Happy 2008 to all of you!  I’m back from a visit to North Carolina for Christmas to see my friends and family, and I’m ready to get right back into the swing of things, so here are a number of links that I found interesting from this, and the past several, weeks.

• Movable Type goes open source
  There have been mixed reactions to Six Apart’s announcement that the popular blogging software Movable Type would be going open source; many people expressed anger that the timing seemed “off,” while others seemed delighted.  If you already run a blog, you’ve probably pretty much settled on whatever platform it is that you use now, so what does it really mean?  Not much, really, aside from the fact that this is a positive precedent for the open source movement.  Six Apart is a relatively big gorilla when it comes to blogging and software to run it, and other companies would do well to follow their lead.
• Google introduces the “knol”
  Google announced a while ago that they were planning to introduce something that they called “knols,” which allegedly stands for a “unit of knowledge.”  Basically, Google is, at the moment, soliciting experts to write articles on various topics that will appear somewhere on relevant search result pages; eventually the expectation is that anyone will be welcome to write their own competing knols.  Some argue that Google is going too far and stepping on the toes of sites like Wikipedia.  I say that isn’t so, primarily because anyone who relies on a single source when doing research is leaving themselves academically vulnerable, especially when using sites like Wikipedia that try to (but do not always successfully) remain “neutral” and are therefore subject to changes that can often be very abrupt and startling.  It’s important to keep in mind that, as Robert McHenry (former editor of the Encyclopædia Brittanica) points out, using Wikipedia–and, by extension, many other online sources–is akin to using a public restroom.  “It may be obviously dirty, so that [a user] knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that [the user] may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.”
• What are we “teaching” photography students?
  An interesting essay from Black Star Rising on what, exactly, we’re teaching students who are taking photography courses.  Are we educating away whatever creativity they may have?  As someone who took three years of university-level courses on photography, I was blessed to learn from a very talented professor who left many of our assignments open-ended so that we could explore the medium largely on our own and seek out advice when we needed it–but according to the author of this post, I shouldn’t have learned at all and that my time would’ve been better spent writing essays.  I tend to disagree with the author, who seems to land squarely in the “editorial photography is the true photography” camp; he would be well served to read Susan Sontag’s On Photography, if he hasn’t already.³³
• The year in bad advertising
  Consumerist has compiled a short list of what it deems some of the worst advertising concepts of 2007, including the creepy CGI Orville Reddenbacher stand-in and Snickers’ stupid commercials of straight guys going berserk after they “accidentally” kiss each other.

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1. I love Sontag’s point when she says, “Except for those situations in which the camera is used to document, or to mark social rites, what moves people to take photographs is finding something beautiful.”  The photos that the author critiques may not, in fact, be “art” to him, but art is such a subjective thing that clumping virtually all student work together as worthless strikes me as ignorant.333

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