First off I’d like to say I’m a bit bummed I missed out on the symposium last week where some of the discussion was based around hypertext narratives and video games. I had just returned from a 4 day trip to Sydney where I was doing some work attachment with Oceanic eSports (check out the photo album from the weekend here) so Tuesday was a bit of a write off since I was required to upload media etcetera etcetera. I always have something to say about games as a medium though so despite missing out I’ll be sure to have something about video games up soon. Before that thought, I had an idea that stemmed from my newfound distaste for the traditional blog…

Secondly I wanted to outline a new approach to blogging here. I am very close to saying that I dislike, not only this structure of blog – long menus, lots of settings, quirky editors – but most blogging structures that don’t immediately offer themselves up to a fast and fluid network. Once upon a time used tumblr for a while which worked rather nicely! A very sleek graphical interface made it very pleasant to use. However I’m finding that my thoughts or ideas are so often scattered, sporadic, even half-baked, few of them ever make it past a lifetime of a few minutes. I’ve tried notebooks but carrying around a pen and paper is not my liking and the time it takes to transfer a thought from mind to paper via the vastly more depletable resource of ink is undesirable.

A rare idea that stuck with me however was curation and twitter. With our blog assessment a few weeks back we had to curate several of our blog posts and explain how they encapsulated our engagement with the course and our overall blog experience. I want to take this idea and apply it to my twitter. I’m currently sitting on over 10,000 tweets with a lifetime of 2 years (I think). Twitter is my go-to platform for sharing a thought, a piece of media, or joining a discussion due to it’s speed, accessibility, brevity, and simplicity.

My plan forward with this blog in particular will be to trial something new in that I will rely on twitter to notate my study and then curate my tweets, embed them in a blog post, and expand wherever necessary to formulate a single post. I’ll do this with a mixture of my personal twitter, and a secondary twitter which will relate directly to course material. It will be an experiment at worst, a success at best, but I’ll only find out through giving it a go.

But why twitter? Like I said before I find that traditional blogging websites don’t offer that sense of network that a platform like twitter can offer. Not to say blogs are lacking, they provide robust and versatile spaces for extended discussion, for me however this does not fit my needs. My mind thinks too sporadically to work on that sort of platform. Twitter will hopefully allow me to work from a real-time platform that provides me with the capacity to notate my thoughts no matter how sporadic or random, allowing me to curate them digitally afterward. It also offers the ability for other twitter users to join any discussion I engage with.

I must say though my favourite thing about twitter is the character limit because with that you are forced to be brief. No fluff, no bullshit, just straight up thought in bite sized pieces. Perfect for a burgeoning hypertext discussion.

Hello world! Consider this an experiment.

— Jake Baldwin (@aLearningMind) September 21, 2013