Category: About (what is all this?)

Is this a proper weblog?

What is a weblog, anyway? Let’s jump back a few years before we try to answer that question. Let’s recall the sense of endless potential that arose when we first put together a collage of typescript and cut-out pictures using a photocopier. Let’s connect that to the mimeograph at school, and to the small hand press in a basement studio, and to the cheap corner print shop. These are all different means to the same end: the means of production for small-scale publishing. The weblog fits into a continuum of publishing forms: a range of sizes and degrees of public presence that starts somewhere around the family newsletter and ends somewhere near the little magazines. Weblogs tend to wobble around more than other forms: we see family newsletters inadvertently reaching a newspaper-size readership; we see viable little magazines emerging from modest local productions.

So how about this weblog? Well, it adds to a project that’s been up on the internet since 2002. Our goal for the Nishigawa Kobo web site has always been to produce something like a hand-press little magazine. Early in 2005, we were looking for a way to publish new content more quickly and efficiently, and for a good way to encourage comments from our visitors. My research suggested that a weblog format, and specifically the Movable Type publishing platform, would be the most effective system to suit our needs. And so it seems to be.

As I write this, the Nishigawa Kobo web site is about to enter its third year in its present form. We’ve enjoyed about 40,000 visits since February 2004 (that’s when we started keeping track). It looks like the weblog format has helped us to reach more people than we did before, so I’m pleased to have added it to the site. I hope you find something of value here: something to encourage new ways of thinking, perhaps; or to help you enjoy the view outside your window; or to draw your attention to things you had not noticed before. Whatever the reason you found yourself here, I hope you have a pleasant time among these pages. They come to life in your eyes: I made them not for myself, but for you.

–CR, 7 January 2006

No, not a proper weblog at all…

No progress and no entries in ages means this is a proper nothing – for now. It will slowly shift into a higher gear this summer (of 2008); until then, please keep watching the main Nishigawa Kobo weblog.

–CR, 14 June 2008

7 January 2006