Chicago Photography is a group that I started and now run at Flickr, that is already a daily source of delight for me. What follows is a sampling of some of the images that have been submitted to the pool, along with credits and links back to the profiles of the photographers, where you can see more of their work. These are reductions of photos that, over on Flickr, were set to allow for the blogging of images, which is what you see me doing here. Click on them, and you'll get to the larger and more interesting fulll sized photos in their original locations. This is, I think, as it should be - the point of a page like this is to get you interested enough in some of these artists to go visit their pages, not to give you the feeling that you had already done so.

You're totally there, right? And maybe in the case of the first photo, a little concerned for your safety? By underexposing the film and limiting what we can see, she channels our attention to where movement is happening in the photo. These last three photos weren't in the group pool, but this next one was.

hot weiner by T_Bex

Videos I've found on Youtube and other video hosting services follow below.

Link to the complete page of my bookmarks, created so that I could link my homegroup to that page, for the sake of easier navigability, the two being tied together, as I've explained elsewhere, the homegroup being used for elaboration on subjects and points raised on my bookmark page.

This is a group, but this is not a discussion group. This is more an extension of my profile.

Right now, the name of this group is "The Ravine". It is a possible replacement for a group at Ma.gnolia by that name, which I had just created when Ma.gnolia went away on January 30. This event came as a great surprise to all of us, the owner included, who seems like a decent enough fellow. While I'm inclined to give Ma.gnolia and Mr.Halff another chance, at this point none of us know when or even if that site will ever return. I hope it does, but one has to make contingency plans.

This group and my membership on Diggo, together, are my contingency plan. Regardless of what happens with Ma.gnolia, both will be put to good use. All that will change, should Ma.gnolia come back, is what that good use will be.

What is the purpose of having such a group? We could think of my profile at Diigo as being a kind of blog. I am not that excited by the thought of giving you and endless series of bookmarks, just standing alone as bookmarks. I want to talk about what I saw on the sites I bookmarked, and maybe go on a few tangents which I find interesting. Some of those tangents might be ones that you find interesting, but maybe they won't all be so. The problem with the straight blog format is that it presents the reader with a strictly linear format - section one follows section two follows section three for everybody, whether everybody wants to read section two or not. This, I always found strange, because blogs were invented after the advent of HTML, so why take what was one of the worst limitations of the fora during the all text era, when the limitation was inescapable, and impose it on a more technologically advanced modern medium like a blog?

What I attempt to do is couple what is the strength of the blog format - the reverse chronological order of the postings always taking visitors to what is the freshest material present, without making them wade through old material to find it - with the strengths of webpages and other less linear sorts of pages, one of which is that of offering the reader a chance to be more selective about which points he will read about at length. The way I plan to do this is so simple, that I'm surprised more people don't do it - I'm going to create a series of little "consumable" sites or pages that expand on this point or subject or that, linking to them from the blog, having them link back so that when the reader is done, he finds himself back on the blog. With more standard HTML pages, the way to do this is to organize the little sites into sub-articles, in the form of strings small html pages that loop back and drop the reader off an a central homepage for the site - which is how most sites tend to work.

More about this, when I get up. It is now 3:25 am, my time, and I need to get to bed. For now, I'll just say that this group is going to be part of that nonlinear component of the blog, of which I've been speaking.