For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow

I didn’t raise this in our meeting, but I was really struck by the distinction Barrios made in his “Year of the Blog” piece between an article and a website. It’s one of those “duh” statements that struck me as genius. It’s a distinction that really clarifies one murky aspect of web publishing–to update, or not to update? When is a text “done?”

At the same time, however, I wonder if Barrios’ use of “article” is so mired in a print-based economy of fixity that he may be forcing artificial constraints upon his web publishing. After all, aren’t printed texts “done” simply because they’ve been duplicated and circulated? And since the web makes changing, revising, and do-overs much easier, do we still need this idea of “done?”

I’m not saying I’d like to revise the same piece of writing over and over for the rest of my life, but I wonder how much we need to remediate print-based notions of publication and circulation, and what notions should be revised?

First post filler.