Journal: News & Comment

Kottke'd

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

Here's the way the Web is supposed to work. bpx has been posting sons of photos of old Soviet-era posters at Flickr for awhile now. A few days ago, Jason Kottke, one of the most popular bloggers in the world, linked to the collection. I saw the link, and it got me talking to Darren at work (who's an artist and designer) and thinking about how different people's attitudes are toward Communist and Nazi propaganda.

Anyone who blogs, as I have done for six years, has different intentions for different posts. Most of the time I'm either just writing compulsively or posting something so that I'll remember it and can search through it later. But when I posted about art and genocide, I was hoping to provoke a bit of discussion, and was disappointed when I got only a single comment.

Then today I dropped into my website and found 10 new comments (my first thought: oh no, spambots!), in an intelligent discussion of the topic. What was going on? My server logs told me: Kottke linked back, and that of course had its halo effect of numerous other sites linking in as well (and some great links). Plus my site traffic, which isn't insubstantial to start with, more than doubled yesterday too, surpassing even the spike I got last summer when I linked to this freaky spillway at a California dam, or two years ago when I linked to all the then brand-new Blogger templates and everyone in the web design comminity came to visit.

So let's keep it going. What's your take on the totalitarian art subject?

 |