Waking up!

[image by nkzs]

It’s been a slow start to the year at butterpaper.com. Sorry about that, if you’d noticed. There have been two main reasons.

1. The Butter Paper architecture and web office is about twice as busy as it was a year ago. Given the gloom forecast, I had taken on some enjoyable yet demanding tutoring work at Victoria University this semester. So time for this website has been in short supply.

2. OK this is a long one. The web has changed, again. I have taken a step back to work out what this site can be in the future. Back when this site began in 2000, the backbones were the directories, and its news coverage. It was one of about two websites reporting on Australasian architecture. I would type summaries of print publications, with links where available. This is now known as micro-blogging and there are several hundred others covering the same territory on twitter and facebook. Everyone is a micro-blogger.

I deleted the trade library in 2003 as by that time there were far better-resourced sites in competition. The forum, like many others, started to die off about three years ago as Facebook and Twitter encroached into that territory. I think the quality of online discussion has deteriorated since then, but there ain’t much I can do about it. The events section takes a lot of time to maintain, and there are now several commercial sites doing exactly the same thing, so I’m becoming weary of that too. The choice became: do I continue throwing time into elements and aspects of the site that are becoming obsolete, or do I concentrate on the things that can’t be copied?

I have decided to: – find ways for people to directly add items like events and notices, perhaps through a delicious tag or a login (which is rather tricky using the current software). – do something similar for the architects’ directory, which is way smaller than it should be. – spend the bulk of my time working on longer posts examining the back stories of some of the news items that fly past us at a rate of knots. I like doing that and it can’t be copied. But it does take time, I have had some in the works for months. These will be promoted via twitter and facebook when they go online.

As always, thoughts are most welcome. So they we are… welcome back to Butterpaper v.2012.

[image source stanford.edu]

Posted by Peter on 25.03.12 in random debris