The 6th Annual Weblog Awards (or “Bloggies”) are now taking nominations, lasting until January 10th. Due to the self-referential and circular nature of the blogsphere, this is potentially an important event for bloggers. Here at Generator.x we are skeptical towards competitions, but whatever. This is a chance to shine a light on your favorite blogs.

Nominations for Generator.x are naturally welcome, but just as important would be nominations for the many excellent blogs championing computational design and generative art: Dataisnature, Information Aesthetics, Interactive Architecture dot org, Future Feeder, BLDGBLOG, Processing Blogs etc.

If we had to pick a favorite it would have to be We make money not art, not just for being a great read but because Regine’s obsessive-compulsive blog disorder provides the rest of us with so much input.

This looks interesting: WWW 2006 Call for papers for the 3rd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem.

Sounds like a challenge for all the infoviz kids out there. I for one would love to see an open depository of data sets, provided under some Creative Commons license. Finding interesting and complete datasets can be a challenge for would-be information visualizers without academic resources. If anyone knows of such a depository, please leave a comment here.

There seems to have been either a hacking attack, bug or worse, a feature, on the blog this afternoon, causing a fair amount of content to be deleted. Fortunately, I have most of the content offline, but some images that were uploaded to the blog have disappeared.

Blog authors, if you know one of yours is gone please re-upload it. We’re working with our ISP to figure out what the cause is. I’ve backed up the database just in case, and also disabled the shoutbox since it’s been the consistent target of some dubious activity.

Just did various tweaks of the blog design (including making Technorati tags available for all posts), partly just for flavor and partly to reflect a new series of printed materials that will be arriving from the printers shortly, further developing the Generator.x visual identity. As always, we are working with Erik at Products of Play, who not only continues to surprise and delight but also is a tough guy who is not afraid of colors.

Please let us know if anythings breaks for you for any reason. CSS is way more fun than HTML, but it’s still not an exact science.

This is a first: Generator.x has been simultaneously praised and dissed over on Gnodal’s blog Collaboration and higher-order thinking. The praise was for an "interesting article on folksonomy and tagclouds", the diss was for our color scheme. I quote:

Well, there’s no accounting for taste, and we’re not about to stoop to name-calling over color schemes. We are however pleased that the tagcloud article was found of interest. Small blessings, etc.

Generator.x – It’s the RGB, stupid.

The Generator.x blog is meant to be a community-driven platform for generative art and design, and so we’re looking for more blog contributors. There’s no requirement for regular posting, an entry or two a month would be great. The aim of the Generator.x project is to examine the role of generative work both in art and the design disciplines, so people from both worlds are welcome.

You don’t have to be an expert coder or art historian, but you should have an interest in and understanding of generative works. You should also be able to write intelligently about what you post. A working understanding of blogs, trackbacks etc. will be useful, but not essential. We follow the old dotcom strategy: Hire for attitude, train for skills.

Authors will be credited with every post, linking back to your own URL. There will also be an author page with author profiles. What you write remains your own property, but as long as it remains on the Generator.x site it is published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike 2.5 License.

If you’re interested in contributing please send an email to info–at–generatorx.no or use the contact form. If possible, include URLs to your work.

We’ve added a shoutbox for people who want to leave tips to good projects or just talk. Look in the left column, under categories.

We’re using a Wordpress plugin from Michiel 'McMike' Auerbach called "Roept U Maar" (”You call it” in Dutch.) The shoutbox was very easy to install, and even with some customized hacking it took only about an hour to set up and customize. You can use HTML code, so links can be coded as <a href=…> etc. We have also added a “Recent comments” and “Recent posts” feature to the article view, using a plugin from coffe2code.

Obviously, the shoutbox will be removed if abused, but we think it is a good feature. It’s all in the spirit of collaborative texts…

Jill Walker is perhaps the most prominent academic blogger in Norway, and she clearly believes in writing it as you live it (although without being awkwardly personal). Her work is on distributed narratives, and through her jill/txt blog you can follow her academic interests, written in a style that is both entertaining and informative. She is also a believer in making literature students program CSS and PHP, bringing a whole new dimension to a debate about media literacy…

Some blogs and news-based resources pertaining to all things generative in nature. In alphabetical order so as to not imply relative value judgments.

This is the first post on the Generator.x blog. Be sure to read the introduction to the Generator.x project.

Over the next few months leading up to the conference and the opening of the first incarnation of the exhibition, we will be posting articles related to generative art and computational design. This blog will remain online and active for the duration of the project. Currently, the exhibition is set to tour until the end of 2007.

Thanks to Products of Play for design. This blog is published in WordPress, a free blog software with comprehensive features.