So I’m sure some of you have seen this, but over the last couple weeks I’ve developed and been keeping up with a blog here at http://blog.mattborghi.com called The Digital Imperative that deals with digital strategy, electronic communications and the Web, really my other love, and also my livelihood. I have a lot of plans for the blog and surely some of them will creep over into mattborghi.com domain.

So it’s been a little while since I’ve gotten on here, and added some fresh content. That’s not to say nothing’s been happening, quite the contrary really… Please see the homepage of my two new groups, The Elevator Conspiracy, a sort of electric lounge with jazz and rock implications, as well as Teag and PK, my experimental folk/folktronic duo with my Elevator cohort, and new friend, Mike Teager on sax and other winds… There will be some other updates coming, but I’m not sure when. Watch the respective pages for info on these two groups if you’re interested in checking them out live.

I’ve been on vacation for the last week, and the time off gave me a chance to think about creativity, but especially, photography. We’ve been traveling the norther coast of Michigan’s lower pennisula, and we took a day trip to Mackinac Island, which is where the picture from above was taken, in 1905, by William Gardiner, a relatively unknown photographer whose glass negatives had been unearthed and published in a book that I picked up, called Picturesque Mackinac… a fascinating book to be sure.

However, this got me thinking about photography, from my private journal:

I did come to a conclusion this past week about the place of photography, for me, as an art. Photography, for me, is a form of creative documentation close to painting or writing, and even video, but somehow, there’s more to it. With photography you’re given the chance to study a captured moment; this is true with writing and painting, but with video, less so, because of the time-based nature of the medium. You can’t really study it, as much. However, with photography, you can really spend time looking at the details of people’s faces, the reflections of light, the background… Often, I see more about a time and a place by looking at the background, rather than the foreground, or the focal point of the photograph.

This was a rather profound insight for me to have, as photography as an art form has always been troubling. Is it documentation or is it art? Is is craft or is it art? Now, though, I’ve come to the realization that questioning the artistic merit of photography isn’t even relevant; because photography by its very nature is expressive, so the question as to whether it’s art is really quite insignificant.

Tags: art, photography, photograph, spirit, mackinac, michigan

Surfing Flickr, as I so often do, I find images that inspire me. Last Friday night, though, I found the fantastic work of Indy Kethdy. I spent hours, and hours pouring over his pictures of Lake Michigan from around Wisconsin. I started to hear music in my ears, and imagined putting these images to sound. I was in luck, because Indy had set his pictures with a Creative Commons license that allowed me to make a video of his photos, put them to music, and then post it here for you to view. I highly recommend visiting Indy’s Flickr page - http://www.flickr.com/people/indykethdy/ and getting a taste of his excellent artistry first-hand. First, though, check out the video homage and the music that I created from the inspiration of his gorgeous still images:

Tags: still, photo, soundtrack, peace, music, sunset, sunrise, lakemichigan, michigan, lake, ambient, music, mattborghi, flickr, indykethdy

I’m really enjoying this image right now –

The living experience, we’re always moving…

Tags: mattborghi, borghi, life, experience, flickr, light, photo

Ever the impetuous tester, I’ve decided that MojoBlog will work fine to get us through this wing of things, and I’ve moved it up to the top of the nav, and taken it out of beta. Well, not really. If it really starts to suck, then I’ll probably dump it, switch Joomla to a different directory, and put a Wordpress install in the root. We’ll see how things go.

Today, while I was standing looking at cloud formations, taking a break from work, I started to think about writing something on the blog here. It also dawned on me that I was inspired to buy a keyboard/synthesizer yesterday, and I printed this past weekend. These are important in context, because they illustrated, for me, that no matter how much I plan, it’s the stuff born in spontaneity that really seems to stick.

The context is that no matter how often I’ve tried to categorize myself as a music composer, a music journalist, a writer, a letterpress printer, a reader, a father, a husband, a son, an artist, a creative, a student, etc… none of these things are who I am all the time. In fact, it makes me realize that I’m some of these things all the time.

Frequent visitors to the site will know that I frequently change buttons around here. I’m constantly thinking about the end-user. What are they here for? The writer, composer, video-collagist, artist, letterpress printer…? As I stood their looking at cloud formations I realized that it didn’t matter. I am whatever I am right now, and no site navigation, or flow chart is going to get me any closer to figuring out what or who I am. For a long time I believed that I was whatever I was at that moment in that fit of inspiration or that jerk of slumping depression. Those moments defined me. I thought. But they didn’t. None of us can be defined in such simple terms. The depth of what we are is beyond words, labels, categorization, etc…

I’ve decided that as the life journey unfolds, so too should the narrative. No longer tidy navigations, succinct statements in the third person, and handy graphics that give the impression that all is under control, planned, and certain. Life is none of those things most of the time. The journey begins.

Tags: mattborghi, life, ambient music, art, experience

I’m very pleased to announce the re-release of Huronic Minor, my 2000 Mp3.com release, which has been out of regular production for nearly seven years. Buy it now, here…

From the Hypnos site: We here at Hypnos have long enjoyed Matt Borghi’s subtle atmospheric ambient music, and believed it deserved more attention. Many of Matt’s CDs are out of print, and we’ve agreed to re-issue a series of our favorite recordings on the Hypnos Secret Sounds imprint. We’ll have more information soon about these recordings, but wanted to post a quick announcement to let everyone know these are coming. The first of these Matt Borghi reissues will be Huronic Minor.

Coming later will be December Impressions, and then The Phantom Light. Very soon we’ll have audio clips and full descriptive information for Huronic Minor, prior to its release, then the other releases will be spaced 2-3 months apart.

Visit Hypnos Recordings for the most up-to-date info on this classic ambient release: http://www.hypnos.com/smf/index.php?topic=573.0

Tags: mattborghi, huronic minor, borghi, ambient music, michigan, hypnosrecordings, hypnos, recordings

Day two here on this beta blog and things seem to be coming along well. I installed the Simple Tags plugin for Wordpress, and it works like a dream. See the tags at the end of the page. I’m a huge believer in tags, and the concept of folksonomy, where the content creator, rather than a Web or an IT person creates the labeling of content. I was very happy to see the Web moving in this direction a few years ago. This all started to happen after I dropped out of my Master’s of Library and Information Science program. I was really into the concept of categorizing, but folksonomy took it a step further, and said ‘hey, let’s just put this in the hands of the user’. I believe that no site should be without some kind of tagging functionality. Joomla has had a bit of a tough road with this, but they’re well on track now.

It’s with tags in mind that I think of an article I read today on the Read/Write/Web site. I first came across this story in my RSS aggregator, Google Reader, yesterday, but I didn’t have time to read it until today. The article is called Info Overload - What can we do? This was a pretty good article, but I felt kind of let down. I guess I was preparing for this big wisdom bomb of Zen practices for controlling information overload via email, blogs, twitter, chat, etc… but really the author just gave a kind of practical knowledge approach to dealing with information overload. Common sense stuff, mostly, but as my boss said recently, ‘common sense isn’t all that common…’ amen, to that. So all and all it was a good read, but this article really made me think about tagging. There are so many places that tagging could be used to categorize and create order. Tagging could be done with email messages in Outlook like with Google. Why has Google been the only one to get this. Allow us to tag. Folders are helpful, too, so Google’s total paradigm shift was a leap, but what about some combination. That’s really the answer. Filter with tags, labeling with tags, setting rules with tags. We could handle information overload with tags. We just have to tag everything in a way that makes sense to us. Who else is using tags besides blogs and folks trying to achieve SEO success? Please comment, and let me know…

I have found ReadWriteWeb to be a great site. There’s a lot of information coming out of there, and it’s only thanks to my aggregator that I can parse it all so quickly.

The posting of this article, and trying to trackback to it just posed a problem. There’s no trackback functionality for pinging in this blog component. A forum post that I just read said that will be a couple versions out. I don’t know. It’s the small things, but the small things matter. To be able to tag, trackback, have commenting enabled, etc… are the keys to any blog. Bookmarking is nice, but these days I feel less compelled to have Bookmarklets for that, as I just put most everything up on Del.icio.us via my Firefox toolbar.

I think that there’s a lesson here on user experience. No matter how many features something has, no matter how much something works in a new way, when it’s something you’ve used before, even if it’s better in so many new ways, if it’s fundamentally lacking the features that brought it to the forefrong, and created that initial experience, then it’s not ready for prime-time. New functionality can be added, but no old functionality can be omitted, unless there’s a lot of evidence to prove that it didn’t have value. A Wordpress wannabe needs to have trackback funcionality, it’s a deal-breaker.

It’s with that said that I find myself scratching my head. Is it time to put a Wordpress install on my server? Which would require me to switch hosts so I can move my music stuff to a sub-domain? I may give up using the MojoBlog altogether, or at least being very careful about how much content I put up here, knowing that I’m going to have to migrate it at some point in the near future and I’m not going to get the benefit of trackbacks and having the blog conversation. The experience has changed.

Tags: joomla, user experience, web, blog, mojoblog, wordpress

So I started this kind of thing with The Hand Work Press blog a couple years ago, but the direction vacillated. I hoped to focus on Web, communications, letterpress printing, and a couple other things, but really I went in all kinds of directions until I reeled it in, and put the focus on printing, specifically letterpress printing and graphic design.

I’m trying something new here in Joomla. I’ve been experimenting with Joomla components for blogging for a long time to not much success. In that period I discovered a variety of blogging apps, and content management systems. With the developer community, and the sheer brainpower behind Joomla! it’s clearly the stand-out for an open-source CMS’, but for something lighter, and more semantic-oriented I’ve felt for a long time that Wordpress, Typepad, and even Blogger were best for this. For my part, I went with Wordpress. There’s just something I really like about it. Lean functionality, quick loading PHP, and extremely Google friendly.

Tonight, I’m trying a new Joomla! component called MojoBlog, and I have to tell ya’, it’s pretty sweet. It’s like the best of both worlds. I have a Wordpress install tucked safely inside my Joomla! install, and it’s uncanny how much it looks like I’m working in Wordpress. In a word, it’s great!

So I’m trying something new with this. Since my first Ragan Conference, a couple years back, I’ve been encouraged to impart my knowledge on the Web here on the Web (what a thought) rather than in meeting rooms, conference calls, and just through the daily experiences of guiding people across the digital divide. I don’t know what the content focus will be, but I’d imagine it’s going to focus on experience, particularly user experience and just how incredibly that’s overlooked in nearly every aspect of our life, yet it’s the most important part, in fact it’s the lowest common denominator with all the things that we take for granted in daily life. Whether we’re talking about a toilet handle and its accompanying assembly, a toothbrush, a microwave button layout, our car’s dashboard, or configuring your brand-spanking-new version of Firefox 3.0. How these were designed, and how you were meant to interact with them should have been intimately thought out long before it ever made it you. Often, if hasn’t been, and usually you know when it hasn’t, and in fact, you’re probably thinking of one such object right now. More on all of this later…

I’m going to keep this blog at the bottom of the site’s navigation and in beta for a while just so I can see how it goes. Eventually, I’d like to move this up to the root of the site, but I’m in no hurry.

Tags: web experience, blog, user, matt borghi, design