When my fellow ex-Amazon.com employee Mike Daisey chose to write about his three years at the company, he titled his performance and subsequent book 21 Dog Years to reflect the accelerated "Internet time" we had inhabited while working for the online retailer. Today, as Artdish approaches its tenth year of life on the Internet, I fear that we have too often failed to move at the familiar West Coast Standard Time, let alone the Internet time I once knew so intimately.
But today we have made a positive step forward, installing a blogging software on our homepage that enables our writers to publish their reviews as soon as they get back from the exhibit, performance, or lecture they have just attended. Our old, less frequently used Artdish Blog has been merged into this platform and I will now post my editor's picks, thoughts on politics and culture, and gardening tips here rather than the Artdish Forum. Our goal is a more seamless integration of content in one central location.
If there is any practice that has characterized Artdish since Victoria and Eric launched the site, it has been the encouragement of active reader participation. The Artdish Forum, set up long before blogging software was available, has served this function remarkably well even as it began to feel cumbersome and outdated. We plan to continue this tradition on the new homepage by including a comments section at the end of each post. Readers can respond here the way they have always done on the Forum.
The Artdish Forum will not, of course, be going away. Some of the greatest art discussions I have ever engaged in have taken place on those threads and we want our readers to continue to post topics there that are of interest to them. After posting 2,168 times there myself, I am not about to leave comments unacknowledged or queries unanswered. And at some point in the future we hope to merge the search capacity of our old system with the new. (Until this day arrives, you may wish to bookmark the Forum's search engine, enabling you to easily unlock all that lies hidden there.) Our Community Pages, on the other hand, will be retired temporarily as we look into social networking software that will allow artists to display their work in a more dynamic, gallery-like format.
The new Artdish will require me to step things up a bit. I plan to see more art, read more blogs and magazines, confront important people with probing questions, and do more homework. Expect new voices and faces on these pages in addition to those you have come to know (or possibly love) already. As always, we'll be eager to hear what you think.
