Adding Some Form to all the Function

I have written a ton of analytic posts about new media. That's all well and good, and it's certainly part of what I wanted to do here, but there's a reason that I called this blog Cloud Culture rather than Economics of the Cloud, or something like that. Inspired in no small part by my friend Kelly's appreciation of the many art forms thriving on the web, I wanted to delve more deeply into the cultural aspects of the cloud myself.

But I ended up mostly writing new media analysis, because it's what I know. It's what I spent years thinking and writing about over at Sophistpundit. Along the way, I have definitely found some art to appreciate, but they remained in the minority.

There are definitely posts that I am the proudest of that are very much about culture. In particular, I'm happy with how this post on webcomics came out, and this post on the future of music.

However, I've made a concerted effort to finally start taking a crack at immersing myself in artistic expression on the web. In particular, I have attempted to find more good fiction, because writing is my personal passion, and it's really shameful that I haven't done this sooner.

That's the reason I found and reviewed Kristine Williams's science fiction novel Keeper. I did so through the Web Fiction Guide; a site I will certainly write about when I have used it enough to get a better sense of its quality. Writing online seems to be a far more dispersed thing than I thought it would be; you're more likely to find novels and stories of various length on dedicated websites for them specifically than in big content hubs like you find with videos on sites like YouTube.

I have also continued to delve into podcast novels, because my long commute makes this convenient for me. I just read J.P. Moore's novel Toothless, and will be reviewing it very soon. Earlier in the summer I read Scott Sigler's Earthcore followed by Nocturnal, both of which I liked but the latter I really liked.

I followed up with the first book for J.C. Hutchins' Seventh Son trilogy, which was well written enough but which didn't quite grab me. I might go back for the second and third books at some point; like I said, I spend a lot of time on the road and good writing is hard enough to find. I'm currently subscribed to Phil Rossi's Harvey, making it the first podcast novel I've actually listened to like a podcast--that is, in installments, as it comes out, rather than all at once after it's finished. I'll review it and the experience once it's over. I know of it because last year I listened to Crescent, Rossi's first podcast novel, which was very Stephen King--who in general I enjoy reading.

There will still be plenty of new media analysis, as I continue to love writing it. But I am going to try to remember that the tagline here is "form and function in a networked world", so there ought to actually be some discussion of form amidst all the talk of function.