randform

Hospitals are often white in white. This doesn’t help to increase visibility for viruses and bacterias, but white has (at least in some cultures) the symbolic character of purity. However the traces of visitors on white walls need not necessarily be stain, they could be graffiti or art. A famous art example are the works of Robert Rauschenberg. (-> Link for some white Rauschenberg). From Wikipedia:

The “white paintings” produced by Rauschenberg at Black Mountain in 1951, while they contain no image at all, are said to be so exceptionally blank and reflective that their surfaces respond and change in sympathy with the ambient conditions in which they are shown, “so you could almost tell how many people are in the room,” as Rauschenberg once commented.

It is a plain observation that stylish western blogs (as seen from easteastBerlin) are currently often – very white. Concerned about our statistics and some critics about our oriental webdesign, we will follow this white trend for some days and make the vest or theme of our blog purely white and observe our statistics. We take this as a kind of miniblogdesignpoll analog with this poll. Be aware that if a suburbiablog picks up a trend then this may be mainstream.

But coming to the point – todays randform suggestion for web2.0 is a tool, which allows visitors to scribble onto the pages of a blog (a blog graffiti – poesiealbum-tool) – which would make the metaphor of the blog as a white space for communication etc. maybe more tangible. It is of course possible to scribble on Flash or processing applets but these need to be embedded.

In this context one should also mention that Tims jDvi (a viewer for dvi – the output of LaTex) has the option to scribble on the dvi file, which makes e.g. collaboration on a math paper easier.