Jorn Barger: Difference between revisions

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	By summer 2005 Barger's fortunes continued to decline. He was spotted on the street in San Francisco appearing disheveled, homeless, and depressed by the writer Paul Boutin. In a brief ] Boutin reported that Barger was broke, unemployed, sleeping on a friend's floor, and had resorted to panhandling by holding a cardboard sign bearing the message, "<i>Coined the term 'weblog,' never made a dime.</i>" Barger also claimed to be leaving San Francisco for Memphis.		By summer 2005 Barger's fortunes continued to decline. He was spotted on the street in San Francisco appearing disheveled, homeless, and depressed by the writer Paul Boutin. In a brief ] Boutin reported that Barger was broke, unemployed, sleeping on a friend's floor, and had resorted to panhandling by holding a cardboard sign bearing the message, "<i>Coined the term 'weblog,' never made a dime.</i>" Barger also claimed to be leaving San Francisco for Memphis.

	Around this time Barger made his <i>Robot Wisdom</i> blog even more explicitly anti-Israel, adopting the motto "<i>buck israel and see (i dare you)</i>."		Around this time Barger made his <i>Robot Wisdom</i> blog even more explicitly anti-Israel, adopting the motto "<i>buck israel and see (i dare you)</i>" at the top of the front page.

	== External links ==		== External links ==

Revision as of 05:18, 2 July 2005

Jorn Barger (born 1953 in Yellow Springs, Ohio) is a United States writer, best known on the Internet as editor of Robot Wisdom, an influential early weblog. He coined the term weblog to describe the process of "logging the web" as he surfed.

One of the first weblog controversies revolved around his strong anti-Zionist views, which to some crossed over into anti-Semitism.

Barger is also an expert on James Joyce and artificial intelligence. At one time he worked at Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences under the influential Roger Schank, eventually departing over philosophical differences.

An active participant in Usenet during the 1990s, he wrote early FAQs on ASCII art, Kate Bush, Thomas Pynchon, and James Joyce.

In 1994 he formulated an "Inverse Law of Usenet Bandwidth": "The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post... and vice versa."

By 2000 he felt he'd exhausted the formal possibilities of weblogs, and began instead to explore the timeline format, annotating each timeline entry with a link to a relevant resource.

His resources on James Joyce are extensive and are referenced in academic websites. He has referred to Joyce as as early pioneer of artificial intelligence as the master of descriptive psychology.

Previously a long-time resident of the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago, Barger was living in Socorro, New Mexico as of late 2003. An outpouring of concern and speculation occurred in early 2004 because he had not been seen online for some months, but he had been known to take unexplained absences from the Internet in the past, and indeed, this turned out to be the case; Robot Wisdom returned February 2005.

By summer 2005 Barger's fortunes continued to decline. He was spotted on the street in San Francisco appearing disheveled, homeless, and depressed by the writer Paul Boutin. In a brief Wired Magazine article Boutin reported that Barger was broke, unemployed, sleeping on a friend's floor, and had resorted to panhandling by holding a cardboard sign bearing the message, "Coined the term 'weblog,' never made a dime." Barger also claimed to be leaving San Francisco for Memphis.

Around this time Barger made his Robot Wisdom blog even more explicitly anti-Israel, adopting the motto "buck israel and see (i dare you)" at the top of the front page.

External links

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