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Jorn Barger

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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. Though it must be said that Barger has never been associated with any groups involved in anti-Semitism. Given his character he would be unlikely to deny such claims even if they do not reflect his true position. Anyways people do not go to Robotwisdom or Jorn for considered opinions, but leaps of association.

Robotwisdom is like a creative dream on the Internet, linking in wild pieces and giving a strange symbolic order to much of what would otherwise be a collection of isolated URLs.

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.

Barger's rejection of Weblogs just as they were about to explode as a new means of content presentation gives deep insight in to the unconventional nature of his character.

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 ineed, this turned out to be the case; Robot Wisdom returned February 2005.


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