This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Infrogmation (talk | contribs) at 12:14, 2 July 2005 (Reword from a less sloppy reading of the article; remove unneeded html tags). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 12:14, 2 July 2005 by Infrogmation (talk | contribs) (Reword from a less sloppy reading of the article; remove unneeded html tags)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)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.
According to writer Paul Boutin in a brief Wired Magazine article, the lapse of "Robot Wisdom" occurred when Barger was broke, unemployed, sleeping on the floor of a writer friend in San Francisco, California, and could not affort to re-register the domain name. Barger said that he plans to move to Memphis, presumably the one in Tennessee, and that if he needed to panhandle for cash he had a sign ready reading "Coined the term 'weblog,' never made a dime".
Around this time the small text motto at the top of the Robot Wisdom front page was changed from "smooth moove, president ex-lax" to "buck israel and see (i dare you)".
External links
- Robot Wisdom Weblog
- Robot Wisdom homepage
- Anti-Math story-notation language
- Textbook of romantic psychology
- Timeline of Unix/Linux
- Logarithmic timeline of universe
- Interview with Jorn on webword.com
- "Is Judaism simply a religion of lawless racists?" -Jorn Barger
- The Greatness of Robot Wisdom (The Register)
- Jorn Barger missing (MetaFilter)
- The black is back (MetaFilter)
- Robot Wisdom on the Street, (Wired Magazine)