Justin Hall mentioned in Greek Press!

One of our very own students and a prolific blogger, Mr. Justin Hall is mentioned in the Saturday issue of the web version of 'Eleftherotipia" (Free Press), one of the most prominent papers in Greece. Journalist Katerina Shina writes about the blogging phenomenon...

Below is my rough translation from the Greek text but keep in mind that Greek is very hard to translate into English.

"In an explosion of untamed curiosity, I visited the place of an internet old-timer, the Californian Justin Hall (Justin's Links) - an autobiographical saga that would make Proust blush - and Paul Ford's Ftrain, something between a personal diary and experimental writing. I was taken away for hours even though it is hard for me to get used to hypertext, this non-linear writing style of our digital civilization. Through passing by, tracing back and peeling away, one can sometimes reach the heart of genuine need, and the core of a borderline communication naivété that manages to transmutate itself into an art, maybe even under the pressure of urgency."

Read Article in Greek (if you can...)

The text below precedes the above quote:

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"One would easily characterize them as the 'Gates of Self-Exposure': websites replacing futons, confessionals and 'strictly private' diaries. Open Diary, diarist.net and Diaryland are the most well known and most visited web 'rings' (interconnected diaries in a contiguous circle) and 'burbs' (stemming maybe from 'burble', 'babble', 'twitter') where lonesome visitors with specific obsessions connect themselves at their own will with other 'diarywriters' they recognize as 'one of their own'.

I encountered such a burb recently: Breasts of Doom (thank god for humor) where women of every age share their thoughts about the 'breasts that rule their lives', their giant breasts (wow - what a problem that must be). Later, I counted 64 (!) sites dedicated to knitting, 19 to smokers and even one purely dedicated to women worldwide named 'Katherine' (which naturally peaked my interest...) Web chains, burbs and rings manage to connect anyone with everyone: dog lovers, soccer fans, sex workers, collectors and hobbyists of all sorts in neighborhoods of remarkable familiarity and confessed honesty."