patternsthatconnect

Recently Rachael Pinks blogged about art blogging in a post entitled Why Artists Need a Blog, and Angela Sefton at Blackbox Art Studios reblogged it, the content itself a reblog from an AN blog originally published in June 2009. Some artists like to blog and then to blog about blogging.

It's turtles all the way down

…because blogging really can open up new avenues for study, learning and inspiration. Choosing to ‘abide by the rules’ when it comes to using images I spend quite a lot of time seeking images or permission to use images and I ‘meet’ lots of people as a result (even though my wife refers to them as my imaginary friends). Most of the time I get very generous responses to my requests, and I often learn things about the artworks and related issues that I would never learn otherwise.

The blog also opens up opportunities for collaboration. I exchanged art postcards recently with a few fellow art bloggers (BTW sorry Stephen, yours is still in production! I keep destroying them, nearly there now.) Stephen B. Macinnis has some interesting collaborations going on and I liked this recent trail: an idea he proposed that was taken up by another artist/blogger who blogged about the results and then he reblogged it. I am reminded of an NLP workshop activity that Robert Dilts does sometimes, where in pairs one person makes a gesture or move and the other person copies it adding something else, then the first person incorporates the new gesture/movement and adds to it, going back and forth in this way until quite a complicated ‘dance’ develops… and much laughter.

Nice to get featured at Painters table, the magazine of the painting blogosphere.

It is a wonderful site, pulling together lots that is going on at painting blogs worldwide, so it can be seen all in one place. It is easy to get lost in that blogosphere, following the links could serve as a full time avocation.

I have posted before about the blog as a system, and using Statistical Process Control (SPC) to ask questions about the visits, distinguishing between special and common causes of performance variation.

I posted this graph, showing that the variation in the system was mostly due to common causes but that the system was out of statistical control with one data point outside the Upper Control Limit (UCL) and with a run of more than 7 data points below the mean line, indicating the presence of some special causes.

I noted that the point above the UCL, was due to a poll that I had used and that I had advertised via my kids’ Facebook entries. The 7 data points below the mean may have been because I was away a lot around that time so was less active in the ‘blogosphere’ though I continued to post daily through the magic of scheduling.

Here’s an update: a graph for June and July.

The system has not changed. I get a mean average of 53 visits per day, with an UCL of 98 and a Lower Control Limit (LCL) of 8. Again, the runs of 7 or more below the mean are probably explained by my being away during those days (though continuing to schedule daily).

But what caused the spike of 144 visits? That was due my friend Sbmacinnis sharing one of my blog posts on Stumble Upon.

Thanks Steve, I appreciate it!

(More on how to use statistical process control for web site analysis here)

(and more on Stumble Upon etc here)

I was surprised to find that loads of bloggers like to blog about blogging, I inadvertently found myself doing the same (here), and now here I am blogging about blogging about blogging.

And then blogging about blogging could be a metaphor for art about art. Both modern and post-modern art does that a lot (maybe we could think of modernism as art about art, and post-modernism as art about art about art).

Then there is also learning 1, learning 2 and learning 3: Gregory Bateson‘s helpful distinctions, roughly translated (and for this I am grateful to Julian Russell) as learning, learning about learning, and learning about learning about learning.  I don’t yet remember where I read that Bateson had at least speculated that NLP could be an example of learning 3.

…”It’s turtles, turtles, turtles all the way down!”

Although I am having fun with the recursiveness of it, this is serious stuff because it is connected to patterns of patterns – the pattern which connects…

But, whilst continuing to have fun, I guess if someone were to write a blog about this blog, that would be blogging about blogging about blogging about blogging.

Here’s a run chart showing the visits to my blog in May (I know, it would be nice to have more visits).

It shows at a glance just how much variation there is in the system visits per day to my site: although the average (mean) number of visits per day for May was 58, the highest number of visits was 144, and the least was 17.

Plotting the data in a control chart or capability chart (invented by Walter Shewhart and used by W. Edwards Deming) shows that the system is out of statistical control, in that there is special cause variation on day 29,

and the run of twelve days below the mean may also suggest special causes of variation (a run of six or more might be an indication of a special cause).

With special causes it could be meaningful to ask “what happened, specifically?”

Answers: 1) On day 29, I used a poll for the first time, and as it was researching a suggestion made by my son (that some people need help to see optical effects), both my sons were happy to encourage their Facebook friends to visit my site and complete the poll. As a result I got more visitors than usual that day. 2) On days 10 to 21, I may have been less active than usual in looking at other blogs as I was away for some of those days.

All the other data points show common cause variation: the variation that can be expected by the normal behaviour of the system. The chart shows that I could expect to get anywhere between 0 visits (the Lower Control Limit, LCL) and 112 visits (the Upper Control Limit, UCL) on any one day. To be surprised by data points within these limits, to get concerned for example at the 17 visits, would be foolish. To improve performance when the system shows common cause variation one must focus on the common causes rather than on individual data points. I could ask myself “what happens predictably every day, that causes this variation?” I would answer that I post something including a visual image, and that I take a few minutes to look at other blogs, mostly by tag surfing. To get more visits I would have to change this system.