Categories
Random

Remaindered Links (after Kottke)…

Ok. So I’m back in London and I’m struggling to get back up to speed with what’s been going on in my absence. It’s terrifying how much can happen in a week. It’s terrifying how behind you can feel… Keeping hold of that sensation – where you’re actually riding the crest of the meme-stream is becoming an ever more difficult way of passing the time…

  • Debates of Artistic Value in Rock Music:
    A Case Study of the Band Weezer, 1994-2001
    A shameful confession – I haven’t read this yet. Normally I make it a bit of a point of honour to read everything that I post up here. I won’t post it unless I’ve read it. But this is really long…

  • What’s wrong with Dorian’s Eye?
    So I took a picture of my friend Dorian’s eye. He works next to me. He’d put in eye drops. I put the picture on my site. Ha! Ha! Very funny! Suddenly – months later – there’s a huge online discussion about why his eye’s all like that. Everyone’s taking it very seriously. Kind of strange.

  • The Weblog Revolution
    Meg Hourihan brings everyone up to speed on this whole “Weblog” thing in one of the most concise and clear introductions I’ve read.

  • Whitelabel.org / UpMyStreet.com
    After a discussion last week between lots of cool fun people at UMS, the people who are allowed near the code-base put Geo URL metatags into every page on the site. I’ve not really got a clear sense of what people out there might do with this information, but I’m quite looking forward to finding out…
Categories
Social Software

An Artisan in Social Software…

I’m going to take the unusual approach of linking through to a comment I’ve made on someone else’s site. The comment is flawed – it’s full of typos and errors and gets a bit over-excited every so often – but essentially I stand by most of it – particularly this part which is about the relationship between research/debate and hands-on experience running an online community:

From my response to ‘Falling in with the wrong crowd’
“There’s a pretension around our work that says that we’re scientists – but mostly weÔøΩre not – we’re artisans. We build things for people to use. We build things that extend the abilities of individuals in one way or another. As such people who work in this field should be doing apprenticeships as much as they should be doing research. They should be managing a community, understanding the tensions and the collapses, noticing the problems and the benefits, seeing where people get stuck and where they need to get stuck – where they need structure and where that structure will kill them.”

Categories
Random

Any minute now…

Any minute now I’m going to have to launch into a huge tract about social software – about the good things and the bad things, about the cult that’s emerging around the term (with all it’s requisite ecstasies and rites of initiation), about how much the way people write about it reminds me of how people used to write about the internet before it became saturated with hype and the companies came and grew and then exploded in shards and collapsed upon themselves taking many good people with them. At a certain point, I might even have to mention that there’s a tremendous power here, but that it’s an extension of / redevelopment of / repurposing of earlier insights made by people making MOOs, MUDs, bulletin boards, message-boards and wikis and how I love working in it but I’m scared of the way people are talking it up and I wish people would build more brilliant things rather than talking about it. And then inevitably – shortly afterwards – I’ll probably write something more about it myself… It’s not like it was with my other baby. Weblogging grew gradually and properly and organically through the interactions of real people. This one’s being increasingly owned by the wrong people.

Categories
Personal Publishing

Oh Self-Correcting Blogosphere…

I’m going to be playing catch-up for a while here – picking up on things that I would have written about except I took a holiday (never again). First things first, let’s have a gander at this article: Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed… in 42 days (on ‘The Second Superpower’). This is an extraordinary piece of work that manages to merge legitimate concerns with some of the most neurotically paranoid reasoning I’ve ever seen. The argument is simple – the phrase “The Second Superpower” originally referred to “World Public Opinion”, but because someone subsequently wrote some politically castrated techno-utopian article with the same name (and said article got taken up by some ‘significant’ webloggers) if you now do a search on Google for the term, you find no trace of the original meaning. All that remains is the knock-off.

The article seems to ascribe this change to a kind of weird A-list cabal of webloggers. This is true in that a certain group of people who are much-linked-to have linked to the article in question – that’s reputation-based rankings operating to save us from people writing “The Second Superpower” three-hundred times in their meta tags. Unfortunately it’s also rubbish in the sense that – as a vast conjoined semi-self correcting connected network of webloggers exists – all it takes is one Register article (picked up in turn by other webloggers) for this problem to self-correct. People get so tense nowadays… And about so very little… In the meantime, let’s all raise a glass to you, oh gloriously self-correcting blogosphere…

More on this subject:

Categories
Language

On Paralepsis (Part Two)

One of my favourite words is paralepsis (I’ve even talked about it before). It’s a word from the ancient study of rhetoric and it essentially means that you state loudly the subjects that you’re not going to talk about – in the process bringing what you’re omitting into the forefront of people’s consciousness. Here’s an example:

“Let’s not get bogged down here… Let’s pass swiftly over the vicar’s predeliction for cream cakes. Let’s not dwell on his fetish for Dolly Mixture. Let’s not even mention his rapidly increasing girth… No no – let us instead turn directly to his recent work on self-control and abstinence…”

It’s an immensely satisfying and highly entertaining piece of verbal fun, even if it is also a bit of a blunt instrument. Paralepsis is a collision of statement with intent – it presents itself both as an obvious paradox and as the extension of language’s ability to use fragments of fact to allude to larger and more involved passages or narratives – the paralepsis is a signpost that there’s more going on here than the person’s in a position to talk about, even as he or she talks about it. It’s an insidious move as well as a revelatory one, and it reveals one of the greatest difficulties of speaking the truth – that even if one doesn’t lie one can easily mislead. This is the terrible sin of ‘lying by omission’ – of using carefully selected and accurate information in such a way that totally mischaracterises the situation in hand. And an extension of that is the way self-censorship tries to stop individual people making connections of this kind. We all need a weird kind of internal paralepsis, perhaps, to make those connections that we don’t want to make out loud – or perhaps we feel we can’t…

Which is all, in its way, merely an introduction to one of the most blatant, glorious and important use of paralepsis I’ve seen in my life. From the Onion: I Should Not Be Allowed To Say The Following Things About America…

P.S. For the Americans amongst us, “Dolly Mixture” is a peculiarly British kind of sweet that traditionally you would buy in small paper bags by weight from large glass (or later plastic) bottles held behind the counter. I can find little about their origins online, but I believe they got their name by being small enough to look like food for dolls’ tea parties and the like. Shamefully, they are a personal favourite.

Categories
Random

Wants: song by Denice Williams, featuring Jekyll and Hyde?

I’m back in London now, looking around me suspiciously and thinking about what to do next. But the first thing I want to do is resolve an issue that’s been driving me insane for about three years now. When I was a kid, my mother used to listen to fairly terrible cassettes in the car on the way to school – this must have been somewhere between 1981 and 1985. She had this album in the car and it was kind of Motown and it had a song on it which I really liked. Mum swears it was by Deniece Williams. All I remember about it was that it had a line about a guy seeming to be like Jekyll, but actually being like Hyde. You see – clearly a quality song. Anyway – does anyone (i) know what the name of said song is? (ii) know where I could get a CD or decent quality MP3 of it?

Categories
Random

From the Financial Times this morning…

From the Financial Times this morning: UpMyStreet.com in Administration

“Upmystreet.com, one of the pioneers of the UK internet sector, yesterday followed many of its long-gone peers into administration as financial pressure led the company to file for protection as it sought a buyer. Tony Blin-Stoyle, founder and managing director of the company that provides local information to users, said the company had chosen a “prudent course of action” that he hoped would give it time to find a buyer. “We have filed for admini-stration, but still have time as we are fully solvent while looking for a buyer,” he said. Upmystreet developed a reputation for high-quality database technology that made use of the internet’s ability to link people with information relevant to them and won a string of awards. Its website links consumers to postcode-based information such as council tax rates, house prices and local businesses, while its commercial services help business and public sector bodies organise their web-based information. The group, owned in part by News International, BSkyB and NM Rothschild, earns annual sales of about £2m but has suffered from the media and technology slowdowns.”

Categories
Random

Apposite but Innaccurate…

There’s a quote going around the internet at the moment that’s widely attributed to Julius Caesar – and it’s tremendously rousing and potent and apposite. Unfortunately, I’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that it’s not also total bunk.

“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.”

Categories
Random

Slashdot and Conversations

I’m a bit of an enforced holiday at the moment. Evidently I’ve been getting too crazed with work as last week my boss started passing me notes saying things like “You need a holiday” and “Get out of my company”. So it’s ironic that after all those months of carefully tending UpMyStreet Conversations that it should be the first workday that I’m out of the office this year that the site gets Slashdotted.

I haven’t had a chance to read through all the comments yet but mostly people seem interested in the concept of geocoding content generally – with Conversations itself getting fairly limited coverage. Nonetheless I’m hoping for a few insights here and there… It’s a pity that Slashdot’s audience is so US-centric, of course – since the site is designed for people who have UK postcodes. Most of the people who come via Slashdot won’t be able to participate in any particularly meaningful way.

Categories
Personal Publishing

What is Trackback? (part one)

As part of an (hopefully) ongoing series – here’s the most very basic introduction as to what Trackback can do. This is not a study of how it is done – and it makes certain assumptions that I’ll go into in an upcoming lesson (assuming I get around to it) – but I think it might be enough to get that basic first point across to people who are confused by all the other stuff it can do…

(Addendum added April 2005: In a later post I came up with this short and pithy description: “When someone links to one of my posts, my post links back to them”. I think that’s just as useful as the run-through that follows.)

You can also download this image as a .pdf what_is_trackback.pdf. This diagram was created in the awesome OmniGraffle – a product of the Omni Group. I plan to use it loads more from now on…

Addendum: This is not supposed to be directed at the average weblogger of a few months standing. This is just for those newbies who’ve not managed to see it in context enough or who don’t find the name particularly descriptive.