I’ve heard it before and I know it’s not a particularly stunning thing to say, but I still feel a weird rush of pride and enthusiasm when someone says something like this: “Weblogs are arguably the first form that is native to the Web. They emerged from two key elements of the Web: hypertext and the ability for anyone with an Internet connection to create a Web page.” [NY News]
Year: 2003
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On Undesign…
Much to my delight, there’s a picture of plasticbag.org in an article on “Undesign” in this week’s copy of Graphics International: Lo-fi Allstars. If you want to see the article in context complete with images, then you have to download the PDF. There’s something really nice about having your design genius recognised in a professional magazine, even if said genius is a tarted up hand-me-down from more serious and well-trained individuals. You know who you are.
Having said all that, there is something that I’d like to take issue with. The article seems to be conflating two completely different concepts of design, and in the process is doing a disservice to both. Firstly there’s the kind of design that is undertaken by someone like Jason in the design of his weblog – a form of design that he’s recently posted about. This kind of design derives from allowing the content to take centre-stage, simplifying the rest, cleaning away anything that isn’t necessary and leaving people with a simple and clearly branded content delivery system. Being flash with design, he suggests, rather misses the point. I totally agree with his strategy here (and so I should – I’ve ripped him off enough). It’s a strategy that reminds me very much of craftsmen, artisans and the like – a respect for your medium, a desire to do something clean and clear and elegant that fulfils its purpose practically and effectively. This is a school of undesign that is dripping in the craft of design. It’s almost ur-design or even deep-design, in the same way that people have searched for years for ‘deep’ grammatical structures in language. What it isn’t is slipshod, dirty or inelegant.
On the other side of the scale is the work done by Rob Manuel of b3ta in the promotion of a do-it-yourself, scrappy, “shit is good” aesthetic. I used to work with Rob and I know he feels very strongly – and again, I think, correctly – that the more polish you put on a visual joke then the more likely it is that the humour is lost. He aims for characterful and exciting pieces of work above all – get it done, get it out, if the joke’s good then it’ll thrive. It’s a design strategy that can only work in terms of content, though – not structure – and if you step back and look at how b3ta as a site is structured – both in terms of Information Architecture (if you can say something like that about b3ta without being slightly ridiculous) and overt navigation – then it’s a supremely elegant interconnected mesh of simple pages. And the design for the pages themselves concentrates – just as much as Jason’s work does – on being clear, non-invasive and well-branded.
So if you’re coming into this field fresh from the outside world, and you want to get involved in the new weblog-chic (yet again) then keep this in mind – a good site must necessarily be well-designed. It’s designed to be a clear and unobtrusive content-delivery mechanism with no sharp-edges and no confusing bits of functionality. It’s designed to clearly communicate the structure of a site and the nature of a brand. This takes work and is simply not the same thing as making something look pretty. It’s only in the content itself that you can play – and even then some content is perfect for ‘born sloppy’ approaches (humour and horror for example), while other content (news content, financial reports) still have to look authoratitative… [If you’re interested in reading still more on this issue, I’ve had another stab at explaining myself over at marketingfix.com].
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Two degrees from Al Gore…
So here’s a conversation that I’d love to have been party to: Douglas Rushkoff spends a couple of hours with Al Gore. And in his post about it, Rushkoff has the charming naive enthusiasm of a teenage crush. And by all accounts with good reason:
But still, I could imagine him back in the dorm room, sitting up all night with the rest of us and dreaming about how things might be – if we were ever in charge. With Gore, much more than Clinton, we almost got one of us in there. This was an inspiring thought to me, until I realized that this might be as close as we ever get
I’ve had a couple of minor collisions with Douglas Rushkoff in my life. I e-mailed him once about our mutual crush Grant Morrison, and managed to keep a conversation going online for a few days about The Bomb and whether or not he was doing a treatment for an Invisibles movie. And then a few years later Davo and I went to see him speaking in a café in Golden Square, where I desperately wanted to speak about a dozen times and finally squeezed out one rather hopeless question before becoming distracted by a cute bloke.
Nevertheless, I consider this to be one degree of association between us – the same solid degree of separation that would exist if we had shagged like bunnies or grown-up together in Arkansas. Diseases I had that day may have infected him. It’s possible. Which means that Al Gore could have been en-common-colded by me once-removed. If the disease lay dormant for just over twelve months and only sprang into action at the hint of uncharismatic but otherwise cool presidential candidates. We’re practically brothers.
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On the strange priorities of 8 mile…
There’s no denying that 8 mile is a perfectly serviceable bit of cinema. And there’s no denying that it packs a few punches and that Eminem himself pulls off a perfectly adequate performance. And the world that is represented is compelling and mostly realistic. But I have to confess, as I looked at the seriousness with which they approached the combative rap scenes, I found myself unable to fully grasp why these were quite such big deals. It’s two grown men calling each other names in rhyme, surely? It’s artful and creative – gutsy even – but at no point did you get the feeling that these were battles of life and death. And weirdly, in the background, the threat of eviction and homelessness with a small child to look after seems almost trivial… Strange priorities…
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Link-dump in extremis…
According to Mr Webb and Mr Gyford (with whom I work), it is inappropriate web behaviour to have four full lines of bookmarks in your Mozilla toolbar, all waiting to be properly written-up and posted to your site. Probably less appropriate still are the eleven tabbed browser windows I have open as well, each containing something I’d like to talk about in more detail. So – because it remains vaguely fashionable, and because I’d much rather go and play Black and White – I’m going to do yet another link-dump. Don’t hate me. I’ll come up with some proper content one day. I promise…
- Wireless Cultures at the Tate Modern
“Driven by a Brechtian ideal to ‘mobilise the user and redraft him/her as a producer’, small grassroots groups are connecting neighbourhoods into local area internet networks. How can these spark new areas of creative practice, and what precedents were set by the historical radio pioneers? This half-day seminar explores the use of wireless communication in artistic and social contexts…” - Butterfly etymology
In what must be one of the most deliciously wonderful pieces of etymology ever, I discovered today that the word psyche – which I knew came from the Ancient Greek word for ‘soul’ or ‘wind’ or ‘spirit’ also meant butterfly. The word today – of course – generally refers to a quasi-scientific concept of ‘mind’ that is heavily implicated in Platonic divisions between mind and body… - People react to the Bloggies
Despite the fact that the nomination and judging process of The Bloggies is open and well-known the first round nominations seem to have surprised quite a few warbloggers and celebrity bloggers. There are a number of possible reasons for this, of course. One reason is that right-wing warbloggers are self-selecting to be less community-spirited and engaged in ‘society’ (these being the realms of wooly liberals) and so may simply not have bothered to volunteer to be first round judges. Or of course it could be that warblogging and the associated celebrity figures are much more widely read by members of the public than they are by other webloggers. Admittedly some of the nominees are a little weird and there are some very notable absences, but it hardly seems fair to lambast the nomination process for their own inability to motivate their colleagues to take part… (The nomination process is as follows: members of the public nominate and some volunteer to be first-round judges. Then a percentage of the volunteers are randomly chosen to become second round judges who visit a substantial block of the nominated sites and then vote on their favourites, whittling them down to a manageable five per category. These five are presented to the public to vote upon.) And anyway – it’s supposed to be a fun content to take part in – a way for a community to get together and chat about stuff. Like a village fete or something. It’s not particularly serious… - 10 ways to tell if your co-worker is an extra-terrestrial
“Many top scientists believe that aliens live secretly among us. The sneaky intergalactic travelers often pose as our friends, neighbors and co-workers while they learn the ways of Earth. But how can you tell invading aliens from real humans?” - Joe Clark talks balls
One of the most interesting things about Joe Clark’s site is how often his arguments hinge upon how everyone has a vile self-serving secret agenda, or how they’re nasty manipulative people that want to squish the common {gay cinema/web usability/accessibility expert} man or that they occasionally make typos (and are therefore clearly incompetent and unpleasant). - They don’t get blog
Found while wandering through the Bloggies nominations for best article, this piece on how people like Andrew Sullivan miss the point with weblogging (spitting on community, talking about publishing) really hit home for me and reminded me a lot of a piece I wrote a while ago for a talk at the BBC. In it I argued that mainstream publishers had – to date – only interacted with weblogs on the most superficial level, as something to write about or as a territory to claim. Journalists often take the second approach when they go online. I also wrote about this in my debate with Simon Waldman about the Guardian’s Best British Blog prize. There is something very profoundly different about the polyphony of voices interacting and arguing one another. It’s not just a way to shout your opinions as loudly as possible in as flat and featureless a way as possible. Engaging in that community – not of webloggers, but of citizens who happen to be empowered to respond and engage with you – is the whole point as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t believe we ever needed more reasons to love Kurt Vonnegut. But if we did need more reasons, Matt Webb’s extended quotation from the Vonnegut book Bluebeard would certainly suffice. In the excerpt, three types of people are outlined who must be present during any kind of intellectual revolution: the Genius, the Expert and Christmas Turkey. Sometimes you have to wonder if any industry has ever been more full of the third type than the web industry:
The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain anything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. ‘He will say almost anything in order to be interesting or exciting,’ says Slazinger. ‘Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.’
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell called these people “Mavens”, “Connectors” and “Salesman” and we all bought his book and called him a genius. Go figure.
Well the nominations have been announced for Bloggies 2003 and this year I’ve not been nominated for either “Best Poof” or “Best Eurotrash”. It’s always a terrible shame when people who do so well in childhood fail to live up to their early promise, don’t you think? Nonetheless, there is cause for celebration! Of all things, plasticbag.org has been nominated for the category of “Best Designed Weblog”!
My co-contenders in this category include Snazzykat, Neurotic Fishbowl, the gloriously lovely Loobylu — subliminal: she eats babies and kicks puppies – you don’t want to vote for her – plus anyway she’s far too good — and the frankly intimidating thinkdink. Obviously I don’t hold out tremendous hope for victory, but that won’t stop me pulling out my bull-whip and looking threatening until you agree to go and vote for me…
Typically, of course, such a nomination couldn’t have come at a worse time. There are small oddnesses creeping in around the site which you probably haven’t noticed yet, but will shortly. Something is stirring beneath the placid exterior of plasticbag’s webloggery that may give you pause to wonder, “What on earth is he up to?” Trust me, it’s nowhere near as exciting as it may initially sound. More later…
Thanks to Matthew Davis, George Wright and Tim Duckett for writing in with various e-mail addresses for Dr Kim Howells, the Minister for Culture who so resolutely confused music piracy online with drug-dealing and prostitution and in the process declared that Robbie Williams supported international gangs and terrorism. If you wish to have a go at explaining to the gentleman in question exactly where his logic went wrong, his address is kim.howells@culture.gov.uk. Here’s my e-mail. Try as I might, I couldn’t stop myself sounding smug and superior…
Dear Doctor Howells,
I was disappointed to notice that you recently conflated internet piracy of music (as ‘advocated’ by Robbie Williams) with the selling of fake CDs, videos and tapes. They are – as I’m sure you’ve now been informed thousands of times – completely different issues. The most significant difference is that not even record companies have found any ways yet to sell music online and make money out of it – which is clearly untrue about physical media. That criminals could have exploited this non-market as a way of laundering their profits is at best unlikely and at worst ridiculous.
The kind of piracy that Mr Williams was talking about is conducted by members of the public putting songs online (either through peer to peer technologies or simply on the web) for other members of the public to download. While this is clearly a morally questionable act that’s been debated in the press over and over again, there doesn’t appear to be any way to make any money out of it whatsoever. This fact is known to the many millions of Britons who have used applications like Napster to download music.
That the government I voted for could be quite so clueless about things like this – particularly in the area of culture where intellectual property issues, copyright and digital distribution are huge emerging issues – is frankly terrifying to me! Perhaps you should find some way of keeping yourself informed about such matters before standing up and making a fool of yourself (and by association me for voting for you).
Yours faithfully,
Tom Coates
http://www.plasticbag.org
So Robbie Williams supports prostitution and organised crime? Well – according to the culture minister Kim Howells, he does… And why? Because he supports ‘internet piracy’. After all, as we all know, music distribution online is all about making lots and lots of money – so much money that organised crime had to get in on the act! I suppose it’s more than we could hope that anyone in power would actually get the internet enough to understand which things are likely and plausible and which things are just scaremongering and stupidity. Here’s a quote from Mr Williams:
Williams, speaking at a music conference in Cannes, is reported to have said:”I think it’s great, really I do. There is nothing anyone can do about it. I am sure my record label would hate me saying it, and my manager and my accountants.”
And here’s a corresponding quote full of stupidity from Kim Howells:
“In saying that piracy is a ‘great idea’, Williams is doing the work for international gangs involved in drugs and prostitution who find music piracy an excellent way of laundering their profits.”
I would suggest that you e-mail him or fax him explaining internet piracy to him – explaining that no one makes any money from it – but of course he doesn’t have a website or an e-mail address. I was then going to suggest that you send him a fax, but unfortunately faxyourmp.com is down because one of the volunteers who runs it has the builders in. Quite why such a core service isn’t supported by the Government remains a mystery…[Read more idiocy at Google News]
Categories
The plasticbag.org second link-dump…
Being a set of links that I don’t have either the time or the inclination to write up properly, even though I know no-one will actually click on any of them:
- Syndirella – Is this NetNewsWire for Windows?
- Does Larry Lessig have a public domain workaround?
- It was Cal‘s birthday on Friday. You can buy him a present here.
- Anil Dash now runs a pure link-log in his left-hand-pane…