Lifecycle of Articles - In magazines, an article appears on the shelf for a fixed period of time and disappears, with little reverberation afterwards, save for the occasional letters to the editor or op-ed. On the Internet, reverberation is heavy, and often more important. As an article gets linked, it then gets read. As it gets read, it gets commented. Eventually the article balloons into something more than the original post. So while in the print world, the buzz comes after the article's publication, in the blogosphere, the buzz is the article's publication.
Articles in the blogosphere also grow and shrink as need be. There are plenty of retractions, re-editing, and addendums. Articles are dynamic in the blogosphere, but static in magazines.
Auxiliary Comments - There are no forums in magazines, which is unfortunate. There are reams of great material within forums, and often the commentary is more important than original articles. Look at the popularity of the acronym RTFA (Read the F-ing Article), a common exhortation on places like slashdot.org. The user often bypasses the original article and goes straight to the highest-ranked posts. That's where the good stuff is. A lot of good writers feel comfortable commenting after someone has posted the original article, but won't have the desire to collect their own works into a blog or portfolio. Magazines and newspapers have no forum aspect. The printing is the end. There is no town hall meeting.
Group Authoring - I don't like how the blogosphere is like a flat plane of single voices. In magazines, there's a lot of collaboration that goes into the production of the original article. There is the original writer who gets the by-line, but there's also copy editors, illustrators, photographers, an editor-in-chief, and a publisher. Plus interns to get the coffee and analysts to do fact-checking and data-gathering. In print publishing, this group authoring is concentrated and organized.
There is a sense of group authoring in the blogosphere. You will discover a video with no text associated with it on one site. But you will find the commentary on many other sites. So there is an emergent group authoring on the Internet. However, you may not always find the relevant information. I often read articles on the Internet missing some basic and crucial information, and it will only be a week or two later before I find a related article that fits the pieces of the puzzle.
There is one example of heavy group collaboration working well, even better than magazines, on the Internet that I want to highlight: Wikipedia's coverage of the Tsunami. There are hundreds of people working on the article, bringing in all the relevant graphics, statistics, and histories that I couldn't find organized anywhere else.
A single blogger, on the other hand, can only provide her one voice. This provides deeply personal stories and novel theories, but not really broad and rich content.
Concentration of Risk - Time Magazine can delegate and pay reporters to cover the Inaugural because they can guarantee they will generate revenue from that coverage. They may also send ten to twenty people there, even if only the material from only five of them generates eighty-percent of the interest in their articles. In the blogosphere, on the other hand, it's unpredictable whether an author will get proper payoff from doing a specific coverage.
Service-oriented - Magazines are more service-oriented than blogs. In the New Yorker, for example, every issue has a catalog of all cultural events happening in NYC. Someone is paid to collect that data. It's really mundane to produce it, but it's important. The blogosphere, on the other hand, consists of people at-will doing every piece on whim. They don't provide consistent sub-services. Instead, they write about what they want to write about. Leave the collating to the monkeys, or automated places like craigslist.
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I haven't updated Philosophistry in a week, but don't let that fool you.
I've been heavily active on my mind blog, on my LinkBlog (1) and (2), and now my self-programming diaries. (to keep track of all these blogs at the same time, visit the Philosophistry Portal)
It seems I have a sort of fixed blogging attention-span, such that the more I throw into other blogging services such as MindSay or Blogger, the less attention I put into other ones, like this one.
I also am finding much difurcation in my blogging habits. There is this desire to keep on setting up blogs for different interests with different formats, audiences, and mediums. It's like I'm constantly adding tentacles to my existence on the web. Like when I noticed I was spending a lot of my mindblog talking about my personal self-help, I decided to separate into the self-programming diaries.
Either way, it's fun. Blogging has taken my writing skills to the next level and I'm a much more effective communicator than a year ago. I've since found my writing assignments in school to be child's play.
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aural=robots
okay, kids. the journey's over. I need to take this blog to new directions. I've evolved as a writer, I've learned my limitations etc..
so in pre-emption of the classic "sorry lack of updates" post, I'm going to switch gears to a different style of writing that will let the ink flow.
hmm, okay should set some general rules:
1) blogFabrics don't have to be there all the time, nor do blogaurals, and dirty colored tiles
2) first-drafts are better
3) the more personal the better
4) uncouth, rapid, write-first ask questions later
update:
5) flooding is cool
6) posting trash is not cool
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Mark Cuban is the richest blogger in the world. Check out his blog, BlogMaverick. Cuban made $2 billion selling broadband media provider Broadcast.com to Yahoo. Read some bio bits here.
On his blog he has an entry where he slams Donald Trump by describing his personal encounters with the man. Read the juicy tidbits there yourself. It's a nice peak into how immature and normal these rich kids are.
After leaving your office, I promised myself that if I ever got liquid and had an obscene amount of money in the bank, I would make a point not to remind myself and everyone else around me of it every minute of every day — unlike you. (read the rest)
This brings blogging to a new level. It shows how blogging and the Internet has compressed the world into a tighter global village; we now have access to more intimate details of the interactions between alpha males. While we maybe had this before in a few random interviews or in a book, this is one of the earliest times that you see it done live and unprompted by an interviewer. The bulk of current media via TV and print, only displays the dramatic side of celebrities: either the heights of their charisma or the lows of their criminal behavior. What comes out is this false impression that these celebrities are somehow super-human. The honest truth, as Cuban's blog helps reveals, is that they are jus as stupid as the rest of us. It therefore gives hope to the common people that they can rise up if they wanted to as well.
Note: he is probably not a billionaire anymore due to the dot-bomb's crashing his Yahoo stock.
Second Note: I remember Tommy Lee used to dish slime at other celebrities, like Kid Rock, via his band's site a few years ago. Good stuff.
Third Note: Yeah, Cuban's obviously doing this to help promote his show; it seems he's taking donald's on-camera remarks too seriously otherwise.
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I wouldn't say that I blog. Rather, I run a small online magazine where all the staff positions are compressed into one person.
aside: what the hell is the point of this post
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At some point in the future, Philosophistry could be so completely reflective of who I am that a critical point is reached. This would be a point whereby me and my blog are perfectly synchronized. At this point, my mental and physical health can be observed in both the real world and through my blog. For example, right now I'm under physical duress thanks to weekend reverly and torrential rains. Likewise, visiting my blog over the past few days only shows basic parts of my site being updated, like the link bar above, the away message, and the artist bar. My last main post was also short and a posted a while ago. In tandem, the BlogFabric above has been stagnating a bit and the site's overall quality is less than excellent.
Synchronoy, like harmony, is an interesting phenomena to occur between objects. In the book Sync I've been learning how inanimate objects naturally obtain synchrony, such as pendulums keeping pace, binary stars having stable rotations, and water molecules freezing up simultaneously. It's even conjectured, that synchrony is the essence of self-assembling mechanisms, such as the spontaneous generation of life on Earth.
So to relate this to the web, if my blog moves in perfect step with myself, then we have achieved harmony. But if small perturbations in me or my blog are automatically reflected in the other medium, then synchrony has been achieved.
Blogging is part of a tradition of web extensions for human experience. Since 1990, new tools have been developed to act as surrogates of existing human faculties: Google as the surrogate brain, Instant Messaging as the surrogate mouth, and eBay as the surrogate hand of resource exchange. Blogging appears as the surrogate face of personal identity. Through every post you are saying to the world, "this is me, this is what I'm thinking, this is what I'm about." Blogging becomes an alternative or simulated existence for the person.
Eventually, the simulation could become too real. The simulation becomes a simulacrum, which according to Baudrillard, is a copy without an original. At this critical point, the blog's initial frame of reference, you, has disappeared, and author and content have become one.
// Like I said, I'm a little out of sorts, and hence, I apologize for this post's incoherence.
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What happened to your site, it's so big!?
Why the horizontal scroll bar?! Scrolling left and right forces me to choose between liberal and conservative. And I can't think like that?!?! aaaah!
Chill. If the new scares you, you can always view the watered-down philosophistry. But don't you want something more like PhIl0sOph1stry rather than plain-jane .... philosophistry?
So you're not convinced? Let me put on my web-designer socks. Or rather my web-designer <socks> and walk over there and <teach> you a lesson.
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Anti-Negative Reasons (Problems that a 2D layout solves)
My head is getting bigger, and so is the content on my site. Quantity wise, the amount of info I'm packing onto the site has not changed much since I started, but it's becoming more organized and having order to it.
So I thought of separate modules of content and had the challenge of figuring how best to organize it.
So here would be the standard options for those still living on line land:
First, let's rule out separating the site into pages or mouseovers.
If it's not on the front-page it's not relevant. I've seen people show me their main blog and link off to a separate linkblog. And because of this, the linkblog, thematically, appears as if it were left-overs from the main juice on the frontpage. As a web designer, as well, having separate pages to manage reduces your motivation to make the sub-pages that interesting. This happens to me often where I'll invest so much into the front-page and forget about what happens to internal pages.
As for javascript roll-overs. Those in general are a big no-no because they enjoy crashing on people's browsers. Also, I felt these javascript roll-overs would require too much advance planning of how I wanted everything to be like. Plus, people hate them.
So, in layman's terms, any form of separation would be like forcing the user to dismember the whole Philosophistry body with slices in the form of his clicks. Yeah, nasty image, I know. See, this is why we need two scroll bars.
It's like keeping the party all in one room...
Positive Reasons (New Realms to explore with this layout.)
We have the browser, we have the bandwidth, we have the processing power, yo, let's take advantage of it.
Who the hell makes a site that is 3000x5000??? The Philosophist himself, that's who!
Packing everything in on one long snake of a page is a throw-back to days when ppl relied on HTML tables. Now, thanks to CSS's adoption, we can throw floating objects anyhere with reckless abandon. So the map-like layout of my site makes adding new features a cinch. In other words, my design is scalable. Whereas in a traditional brochure site, I'd have to rearrange so many puzzle pieces to get things to fit. Now I can just tack them on like post-it notes.
I was also curious to see what designing for such a wide space would entail. I feel like a new painter who just bought his first large canvas. I'm tired of being all zen and cute, trying to figure out how to pack and miniaturize everything onto one small screenful.
Okay, now take a deep breath, this is where I get into my hazy-mind territory.
I also wanted to see if I can change the way people think. If people were so caught up in viewing sites with such constraint, I wanted to see if I could expand their mind to start thinking about sites in terms of maps and not pages.
Maps, not pages, people! If we wanted pages, we would fire up Microsoft Word! This is 2004!! I feel like designers are still acting like magicians trying to figure out ways to move their limbs so they can fit into a small box. It's like, "Oh, there, look I got my pinky in, and you can still see one of my ears and eyes in this new positioning. I've been perfecting it for years." Man, think outside of the box <buddy>. Stretch your arms out and breath.
And if you're still confused as to why I did this, in summary, here's why: because I can.
I feel that the horizontal scroll bar is a lonely UI component.
My first passion has been web design.
My site is best designed for a 4-directional mouse scrollbutton.
Happy New Years Philosophistry. As you enter near the 1000th entry, how about a new design?
Let me sit down and explain whats been done to Philosophistry...
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I've destroyed the standard brochureware site design to allow for flexibility to throw modules all around my site with reckless abandon.
....
Let me describe the new modules, BTW...
.........
I'm jurying links to give visitors a taste of the interesting sites I stumble upon. This "linkblog" is also an alternate route to inspiration for those who don't care for my original notes.
The "found artists" section is just more jurying. Mainly I love diving into eye-candy portfolios of artists, and so arranging them like this fits that purpose well.
I felt the meme.abusage module needed to get its own space. These are words that I say with a little raising of one eyebrow. I just love creatively abusing these words and so I felt it important to highlight them.
The Away message gets its own section.
The "what you say" section is basically to aggregate all the chatter that occurs throughout my blog, and not just the latest posts.
And then I basically forked off all the other parts of the right-hand site of my old design into separate modules as well.
........
Aesthetically..
.........
I just wanted to go further out in representing the identity phil. I'm still employing this brit-pop shiny-color bricks-on-white motif. In addition, I've scratched and strewn abstract lines and shapes to represent the hectic mental.
... .... .. . ..
Future stuff
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I'm saying this now, but it always changes... but let me speculate on the future...
I think this brit-pop philosophistry has reached its climax, or is close to it, and so I may eventually seek a new design philosophy....
Also, I'm working on trying to have consistent posting frequency and not to do "info pollution."
// SIDE NOTE... what is info pollution? To me, it's information that could benefit from organization... at least for me, anything I post has some relevance, so no piece of information is pollution inherently. Even if I put trash on my site, it, in some way, represents an aspect of my behavior. However, if that takes away from the experience that one WANTs to have, such as reading refreshing, well-written material philosophistry then that should be segregated from chatter mental....
sooooo that means I may add a new module that's more free-formatted, possibly just a compendium of everything I want to say. Because right now, I'm censoring general minutae for the sake of letting quality articles surface.
Also, the blog is not the perfect medium for what I'm trying to accomplish. I want to generate a body of significant and novel ideas and observations while inspiring others to pursue lives of passion. -- woah, did I just spit out my personal mision statement -- so I may use a wiki to collect my thoughts around packages of topics that I cover. For example, my recent worship on the altar of logical fallacies will get its own cluster and coherence.
Plus, I have some side projects with pictures and runes that I may want to junk around my site..
Hopefully the new design has enough asperity for our goals. Your suggestions are always welcome. ;-) k. thx. bye.
.... phootnotes....
The sub-header font is my handwriting with a sharpie, thanks to fontifier.com.
I want to take the cross-product of blogging and wikis.
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The blogosphere feels like High School all over again.
Just like in High School, there is the popular crowd. You know who they are in the blogosphere. Ernie, Rebecca, Will, Pirillo, Winer, Aaron. And then there's Cory Doctorow. The alpha-male cum yearbook editor-in-chief, giving a great meta-commentary on the usefulness of blogging, and co-authoring a book on blogging.
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They have their own circles, referencing and gossiping about one another. Just look at them, jovially cross-linking each other, knowing how quickly their guestbooks, inboxes, and pageranks increase.
And like in High School, when the big cliques purchased ad space in the back of the yearbooks to self-congratulate on being a member of their clique, the blogosphere has its own similar ceremonies.
The in-crowd of the blogosphere has the same perks of the popular crowd in High School. They have their own prom court. They have the lion's share of the blogging hits online and the lion's share of the blogging pageranks. If they want to run a "google bomb"--the blogging equivalent of the senior-prank--they definitely have the power to do so.
You can tell I'm jealous. Just like I was jealous of the popular kids in High School, I too would love to revel in all the attention that comes with being in Technorati's Top 100.
But I don't speak their language, I don't wear their clothes. I couldn't don the act of a populist technophile who loves to curl up to my laptop and blog, while I pet my cat. I couldn't recycle articles about technology and funny nuances a la Boing Boing or Aaron Schwartz. Nor could I toot my horn like some sort of freedom-writer/Thomas Paine type like Glen, Atrios, and Volokh
And maybe that's why I never became part of the popluar crowd in High School. I'd sure want the perks and trappings of having many hits and high page ranks, but I wouldn't want to actively participate, go to all their school dances, and become them.
And my perspective is all wrong. It's not like your position in the pecking order is really a choice anyways. I don't think Raed said one day, "I'm going to be a passionate and emotional voice for injustice in Iraq in order to become a phenom."
I feel like a sophomore in Blog High. I've been blogging for about 8 months now, but have a moderate following and a few loose blog-fiends. I've got some page-rank power, half of my page views come from search engines now.
Even if I wrote a few impactful articles that got high on blogdex, I still wouldn't get the keys to the in-crowd. I'd have to fill up their comment forms, e-mail them about broken links, trackback their posts with "me too"isms, and tone down my arrogance.
The lesson I learnt from High School is that you can't fake it. Selling out gets easily detected and rejected. Likewise, I think I'd stick out like a sore-thumb among the elite bloggers. So, I think I'll follow the common imperative, "be yourself." That's what blogging's all about anyways, letting yourself unfurl in ways that the real world can't permit.
I took Excel and tried to map my thoughts onto it. First impression: I love it. Mapping your thoughts in a 2D matrix is interesting and different than a traditional text. A traditional text is a one-dimensional line, a stream, where ideas follow from each other. The excel spreadsheet allows associations to fly around in a plane.
I think this is more closely aligned with the way the brain works. Every idea pops open 4ish ideas for consideration.
Plus, there are also colored bars to play with.
Enough talking see for yourself:
First Excel Blog - Just an all-over-the-place mosh pit kalidescope of colors and words.
What is Blogging? and the Global Mind - What started as a mental discussion about what exactly blogging is, somehow transformed into a pounding on the concept of measuring synchronicity between humans and between neurons to see if we're a global mind yet.
Observations on I-15 - I was driving home from Palo Alto, and mapped my stream of consciousness while on the road. Lots of goodies in here.
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Here are other files I did:
Mcluhan and extension spaces
Tire Marks and Permanence
Blogging is Open Source Living
Regions of Brain are much like Continents
What does the river mind look like
On Skepticism
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What if I died in the real world, but somebody took my existing blog, and then just rewinded it... you know, put it on loop from the beginning, and take entries from one year ago and post them as new.... for ppl who didn't know who I was or had never been to my blog before, they'd certainly get the impression I was still alive and doing something.
We already have ghosts right now in the form of newsgroup posts that don't get lost, e-mail addresses that keep getting spammed to even after they're gone, google caches, and internet archives...
Hell, records of my existence in the real world would probably get lost 100 years from now, but I know that on the web, if you google my name today and then google it 1000 years from now, I'd still be around.
(NB: you could delete all time-sensitive posts, like one's related to news articles. On Philosophistry, 50% of the posts could be recycled regardless of time)
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What do the colors in the blogfabric mean?
First open up the color table. These are the 200 some odd html color names which can correspond to actual hex codes in HTML (betcha didn't know there were so many of them).
Anyways, while color selection is more of an Ouiji-board-like process there is method behind the madness.
Depth of Hues
Deeper hues mean that I am under a higher-intensity of emotion. Lighter hues mean that I am more relaxed and meditative. For example, if I posted something with "lavenderblush" in the Reds column, that would mean I'm fairly passive at that moment. versus "orangered" indicating I'm fired up, charged, ready to go.
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These are what each of the color classes mean...
Blues
Calm, reflective, pensive, contemplative, confident, passively destructive (like a flood), smooth, inert, empty, quiet.
Greens
Progressive, growing, optimistic, expansive, instructive, bursty, aware, understanding
Reds
Cantankerous, aggressive, condemning, actively destructive, charged, forward-moving, sermonizing, alerting, desperate, attracting.
Yellows
Hot, post-destructive, excess, positive energy, reaching beyond optimism, masochism, burning
Browns
Soft, edgy, reluctant, cautious, compassionate, inclusive, other-oriented, sacrificial
Grays
Depressed, stuck, empty, callous, bored, wistful, dark, deep, struck, disabled
Combinations and variations of the above themes lead me to pick the specific color I want. To interpret the meaning of the threads and the blogfabric, look both at the length and the surrounding threads. Half of each thread's meaning comes from its context and shape. i.e. a short azure post following a longer mediumslateblue post would indicate a calm coda or wrap-up of a previous wash.
...
As an artist, I enjoy learning new color names and also seeing a rich, visual representation of my personal evolution.
I made this site map for Philosophistry using my blogfabric thing. My hands were shaky from playing halo and I was kinda wired, so it was a brief flash of insight. yes!
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I go here and I sort of let my eyes just scan and pan across the page, seeing where they naturally want to stumble into. Consider it like a fancy ouiji board. I also consider the existing blogfabric, in case I want to lean toward some continuity. but generally speaking, if the time inbetween posts is short enough, the colors shouldn't differ too widely, or if you're being unnatural.
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Man, everytime I upgrade my blog-strategy or the type of content I post, I find that there already exists a community of people doing the same thing.
For example, I'm trying to do this thing where I draft articles first, stew on them for a little while, and then I post them. But, now that I start to pay attention to this, I find that there's a world of essayists constantly pumping out analysis on all sorts of topics.
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So, what's next? How can I constantly inspire people. I can't keep writing lame essays. They have to be novel, but you can't compete in the space of novelty these days, nothing is novel anymore.
LYD is the key, the idea of a focus, good consistent humor is still hard to find. You have to put things out there that are hard to find. The number of idea-ists out there is amazing, and it's impossible to compete. In economics terms, the supply is huge for simple analysis and therefore it has a low premium.
The idea is consistency, or being "known" for something, recognized as a source. Maybe setting a really high bar for what ideas come out here. Maybe pick only the truly novel analysis.
Yeah, I really do want to inspire, and it's getting harder and harder these days. But wait, what, are you kidding? These essays I see are not inspring or emotionally riling at all. Go to Scripting News, and I am just chewing gum, I don't feel hit with anything but pure data, pure data analysis.
I read something that describes, at the top of maslow's ladder, there is doing meanginful activities, or getting into flow, where you're usually in flow when you're doing what you're best at.
Yeah, to truly compete in the blogosphere, your posts have to be things that only you could post?? that's not exactly true as well, look at LYD, there isn't much talent involved in that, it's funny, it's good, it's consistent, maybe that's his talent, it's not obvious, but it's just being consistent, not glutting the blogwaves with all this other junk, and really farting out gems.
We'll see.
I like challenges.
Weird, you can read this article with the paragraphs in reverse order and it still carries the same impact.
UPDATE: God this related entries engine I'm using is incredible. Here I'm stewing negative about blogging and the engine picked my article, "This Blog Sucks," as being related.
I'm just now starting to meet my physical blog neighbors. I can already start to see a virtual community forming with all the trappings of communities in the real world: neighbors and neighborhoods. The blogosphere is just aching for someone to bring the killer app that combines physical location and the opportunity to expand your identity through mediums like blogging, and technologically through RSS. I can imagine an RSS/Blog chat that would just be AIM + your away message on steroids. Someone ought to layer friendster, xanga, and IM ... I see a hot start-up waiting to happen here.
I worked with Trepia for a bit to implement this, but they were more interested in people dating than sharing their lives. Check out their app design though, I think they're on the right track.
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When it comes to diary entries or self-unveilings on this blog, my goal is not merely to just therapeutically vent, but to exposit different ways of self-expression. I may not be a unique individual, but when I go the extra bit to release my private ruminations, I'm hoping to bring a novel perspective to the art of reflection. i.e. I'm trying to reach beyond the simple, "dear diary..." or "why is it that blah blah"; I make an effort to trek far along the aesthetic dimensions available in blog-format.
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This post's color is lemonchiffon to emphasize calm, truce-like, explanatory, and positive.
Yesterday, The Other Philip, Mr. Greenspun, tries to answer the question "what is the point of blogging" and mentions Nietzsche, Everyone can write like Nietzsche or a Marcus Aurelius, even if few people ever come up with enough clever small ideas to fill a 200-page book. This was just a few days after I made a similar inuendo How can these stodgy professors compete who only know continental philosophy with a specialty in Hume and Nietzsche when the blogosphere is churning out mini-Nietzsches everyday? (link)
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Synchronicity..
I've been noticing a lot of synchronicities lately. Is there any way to measure the amount of sychronicities going on in the world or determine whether sychronicity as a whole is rising. Given the thin degrees of separation concept, it shouldn't be surprising that things are as synchronous as they are. I wonder also whether there has been a dramatic increase in the frequency of synchronicities given the explosive distribution of content via the Internet and Blogging.
Nietzsche..
Nietzsche was definitely one of the greatest bloggers ever. Just take a look at The Gay Science. Every entry is novel and relevant. The tone and content is personal, but with good artistic reasons. Wit is the norm here. I also like Nietzsche in general, because I feel like he embraces the philosophy v. sophistry issue well, by not operating under the illusion that he is certain about everything and forgoing a stodgy tone in order to convey his message.
I'm experimenting with assigning colors to entries. Each color should represent the mood or feeling associated with my mindset in that entry's creation. The sum of these colored tiles should then give an overview of a dynamic movement of feeling over time, and thus expand the self-expression possibilities of this blog.
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Resources used:
- Brad Choate's regex plugin to strip HTML tags from...
- Brad Choate's key/values plugin to encode colors as
- HTML color names
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Man, I've been running this blog now, 6 months, 800+ posts, and still barely any traffic, not barely any, but like still. Anyways.... I feel that what I write is important and significant, but I'm reading the book Linked, and I'm understanding that there's just so much to compete with. If I had put up this site 3 years ago, it'd be the big portal for enlightenment, but now I'm competing with every other smart crafty writer on the planet. And while I've developed significantly in the complexity and depth of my thinking since I started, so has the rest of the world, and possibly at a faster rate.
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Now this is not a woe-is-me post necessarily. I want to emphasize how amazing it is how much this exploding network expansion of the Internet is putting so much competitive pressure on novel ideas and writing. How can these stodgy professors compete who only know continental philosophy with a specialty in Hume and Nietzsche when the blogosphere is churning out mini-Nietzsche's everyday?
If 2012 is supposed to be the end of novelty, I'm not surprised. Nothing is funny anymore, it's just a retorquing of previous material and structure. You can't get any more modern that post-modern. There is only a cycling between fashions and fads, but nothing novel.
Once the network becomes completely aware of network complexity, there will then be the recursion issues of a system aware of itself acting on itself on that information, but I bet that'll be studied rapidly in-depth once everybody stomachs network theory.
Like I remember in 1998, 1999, Complexity theory and the stuff they were working on at the Santa Fe Institute with regards to the law of accelerating returns was like the holy grail, now it's like nothing, just read Linked and Age of Spiritual machines, bam, comprehension realized.
Anyways, I guess this in a defeatist post in that I should give up on trying to be significant or make an impact, and instead just chill, and focus on whatever drives my moment2moment passions, like art, like randomly saying on this Blog that indians are naturally competitive and I walked through campus without my shoes on. That's all I can do really. Sugar works too.
hmm, smells like nihilism up in here. bottle rocket, wildcat, wooh
In honor of the "National Speak like a Pirate Day" phenomenom that has pervaded the blogosphere, I'd like to propose a "National Lay the Smack Down on your Landlord Day." Tomorrow's the day you address all your issues with the landlord, such as:
- Removing the killer bees that have taken residence with you.
- Getting her to actually make a paved walkway between the sidewalk and the entrance to your building.
- Getting her to give the house more than 10 min. of total hot water per day.
- Prevent the maintenence guy from painting our windows shut.
etc...
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Really, if you know Perl and are trying to hack your Movable Type blog, you might be better off just writing your own plugin. I spent hours deliberating over which cocktail of plugins to use to do some tricks when I was much better off running my own deal.
[Draft]
Use the RandomEntries tag combined with the RelatedEntries tag and then throw in the ExtraFields (or field tag) tag to get filenames.... voila (get the mtifempty as well).. yeah, surf all the plug-ins that are out there, maybe even do that hello worl movable type plug-in.
- Create a folder where you want to put all your windows URL shortcuts and put it on one side of the screen
- Open IE and your history folder and put it on another side of the screen
- Click and drag entries from your history into the folder where you keep all of the links you want to convert into HTML
- Once you're done, execute this perl script below from that directory
- Open "spit.txt" to see all of your short-cuts as HTML
#!/usr/bin/perl
$dir = ".";
opendir(DIR, $dir);
@files = readdir(DIR);
open FILE, ">spit.txt";
foreach $file (@files) {
if (-f $file && $file =~ /\.URL$/) {
open URL, $file;
while (<URL>) {
if (/^URL=/) {
chomp;
$_ =~ s/^URL=//;
$file =~ s/\.URL$//;
print FILE "<A HREF=\"$_\">$file\n";
close URL;
break;
}
}
}
}
A friend of mine is working on an app to expedite this process. I'll keep ya posted.
Here is yesterday's IE History folder HTML'ified
I'm exploring how a raw post of someone's history can be a form of self-expression
Wired 8.05 Terence McKenna's Last Trip
$10-Domains - Domain registration at $10. No hidden fees. Domains @ $10
WTF Comics
A Visual Database of Extremist Symbols, Logos and Tattoos
Anchorage Daily News Tested love
AFI.com
A Fire Inside
Welcome to AJC!
ajc.com News Crime rate at 30-year low, survey finds
Google Answers lottery winners
THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
MP3.com G DUB
AskMen.com - Flirting
AskMen.com - LeBron James
AskMen.com - Lebron James picture
The Adrenaline Vault Downloads
Bachelorette .com - Bachelorette Party Experts
Gummy Peters
The Bachelorette Tiara
Penis Pińata - The Most Popular One.
Pin the Macho on the Man
Jello Shot Molds
www.badreligion.com
BAD RELIGION the official web site
Welcome to the Mercury News on Bayarea.com
Better Whois The WHOIS domain search that works with all registrars.
dooby's Home Page...
Blog for America
Blogjam presents Neil Armstrong - The Truth
Boohbah Zone
Boston.com - News - Local - Mass. - The students Nine months you'll never forget
Broken Newz - Cruz Bustamante
Broken Newz - Arnold Scharzenegger
Broken Newz - California Governor Candidate Deck of Cards
CafePress.com Design, print and sell custom products for FREE
shadow
Eric S. Raymond's Home Page
Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories
AtPlay
Celebrity
CNN.com - Fact sheet Bush's 'axis of evil' - January 30, 2002
CNN.com - McClintock 'In the race to the finish line' - Aug. 26, 2003
CPAN
Creative Think
Funet
Commandments fray goes beyond Alabama csmonitor.com
CSP - 'The Psychedelic Experience' by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert
Cyberpump! - The Home of HIT
Unreasonable resolutions cause stress, unhappiness
dailyrecord - CIRCUS MAN SHOT WITH CROSSBOW
datapimp email and hosting services
Dean for America Home
Aphorisms Against Work
Deoxyribonucleic Autonomous Zone
The Eight Circuits of Consciousness
A Tryptamine Expedition
The grid of Circuits I and II creates four quadrants
Dictionary.com-genteel
Dictionary.com-mandala
Dictionary.com-tryptamine
Google Directory - Arts Music Styles Rock Punk Bands and Artists A A.F.I.
Magic Shadow
www.dropkick.com.au
Welcome to Dropkick Murphys Official Website
cracked paint
particle wave
2d exper digital
murals main page
Welcome to Engrish.com!
Special Hair Stylist
White Services
Twistin'
Cleaned Out
The Vaults of Erowid
Erowid LSD (Acid) Vault
Erowid LSD Vault Bits & Pieces
Erowid LSD Vault FAQ
Erowid Library Book 'Psychedelic Experience'
Erowid Psychoactive Vaults
Erowid LSD Vault Flashbacks
Erowid Hawaiian Baby Woodrose Vault (Convolvulaceae Argyreia nervosa, Wooly Morning Glory)
Drew Curtis' FARK.com
Orisinal Morning Sunshine
Orisinal.com - Pocketful Of Stars
FileShack.com
FARK.com Comments Thingee (630147)
FARK.com Comments Thingee (625199)
FuckedCompany.com - Official lubricant of the new economy
Full Court Press The Women's Basketball Journal
A Clockwork Orange-Script
Welcome to GoErie.com
Google Search circuits sitedeoxy.org
Google Search lsd
Google Search acid
Google Search acid erowid
Google Search annullment stanford
Google Search bad religion
Google Search dooby
Google Search high intensity training FAQ
Google Search lottery unhappiness
Google Search manifesto
Google Search peyote erowid
Google Search punk rock
Google Search SHARPs skinheads
Google Search SS
Google Search SS nazis
Google Search SS nazis lightning bolts
Google Search SS nazzism
Google Search storm front
Google Search white pride
Google Search wtf
Google Search adrienne samen
Google Search AFI
Google Search baked
Google Search contrivable
Google Search CPAN
Google Search doby
Google Search dodgers
Google Search droog russian
Google Search drugs set setting
Google Search erowid drug
Google Search fuck this
Google Search full court press
Google Search g dub
Google Search genteel
Google Search gunn
Google Search high intensity training
Google Search howard dean
Google Search html
Google Search kiss
Google Search krispy karnov
Google Search lebron james
Google Search lottery unhappy
Google Search love me now
Google Search mandala
Google Search manifest
Google Search mark consuelos
Google Search mature content
Google Search mother fucker
Google Search nofx
Google Search peyote
Google Search ricky martin
Google Search SHARPs
Google Search tryptamine
Google Search whip talk for me
Google Search wipro
Google Search women for aryan unity
Welcome to California
The Devil in New England
Welcome to the Gunn Webpage
Basic Russian
Transcript ( Neo & Architect Talk)
University of Manitoba Personal Home Page Web Server
HOT or NOT - www.hotornot.com
Wired Magazine Issue 11.09
Encylopedia of the new Economy
I-Mockery.com Hacked Rom Reviews Dick Dug and Babymaker!
Kansascity.com - Your Kansas City Everything Guide
KISSONLINE.COM THE SITE THAT CLICKS ASS
Click Here
K n a k e z o o i . c o m
LeBronJames.com
SHIT Special High Intensity Training
SysRq The Process-nuke LG #81
Los Angeles Dodgers The Official Site
WTF Is It Now
Matrix Essays
HOT or NOT - Meet Me
Protect Your PC
Learn About Antivirus Software
Microsoft Corporation
Moby
Morrison and Foerster LLP
montyandjune.com
Welcome to MSN.com
ESPN.com
Shuttle report blames NASA culture
Mars makes history in the night sky
Bush promises ‘no retreat’ on terror
MTV.com - News -Jacko Goes Willy Wonka, Invites Outsiders To Tour Neverland
MTV.com - News -Did Porn, Sony Or McDonald's Sink Jackson Charity Single
NBA
NBA Draft.net -- LeBron James profile
Don't Win The Lottery
Google News
NOFX -- officialwebsite
No on Recall--Yes on Bustamante
norcal-raves.org - calendar
full_8_23_03_elight.jpg
full_8_30_03_digga2.jpg
full_9_12_03_trancerev.jpg
full_9_5_03_hd2.jpg
full_9_6_03_asylum4.jpg
Two Tons of Morality
The LeBron James Online Shrine
Marijuana Seeds, Marijuana Growing FAQ & Pictures @ Overgrow
American Society of Paid Thinkers
How to Make Our Ideas Clear
Plastic Recycling The Web In Real Time
Plastic When Monsters Kill Monsters Have We Become Monsters
Plastic SciTech
Procrastination.org STILL Too lazy for a catch phrase...
punkrock.org
Qween B
Red vs Blue
Richard Meier & Partners, Architects
Memorial Square
Grotta House
Santa Barbara House
Shamberg House
Wijnhaven Kwartier Urban Developmental and Programmed Study
Ricky Martin
The Anti-Outlook Page
Slashdot News for nerds, stuff that matters
Slashdot Poll
Campaign 2004 Field Guide
The Best of Howard Dean - The bravest thing he ever did. By William Saletan and Ben Jacobs
Madonna Falls Into the Gap - Her new ad's a dud, but Devo cleans up the mess. By Rob Walker
The Best of George W. Bush - The bravest thing he ever did. By William Saletan and Ben Jacobs
Cruz Bustamante - The Democrats' backup plan. By Chris Suellentrop
Thirteen Going on 40 - A harrowing, moralizing portrait of adolescence. By Marshall Heyman
The Road to Nowhere - Is the U.S. auto industry doomed By Daniel Gross
Taped at the BBC - Can the Beeb put its entire archive on the Web By Paul Boutin
Interpretation of Dream - ABC remembers Martin Luther King Jr.'s great speech. By Virginia Heffernan
MSN Slate Magazine
The AMC Pages About the Actors Mark Consuelos
The Advocate - Marital bliss ends at reception
Haraway_CyborgManifesto.html
Yahoo! News - Phone Book Cover Features Heroin Flower
Jul2000 The Lottery
Adrienne Samen
Sun-Sentinel Strange But True
TechTV new things. turn us on.
TechTV Unscrewed
TechTV Realdoll Surgeon Slade Fiero, Search Sperts, Fancy Fetish
The Indian Programmer A magazine for Indian IT professionals
The Indian Programmer Burning Issues Germany Revisited
The Onion America's Finest News Source™
The Onion The California Recall Candidates A Focus On The 87 Front-Runners
totse.com A text file on Special High Intensity Training
www.vapir.com
Unhappiness
www.websoapbox.com
Why War Features
Welcome to Wipro - IT (Information Technology) Services Product Design Services
Wired News You Gotta Hand It to Porn Coders
Wired Magazine
women.stormfront.org
WorldNetDaily 22 things about the Bible that drives the left crazy
Welcome to World Taekwondo Federation
www.wtfcomics.com
What The Fuck ! v2.0 ... NOT for Netscape
X - the band
X - the band - Exene
Read This Column by big shot PC Magazine writer John C. Dvorak.
But where is the leverage? In the past I've complained about the inability of net-heads to make any real impact on politics. The Computer Decency Act, for example, waltzed through Congress without a hitch despite the online grumblings all over the place. The blog community may be different. It's more politicized than any other online movement, with Democrats, Republicans, and mostly Libertarian variants each yakking loudly and getting re-quoted everywhere. The real influence is still an unknown. It's possible that this newer form of carping will be just as ineffective.Realistically, the idiotic Conyers-Berman bill is not going to happen anyway. But you can sense that something really dumb is going to get close to passing and the bloggers will have their shot at proving that the Net can make a difference.
One way is that just by the large dissemination of ideas and truth, people will then naturally spread that to the offline crowd, hopefully convincing them. However, politicians have been very disconnected with the concerns of the people and instead focus on big business... which is odd because WE vote for them, not the businesses. I think an informed public is the key to sound government
I see a lot of blogs with the tagline "Fair and Balanced" in them. This is a jab at FOXnews and it's apparent unfair and imbalanced reporting.
Well, I don't want to miss the party, so my blog will get the same title as well. You should do the same as well.
This is the web-equivalent a crowd making a wave in a stadium.
I'm experimenting with usages of text-decorations, such as Bold, to improve readers' experiences with online text.
My surfing habits are such that now I just scan instead of read websites. My eyes moves up and down between 100+ pages a day, and stumbles upon some keywords I like. I then continue to read, usually skipping around, until I get the juice that I'm looking for, and then I close or move on.
Unfortunately, a lot of the web, esp. blogs, are still written like stuff offline. News articles are still long columns of text, and blogs are like pages out of a diary.
I'd like to suggest using text-decorations and other font stuff to make scanning easier for people.
Here are the basic text decorations:
- Bold
- Italics
- Underline
- Normal
- HyperLink
Here are all the feasible combinations:
Normal, Bold, Italics, Underline, Bold-Italics, Bold-Underline, Bold-Italics-Underline, Hyperlink, Italics-Hyperlink
So there's 7 non-hyperlink classes of text that you can use. Various parts of your text should be classified with text-decorations to allow readers to scan for what they need.
I haven't figured out what the classes are, but tentatively, I'm thinking, make everything italics that is mere opinion, anything bold that are key facts that should be read, anything bold-underline being like the main punch-line fact, and anything bold-italics being a summary statement that captures the gist of what I'm saying. Normal is just filler, story, details, etc. And italicized-hyperlinks are links that are secondary. BlockQuote should be used for quotes. I haven't found a usage for bold-underline-italics, but we'll see.
People who posts essays and long posts online should keep in mind ADD-web-surfers like me and mark the "goods" properly so that we can all save time.
Coming Soon in other blogging experiments:
- My deal with the blogrolls at the top
- Using IE Histories to tell more about what you do
- Using google search terms into your blogs
Blogs your winAMP playlist... haven't tried it.
1) People who just want to start from Philosophistry and bounce to the good stuff in the BlogRoll can do that easily now as the linklist loads up as soon as the blogroll's text has been downloaded--as opposed to waiting for other junk to appear beforehand
2) Posts have been unhinged from being part of one big table--this is to allow the text to load up piecemeal, so once again, you don't have to wait for the whole site to load before getting to the good stuff
3) Posts still have a tableized margin though, because it's easier to read text that doesn't touch from edge to edge
4) Justified text just looks nicer
5) Kept font sizes big, but not too big as to be gaudy
6) Ugly linkbox with links to my archives and older designs has been reformatted to fit in better and be more slick
7) Used 1.5 spacing on posts, once again for readability
8) I apologize for the Trepia Flash IM being lame... this will be corrected eventually.
9) Re-proritized the blogroll to be more user-friendly, here is the order: Power-Cycle, Must-Read, Read-Worthy, Phat-Sites, References, Art, Humor, Plugs, and Easily-Lost-Bookmarks
Clay Shirky's Internet Writings
Why do ppl hate bloggers so much? I mean what is it. I know bloggers don't hate other bloggers... well, there are that group of self-loathing bloggers, but their hatred is just a matter of their self-loathing, not anything of any reason.
but these other guys, they usually say something like, "blah, blogging, more trash on the web that nobody reads" or "ppl just masturbating their minds, blah"
why do they have to be so negative... they like go out of their way to claim how lame blogging is or something... for somebody to go out of their way to be negative is obviously acting out of some loose bolt within them... whatever...
No but really, what if I could blog as fast as I could think. Really, I can pretty much type my stream of consciousness. I guess that's a start. Maybe what's stopping me, maybe it's the public nature of this blog. I have to sort of, craft and punch my ideas into shape so that it can be communicated to somebody other than number one. Also, there's the tip of the iceberg thing. My stream thinking touches the tips of many icebergs of thought, and so if I were to just mention them in passing, I'd have to tap the whole iceberg so as to not leave you completely in the dark. Or maybe I can create a new way of speaking or thinking or whatever that'll allow me to just disclose the tip in a certain way such that you can get, at least maybe, 85% of the rest of the iceberg, by filling in the blanks yourself.
This is how me and Dell have an affinity, we both love efficiency like the masses love inefficiency.
PS, I'm reading Nietzsche now, similarities, thanks, him, color my blogging negative tone.
PPS, also, blog, slow-down, like to read my writing
PPPS, single words, annoying, try other tip method thinking.
PPPPS, Possibility personal orwellspeak = new blogspeak
PPPPPS, Too much fun.
PPPPPPS, Will inform creatively on this new form. Expect: creative compression. Expect: new beauty. This is why I love blogging.
PPPPPPPS, okay, let's take this semi-seriously okay. Well, I don't want to make it like, single punches of words. That'll first just be too annoying, and it'll just give you an impression, but without the context, I doubt any serious matter will get transferred. Orwellspeak, well, that's kind of annoying. I think, well, what I think I'm getting at, well, I don't want it to sound like poop. You should still be able to read it with ease. Stream-of-consciousness is nice because it is well read with ease. There's the tip of the iceberg phenom. I bet I could speed things up 50% just with some parsimony of words. Things can get too wordy and Orwell wrote an essay on being too wordy. So, that might help. I could also just be more creative with my presentation. Instead of long logical introductions, I could provide simpler and more beautiful constructions. I just have to make sure I don't sacrifice beauty for speed. Although speed of delivery is an aesthetic... in the sense that you get a chunk of good ideas, rather than clumps of great ones.
What if I could blog as fast as I could think. I can almost type as fast as I can think, thanks to the Dvorak Keyboard layout. You know, if Apple decided to truly "Think Different" they would offer, as an alternative, a Dvorak-enabled keyboard. Then advocacy would be effected, interest would emerge, and then maybe an intelligenstia of Apple owners will put pressure on everybody else to do the right thing, and type SOME FRIGGING DVORAK!
Some may ask, an an incredulous manner, "Phil, why do you blog?" I then respond and say, "kind sir, why do you think? Don't tell me you think simply for it's utility."
