Prachtig rondje voor de zondag. Veel zon, nog altijd best warm — 14 graden. Fijn langs kanaal en Maas, voor het eerst de bocht bij Elslo gepasseerd, dan dwars door Maasmechelen het bos in en via Gelik en Veldwezelt terug.

Kanne – kanaal – Smeermaas – Uikhoven – Kotem – Maasmechelen – As – Wiemesmeer – Zutendaal – Gelik – Veldwezelt – Zusserdel – Kanne

Om 10 uur vertrok ik. Ochtendrondje. Warm, al om 10 uur, de dubbele laag was niet nodig. Het was zelfs al warm om middernacht, bij een harde zuidenwind. Weersverwachting: harde zuidenwind en warm, 18 tot zelfs mogelijk 22 graden. Bij Fleron dacht ik: laat ik nog een keer naar Chaudfontaine rijden, om de bossen te zien. In het dal dacht ik, kom, nog een stukje tot Louveigne, want het is heerlijk warm. Toen was ik zo ver dat het zonde zou zijn om niet nog een laatste keer de klim naar Creppe te doen en dan de bossen bij Spa te bekijken. Uiteindelijk besloot ik tot het dal van de Roanne af te dalen om een laatste keer mijn favoriete klim te rijden. Zo reed ik 139 kilometer. Ik was goed kapot na afloop. In Spa zei een thermometer 23 graden — en dat klopte zeker. In Theux zei een thermometer 26 graden. Het was warm als in de zomer. Korte broeken- en eigenlijk ook korte mouwenweer. De bossen op hun mooist, met alle mogelijke schakeringen groen, geel en bruin en zelfs rood. Om 6 uur terug (pauzes om van het landschap en de warmte te genieten).

Kanne – Eben – Halembaye – kanaal – Hermalle ss Argenteau – Sarolay – Cheratte – Saive – Tignee – (plus een niet eerder gereden klim over een smalle lokale weg) – Retinne – Fleron – Romsee – Chaudfontaine – Prayon – Louveigne – Desnie – Winamplanche – Creppe – Geronstere – Rosier – Andrimont – Moulin du Ruy – Andrimont – Rosier – Geronstere – Spa – Theux – Pepinster – Drolenval – Soiron – Xhendelesse – Jose – Herve – Bolland – Blegny – Ttrembleur – Feneur – Richelle – Vise – kanaal – Kanne

It would be too long to publish as a ‘post’, so I made it into a ‘page’: http://www.ariealt.net/a-very-simple-research/. I just counted, for 204 different blogs, what softwares they used…

Screenshots of all 204 blogs — resized to 10% of the original size — in one html-page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ariealt/jve/204_blogs.html.

10.30 – 12.50 Ik rij toch liever ‘s avonds na dan ‘s ochtens voor het werk, maar eind oktober is er niet zoveel keus, als je wilt rijden. Zon na dagen met regen, de bomen kleuren. 12 graden. Rustig gereden (maar eigenlijk kwam ik niet vooruit). Kanne – kanaal – Vise – Lorette – Dalhem – Mortroux – Bois de Mauhin – Val Dieu – Neer Aubel – St. Pietersvoeren – St. Martensvoeren – Gravensvoeren – Moelingen – Lixhe – Lanaye – Kanne

Now listening to the works of post-minimalist composer Julius Eastman (1940 – 1990) – or well, to those works that have been tracked down. Eastman was evicted from his house in the 1980s, all his stuff, including his scores thrown out too. Eastman went on to live in Tompkins Square Park, until his death. The story is incredible: http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=4411, the music is like a slap in the face. I generally dislike minimalist music, but Eastman makes a maximum impact. Can anybody explain why we’re bothered with Philip Glass and John ‘Other’ Adams-operas when there was somebody like Eastman? (Yeah, difficult person, et cetera…. but the music!)

(Btw: there are two contemporary composers by the name of John Adams; the ‘famous’ one and then John Luther Adams — most known for the fact that he lives in northern Alaska. According to Samuel Vriezen John Luther Adams writes by far the more interesting music — hence he calls the famous John Adams, John ‘Other’ Adams.)

Just wrote: “Only marketeers who’d like to reach out to an audience and have that audience stay with their blog, want this. Why would you like an audience to stay”. Well, dear reader, of course I am very happy if you read daily what I scribble here. I am more than happy if I receive nice comments. What I meant is that the life of this blog does not depend on traffic, but on my willingness/desire to write.

Although I read blogs regularly, I myself am not a faithful audience that keeps returning daily to favorite blogs. (Or maybe, for a while, for 1 or 2 blogs, never more). I am faithful in the sense that I keep returning to the same blogs (or people) over a long time. (One can also say that I will encounter them, again and again).

I think, (well, hope) I have such faithful readers.

Sometimes knowing that one is read helps to keep the desire to write alive. But I know I would also write and publish if these posts were not read daily, not read right away. I believe in keeping track of time through writing. I believe it makes my live richer. Whatever. I hope to catch, or understand that which escapes me, what I cannot catch.

I also believe in giving all this away, this effort, uploading it to the web, as a gift to all those others that keep on uploading their efforts, for whatever reason. Hoping something will come of it.

Well, that sounds like a ‘creed’….

Let’s do a deconstruction.

I found a post on blogging by a professional from the marketing-world. Funny enough I found it by searching for mp3’s of James Chance and the Contortions, namely here: http://somevelvetblog.blogspot.com/.

The piece originally was posted here: http://www.mpdailyfix.com/ and comes from here: http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/kintz/, exactly: http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/kintz/archive/0001/01/01/1120.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN.

I’d like to deconstruct some of the assumptions in this post to bring into perspective how much the view of the marketing-world, and their idea of corporate blogging is rooted in an idea of publishing that is superseded by blogging. The funny thing is that the conlusions of the research and the advises taken from it, do correspond quite well with my own view on/feeling about blogging. But I’d say those things should’ve been clear from the start…

I will quote the whole text Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore from Eric Kintz — in italics — and add my commentary.

“Thou shall post every day” is the most fundamental and most well known principle of blogging….

— It never was. Only marketeers who’d like to reach out to an audience and have that audience stay with their blog, want this. Why would you like an audience to stay? The only real reason I can think of is: Google-ad revenue. Power? Having people read what you scribbled? My god, there are millions like you… Conversation? That comes from putting up good content. Not from blogging daily.

Every new blogger is warned about “the” ultimate rule and is confronted with the pressure of a day going by with no new post. Every one has in mind the examples of successful bloggers, like Robert Scoble at Microsoft, who post several times a day. Daily posting shows that you are serious about blogging, generates traffic and drives reader loyalty, as readers come back daily to check your new posts. You cannot be successful if you do not go by the rule, right? RIGHT?

— No. See above. Who wants to be like Robert Scoble?

Wrong. Daily posts are a legacy of a Web 1.0 mindset and early Web 2.0 days (meaning 12 months ago!). The pressure around posting frequency will ultimately become a significant barrier to the maturity of blogging. Here are 10 reasons why.

— Well, you have my attention now.

#1- Traffic is generated by participating in the community; not daily posting – The blogosphere doubles in size every 6 months and cutting through the clutter will become ever more difficult with a new blog emerging every second. Daily posting deals with the clutter by adding more clutter.

— Who cares about traffic? Only the ones who have (Google-)ads going? Participating in a community is important, but not because it generates traffic. (Want traffic? Write a bot that visits). But the next sentence is really troubling, it actually states that the idea is that the ideal is that we should go through the whole blogosphere every day… As if there is one blogosphere where everybody talks about the same subjects, a blogosphere that one can keep an eye on, in its whole. That idea is wrong. At least since Bacon and Locke discovered that there were more books around than they could ever read in a whole lifetime, it has been impossible to keep track of everything going on. The fact that the amount of postings doubles in size every 6 months is meaningless in this respect. One can only follow a fracture of it — indeed a few “communities”-of-interests that one participates in. “Daily posting deals with the clutter by adding more clutter” is exactly what blogging is about, and has always been about. Is that a paradox? It is what writes have always done. Bacon and Locke dealt with “information overload” by adding to it: making summaries, indexes, their own notes and commentaries.

Although this strategy made sense 12 months ago and still makes sense for the top bloggers, its effectiveness diminishes with every new blog created. Traffic is generated by successful bloggers linking to you either in their posts or in their blogroll. Mack at Viral Garden has a series of great posts on the importance of joining the community.

— Again: who cares about traffic? 99,9% of bloggers will never receive links from the top-bloggers (who are not characteristic of blogging at all, I think). Blogging goes on, and blooms in the realm of 1 to 30 visitors a day.

#2 – Traffic is irrelevant to your blog’s success anyway– Unless you specifically target bloggers like Bruce, are a blogging consultant or blog about your latest book, traffic is irrelevant to you. What matters most is whether you are reaching your target audience (which may be narrow and focused), not necessarily how many people read your posts. Engaging with the audience you want to have a relationship with is a much smarter strategy than posting frequently.

— Ah, now we’re talking. “Traffic is irrelevant. Engage with your audience!” True. Better still would be “Traffic is irrelevant. Write about what you are passionate. Don’t think about an audience.” Actually that’s already what Rebecca Blood advised years ago.

#3- Loyal readers coming back daily to check your posts is so Web 1.0 – As the blogosphere matures, the number of new readers and bloggers will decrease and loyal readers are going to matter more. I have heard many bloggers tell me that they will lose reader loyalty if these readers come back daily and do not see any new posts. This perception is still very strong although irrelevant. Loyal readers subscribe to your blog via RSS feeds and have new content pushed to them. They will remain loyal because they have subscribed, not because you post frequently.

— Now it starts to be interesting. Loyal readers subscribe through RSS. (Is that true? I subscribe to over a hundred feeds, yet prefer to visit the blogs themselves. Going through feeds is what I do when I’m offline). Actually the whole idea of loyal readers is I think much more “under threat” because most internet-users will find a blog thanks to a Google-search, and then migth explore that particular niche by clicking a few links (for instance from the linkslist or blogroll of that blog.) Or they might — technorati-style — follow a certain subject (technically a ‘tag’), being fed with bits and pieces from different blogs that are ‘tagged’ as that subject. In that way people read much more through different blogs than follow the blogs they are loyal to.

#4 – Frequent posting is actually starting to have a negative impact on loyalty: Seth Godin (a frequent blogger) has a very interesting theory.According to him, RSS fatigue is already setting in. With too many posts, you run the risk of losing loyal readers, overwhelmed by the clutter you generate. Readers will start to tune off if your blog takes up too much of their time.

— Well, what is the problem there? The only rule is: write what you are passionate about even if that means putting up enormous amounts of texts daily. If your text is a good one, you will be read, maybe not today or tomorrow, but in a few weeks time, or even later on. Is there a problem with newspapers, thousands daily writing about sometimes the exact same subjects? (A good style of writing is often one that uses words economically, that is true, and something else).

#5: Frequent posting keeps key senior executives and thought leaders out of the blogosphere – My colleagues and industry peers cite bandwidth constraints as the number one reason for not blogging. They are absolutely right: frequent posting is not very compatible with a high pressure job. As an example, not one single blog is authored by a senior corporate marketing blogger in the top 25 marketing blogs listed by Mack. Not only does the blogosphere lose valuable thought leadership, it runs the risk of being overlooked by these very same marketers.

— Ha ha. Those marketeers, concerned about the senior executives and ‘thought leaders’ –, the thought leaders are publishing on the web. (Okay, this text is about corporate blogging). And yes, blogging is time consuming. Did anyone ever say something else? Did anyone ever say that everyone should blog? Of course the senior executives are not blogging. Of course we hardly have fulltime nurses blogging. Is that a problem? Is it a problem that senior executives are not writing novels, shooting movies, uploading their favorite recipes?

A recent study by Forrester found a reluctance among marketers to shift from more tried-and-true online channels like search and e-mail marketing. Just 13 percent reported using blogs or social networks in marketing, and 49 percent said they had no plans to do so in the next year. If the blogosphere wants to become more mainstream (vs. being the latest hype), frequent posting and required bandwidth are undoubtedly a major barrier to adoption.

— Good. The less marketeers use the blogosphere, the better; also blogging might be exactly the opposite of marketing. But this sentence is troublesome: ” If the blogosphere wants to become more mainstream (vs. being the latest hype)”. Hmm, if almost everybody is blogging — 75 year old retired managers, 15 year olds from the MySpace-generation, and everybody in between — how to become, well, more ‘mainstream’ than that? The problem is here: blogging (and the internet in general) has shown that there is exactly no reason whatsoever to know who Madonna is, it has shown that ‘mainstream’ is an invention of mass-media — or at least a mass-media-phenomenon.

#6: Frequent posting drives poor content quality – The pressure of daily posting drives many bloggers to re-purpose other bloggers’ content or give quick un-insightful comments on the news. Few bloggers have enough time (or expertise) to write daily thought leadership pieces, thus adding to the clutter. Ben at the Church of the Customer Blog explores the 1% rule and cites the Wikipedia example: 25 million readers visit Wikipedia every month, but the number of people who actually contribute content to Wikipedia is about 1-2 percent of total site visitors. I would argue that the same is valid for the blogosphere as a whole where most of the original high value content is driven by 1% of the bloggers. Some of the most insightful –and most quoted- marketing thought blogging leaders are actually infrequent posters, from Sam Decker to Charlene Li or Randi Baseler.

— Good. Point taken. I think this is largely true as long as bloggers think they have to write about ‘what goes on in the media’. But the 1% original content sounds too pessimistic. It does not take into account that a lot of blogging exactly consists — not of putting up ‘original content’ — but in constructing a distributed conversation on a certain subject. Bloggers who ‘live’ in the same niche, react to each other. That is blogging. What is original content anyway?

#7: Frequent posting threatens the credibility of the blogosphere – as many bloggers re-purpose existing content under the pressure of daily posting, they do not take the time to do any sort of due diligence and conduct effective research. Errors snowball in the blogosphere as they spread from one blogger to the other. The collective wisdom of user generated content was supposed to provide an alternative to biased traditional media content – it is instead echoing the thoughts and biases of a few.

— Blogging is not journalism. Yet I agree that, if one takes blogging seriously, one should try to check sources, give the right references, et cetera. But I know I do not always do that. It’s the ‘freedom’ of blogging — in opposition to journalism — to be inexact, and say “it is inexact, sorry, but that’s how I felt”. An important part of our media literacy should be our competence of checking sources, being able to ascertain the credibility of a text.

#8 – Frequent posting will push corporate bloggers into the hands of PR agencies – As they struggle with bandwidth constraints as well as peer pressure to join the blogosphere, more and more companies will resort to partnering with their PR agencies to create blogs. The blogosphere will in turn lose some of its effectiveness and value.

— Yes. I think that is true. But do I care? I do not read those blogs. They hardly exist in my world. Btw: PR and blogging are very closely connected, at least in the Netherlands, and at least ever since financial minister Gerrit Zalm started a blog. Again: we readers should be able to tell what the interests are that are represented by a certain blog.

#9 – Frequent posting creates the equivalent of a blogging landfill – According to Technorati, only 55% of bloggers post after 3 months of existence. The pressure of the first months to write frequently certainly contributes to people abandoning their blogs. Is that in the blogosphere’s best interest to have a third of its participants frustrated by their initial efforts?

— Does the blogosphere care? Again I do not see what the problem is. A third of the people who start a blog find out that it is quite an effort to blog. It is not everybodies idea of a pasttime, apparently not everybodies idea of a way of dealing with the sheer amount of interesting stuff available. I agree that nobody should say that one should blog every day. (Whoever said that to begin with?)

#10 – I love my family too much – Ann pointed out to me this cool blog that highlights the challenges of blogging addiction – Bloggers Anonymous. Very funny…..

If you want to be a top 50 Technorati blogger, you will most probably still need to post several times a day. But for the rest of us, we should think seriously about the added value of frequent blogging. Actually, according to Technorati, only 11% of all blogs update weekly or more. What will matter more and more is what you write and how you engage, not how often you write.

— If you want to become a top 50 Technorati-blogger you are either ultra-american (culturally speaking) or you have a very strange idea of the world. It is as if you take up cycling as a pasttime with the ambition to win the Tour of France. So I agree whole-hearted with “What will matter more and more is what you write and how you engage, not how often you write”. But I think it has never been different.

As the blogosphere matures, the measure of success will shift from traffic to reader loyalty. As Seth Godin says in his post, “blogging with restraint, selectivity, cogency and brevity (okay, that’s a long way of saying “making every word count”) will use attention more efficiently and ought to win.” As for me, I will continue to post only when I have something to say.

— Well, I on the contrary sometimes blabber on. Also because I never know what will turn out the be important… not beforehand.

Since I try to read as much as I can — in a way that it sometimes feels as if my brains are not reading but just parsing the text — I often wonder what exactly makes me read, makes me read on, and remember.

I know what makes me pick up a book like Jared Diamond’s Collapse (about how civilizations collapse): wanting to know what is inside such a pop-science bestseller plus the fact that he writes extensively about the Viking settlements in Greenland and Iceland (an interest of mine ever since I read the Icelandic sagas). It’s a fat book. Even before picking up I know I will never read it completely. Starting to read it on the train to Maastricht I find out quickly that it is a book which lends itself very well to speed-reading: lots of anecdotes, digressions, personal bits, life stories, plus always these clear statements about what is to follow, or summaries and conclusions concerning what one has just read (well, or missed). It is the sort of book that one can skim through and still get the main message. Or so it seems — I am speed-reading. However gripping and accessible, such books leave me with an empty feeling. Speed reading always leaves one with an empty feeling, reading more closely will turn out to be tedious, too much repeating, too much what one already knows… Not condensed enough. (Btw: the books seems to be very well researched — and I guess it is a good book. It’s not one of those middle-of-the-road-quick-pay-off popscience books one sees for sale at airports).

Another example: I picked-up Simon Reynolds acclaimed history of post-punk Rip it Up and Start Again. Reynolds is a very, very good music journalist, and a good writer: http://blissout.blogspot.com/. I loved reading his earlier Energy Flash about the rave/dance-culture, (even though (or thanks to?) the fact that he reads the music completely through the lens of drug-use).

Post-punk was very much ‘in the air’ when I started listening to music, (Reynolds is three years my senior), but where for Reynolds this brings back excitement, I am time and time again confirmed in my dislike for this era. I listened to for instance Cabaret Voltaire, Pere Ubu, The Fall, Joy Division, Clock DVA, but I never really liked the music. (I mean, the tape-composers, or home-composers as they were called then, presented by Willem De Ridder on Dutch radio around the same time as Radionome and Spleen were presenting postpunk-bands, were much more important to me). I owned (well: own) copies of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, The Catherine Wheel, and Bowies Low and Heroes, but I never return to those. To be more exact: where I probably share some of the attitudes towards music of postpunk, I do not really like the music produced. Rip Rig & Panic might be the band that comes closest to my ‘taste’, but after 3 or 4 songs, I have had enough — on the other hand I can listen to the Minutemen, Firehose or even (early) The Jam over and over again.

So, reading through the first chapters of Reynolds postpunk-history I am confronted with a growing boredom. And no, I do not have any feelings for the British myth of popmusic. Boredom: please do not make me remember The Human League, not the early industrial bands. Skip, page after page, only reading the last page and a half of chapters. What a rotten book. Until Reynolds arrives at No Wave, New York style. Reynolds doens’t change writing style, but at once I’m full of attention…

Good writing is not enough — one needs an ‘interest’. Whatever that is, or where it comes from…

Now that I’ve finished reading Richard Powers The Echo Maker, I go through a few reviews. It was definitely ‘a good read’ — with all the good but also a few of the ‘bad’ connotations of ‘a good read’. Upon finishing the novel I had the feeling it was not as strong as Gain (my favorite Powers) or In Our Time of Singing (the one that moved me most); feeling it’s maybe too much of a good read, too sympathetic toward one’s warm feelings… Call me cynical. For instance, I think the ecological theme could’ve been treated in a stronger, more problematic, and harsher way. But, having finished it a few days ago, I still think about it…

Slate has a good review, by Stephen Burt, that had me nodding ‘yes’ upon reading this paragraph: “Powers’ insistence that we make one another up, that our personalities coalesce from clouds of floating information, practically requires reviewers to call him “Postmodern”; some would link him to Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, even William Gibson. Yet Powers is less these Postmodernistas’ companion than he is their opposite: warm where they are cold, lyrical where they are clinical or satirical, most involved where they would be most distant. Powers wants to know not how and why we fall apart, amid paranoid systems, but how (with the help of the arts and the sciences) we might put one another together. His subject is not collapse but convalescence, and so reading Powers feels less like reading (say) Gravity’s Rainbow than it feels like reading Middlemarch.” See: http://www.slate.com/id/2151095/.

There was a blog-roundtable about Echo Maker going at: http://www.edrants.com/?p=4579.

An oh, I hope I’ll get the new Pynchon immediately… I understand the review copies will arrive on the desk of reviewers this week. I wish I was among them…

Went to the Concertgebouw on saturday afternoon to hear the new composition … ci tace of the Dutch composer Eric Verbugt. I hadn’t been to the Concertgebouw since ages, I actually said to F. — who joined me — that it was probably 20 years ago since I’d been there, which is I think exaggerated, but still. I’m used to go to all kind of small places to hear new music — and now a full Concertgebouw. Quite a difference. Also for my ears: used to listen to electro-acoustic music in small places (no not loud), my own band in a rehearsal space (often too loud), or to mp3s coming from bad headphones or tiny computerloudspeakers, I now heard the music acoustic, from a distance, but with lots more coloring.

Well, it was certainly worth the price, since it turned out to be probably the longest programme of the year, almost 4 hours of music. 2 pieces for choir by Ligeti, Kindertotenlieder by Mahler, then 3/4 hours of Eric’s piece, followed by a new composition by Klaas de Vries and, to finish off, a bit of Stravinsky. The reviews today all touched upon the enormous lenght of this matinee. All works with an important role for text.

This was the programme: http://www.concertgebouw.nl/cgb/live/ConcertInfo.jsp?concert_id=13423.

I realized again why I much rather go to hear music performed live than buy a cd (euh, I mean download mp3s at Rapidshare): it is so great to hear how music is always ‘in the making’, that you can hear the process, the creation, the moulding of the clay, the material. even when it’s already composed — you hear that the composing was a ‘doing’.

Even when I would not have known Eric Verbugt personally, still his piece — for orchestra (of to be more precise 2 large ensembles), voice, oboe and choir — would’ve been my favorite. His way of writing totally comes from the classic tradition — a tradition of pushing the boundaries — it is a progression of that tradition (say, from Mahler via Ligeti and Nono to Lachenmann — well, here my knowledge is not thorough enough), with the result that, to my ears, it sounds as ‘beauty’ as beauty should be, in music, however ‘harsh’ it my sound sometimes. The writing for the ensembles is maybe stronger than the solo-pieces — though the oboe-solo, totally written-out, is very very virtuoso, with glissandi, multiphonics etc. It is virtuoso in a way one normally only gets to hear in free improv or free jazz (and that even made me think of how afro-american composers who came out of free jazz wrote for large orchestra).

To my 20th & 21st ears Mahler sounded, well, very nice, but a bit bland in comparision. (I know, that’s unfair to Mahler). The Ligeti pieces were breathtaking — but that was no surprise. Strawinsky was a first timer for me, believe it or not, I’d never heard any of his 12-tone pieces. The new composition by Klaas de Vries was nice but sounded a bit outdated due to the fairly simple, or even primitive use of tape. Would’ve been so much better if he’d processed the sound of the choir as well…

Btw, how I met Eric Verbugt is a nice story. Years ago he was googling his favorite writers — Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Arno Schmidt, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow; and every time my homepage was amongst the results. So he sent me an e-mail….

Eric Verbugt: http://www.ericverbugt.nl/.