Eigenlijk stond een zware dag eindredactie op het programma. Maar Jouke was nog niet klaar met de vormgeving (de ubiscribe-publicatie wordt een ubi-pil), dus besloot ik in de middag eindelijk mn kans te gaan: een rondje naar de Baraque Michel moest kunnen. Vreemd weer: warm, erg warm, soms benauwd, dan weer een verfissende wind; wolkenvorming & een voorspelling van buien en onweer. Boven Spa zag ik donkere wolken, maar op de Hoge Venen scheen onverwacht de zon. Het was er kurkdroog — ben ik er ooit geweest dat het er niet regende? If so, dan was het vandaag voor het eerst. 14.00 – 20.00. Eerst oostenwind, later zuidwestelijk.

Kanne – Lanaye – Moelingen – ‘s Gravensvoeren – Warsage – Mortroux – Val Dieu – Froidthier – Clermont – Bilstain – Limbourg – de klassieke route dus – Goe – Hevremont – Jalhay – Mont Rigi – omgekeerd – ri. Limbourg – ra. ri Hembach – fietsrouteknooppunt 38 – 39 – 35 – Membach – Baelen – Heggen – Welkenraedt – Lontzen – Montzen – Hombourg – Teuven – De Plank – St. Martensvoeren – ‘s Gravensvoeren – Moelingen – Lixhe – Lanaye – Kanne

(En ja, tijd voor nieuwe scans).

3 out of these 4 function as a summary…

“The categories of modality are not founded on the subject, as Kant maintains, nor are they derived from it; rather, the subject is what is at stake in the processes in which they interact.” p. 147

“The modern meaning of the term “author” appears relatively late. In Latin, auctor originally designates the person who intervenes in the case of a minor (…) in order to grant him the valid title that he requires.” p. 148

“To make die and to let live summarizes the procedure of old sovereign power, which exerts itself above all as the right to kill; to make live and to let die is, instead the insignia of biopower, which has as its primary objective to transform the care of life and the biological as such into the concern of State power. In the light of the preceding reflections, a third formula can be said to insinuate itself between the other tow, a formula that defines the most specific trait of twentieth-century biopolitics: not longer either to make die or to make live but to make survive. The decisive activity of biopower in our time consists in the production not of life or death, but rather of a mutable and virtually infinite survival.” p. 155

“Biopower’s supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoe and bios, the inhuman and the human — survival.” p. 156

Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, The Witness and the Archive, Homo Sacer III, Zone Books, NY, 2002.

Na een paar dagen in Amsterdam, en een familie-weekendje op de Holterberg ‘s ochtends terug naar Maastricht. Zomerdagen en niet een keer gefietst. ‘s Middags stap ik, moe, toch op de fiets voor een rondje. Op tevee zie ik dat het in Wallonie pijpestelen regent — het Giropeleton rijdt door vies weer. In Kanne is het nog mooi, maar de donkere wolken hangen in de verte. Daarom keer ik bij Haccourt al om. Toch blijft het droog.

Kanne – St. Pierre – Halembaye – Haccourt – kanaal – Kanne

When I found the blog, approximately 3 months ago, I thought, probably for the first time in my life on the internet: “I’m not going to tell anyone. This will go down when too many people know. This cannot last long.” It lasted longer than expected.

I had often thought about converting my collection of jazz and improvised music to mp3. My collection consists mainly out of (about 700) audio cassettes and around 100 LPs. I did convert a few tapes, then decided it really took too much time.

This blog made it possible to collect in one go all the hard-bop and free jazz as mp3s, that I own on cassette or LP. All the Coltrane’s, Ornette’s, Cecil Taylor’s that I know by heart, and yes, also the ones I’d never heard.

The blog operated on the brink, I’d say. There was no reason to doubt the good intentions of the six posters. They uploaded vinyl-rips of long out of print LPs, music that was never released on CD. They made hard to get CDs available. They uploaded everything ever recorded by Andrew Hill, to share the love for the music. I enjoyed it, downloaded as long as it lasted, was surprised again and again that most uploaded files were downloaded only like 40 times over a period of a few weeks. Only once in a while I encountered a file that was downloaded 300 times (that would be a Miles Davis, or mainstream bop). Sometimes I downloaded a file that had not even been downloaded by someone else (that would be European free jazz). But, they did upload really a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot: like basically everything of John Coltrane (I think I only did not see Expression and, funny enough, Live at Birdland).

The blog made me greedy. I put myself in the absurd position of downloading music and not listening to it. Saving for later. Knowing that audio cassettes last longer than harddisks. Knowing that the sound quality of most of my audio cassettes is superior to that of the mp3 files. It goes without saying that — also since I already ‘owned’ much of this music — there’s no chance that I would ever buy one of the CDs. It’s partly hoarding, partly downloading out of curiosity, to listen to once, maybe twice. Anyway, I already wrote about this issue in Metropolis M: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ariealt/luisteren.html.

And then, two days ago, the blog went down. “The trolls found it”. Someone complained. The blog was hijacked, files deleted. Exactly what was bound to happen. What they knew was going to happen.

I have to give a talk on mp3-blogs on the SLSA conference in Amsterdam in june. So I think I will come back to this ‘case’.

And indeed, I will not tell where it continues. Not where the bots are listening too.

So the spammers have found this blog. This weekend I received 200 spam-messages in the comments. To keep the stresslevels of both me and the server low, Peet turned on the well-known little application that checks if you’re human and are able to read in a humanly way when leaving a comment. I’m sorry I have to do that.

Is it a coincidence that the spam began immediately after I blogged Blogonomics, and linked web-log.nl? I don’t think so. In a lot of senses it so predictable. (So bloggers using blogsoftware who until now did not have to fight comment-spam: do not link to commercial stuff…).

And yes, the comment-spam is in some way intelligent. It understand that I also use Dutch (if I remember well there was a bit of Dutch in the spam). It understands that I blog “intellectual” stuff (“Man your blog is so cognitive”). But I can spot the spam: URLs ending with .pl cannot be trusted without thinking twice. Sorry Poland.

The fight against spam can only be seen in terms of war.

How can blogs primarily be seen and conceptualized as conversations, when the comments-functionality is always on the brink of being destroyed by spammers? (When leaving a comment I prefer not to type over a few dancing letters or numbers; when managing my blog I prefer not to have to spend minutes or more on fighting spam).

And, now that we’re on this topic: at the moment I do have quite a problem with spam. It seems that some people do not receive my mail when it’s send from my normal mail-adress (that I have been using since 1997). Very annoying. (So: if you have send me mail and did not receive a reply, it is possible that I did write a reply that ended up in the spambox of your mail).

This happened to me as well when organizing Sonic Acts: every day I had to wade through the spambox to find the mails of Kim Cascone and Greg Kurcewicz.

Yesterday I read through my own blog: intuitive datamining for a small Ubiscribe-publication: http://www.ubiscribe.net.

‘Intuitive datamining’: clicking through the archive, quickly scanning the entries with a human brain, then remembering what I’d been writing about, subsequently finding a few bits that might be interesting to re-publish in a small print-on-demand publication.

We — the (a?) Ubiscribe-team consisting of Jouke Kleerebezem, Sandra ‘Fokky’ Fauconnier, Inga Zimprich, Claudia Hardi and myself — are filling a wiki with ‘stuff” (text, pictures), to be ‘back-upped’ on paper as version 0.9. Publication-on-paper to be presented on 21th of May, at the Jan van Eyck. For all of us the process as a whole (gathering – writing – uploading – tagging – editting – commenting – designing – ‘outputting’ on paper) is a new experience. Though any of us know part of the process, but not the same parts.

Research what publishing is, by publishing.

20.00 – 21.30 Prachtig weer & warm. Avondrondje voor t donker. Kanne – St. Pierre – Halembaye – Froidmont – Heure L’ Romaine – Rue Fragnay – Houtain St. Simeon – Bassenge – Moulin Broukay – Eben Emael – Kanne

En soms heb je gewoon zin om te rijden, al is het koud en al worden er buien verwacht. De zon scheen boven verwachting bijna de hele middag — na een vroege ochtend met regen. 16.30 – 19.30, veel zon, vrij koud (graad of 10?). Kreeg tussen St. André en Moelingen inderdaad een flinke, trouwens erg koude, bui op mn kop. Verderop scheen de zon, mijn fiets zat toch al onder de modder, en gegeven zulke omstandigheden vind ik een flinke bui eigenlijk niet zo erg, hmm, ook wel lekker… Mooie route, nu eens wat klimmetjes opgezocht en op goed geluk wat weggetjes ingeslagen. Kanne – Eben Emael – Halembaye – Haccourt – Froidmont – Heure le Romain – Rue Fragnay – Hermée – Oupeye – Hermalle sous Argenteau – Sarolay – ri. Housse – ri. Wandre – Barchon – Heuseux – Bolland – ri. Blegny – bijna bij de top ra. – daarna weer ra. – la. – ra. mooie kleine weg in – Saint – Andre – Mortroux – Bombaye – Warsage – ‘s Gravensvoeren – Moelingen – Lixhe – Lanaye – St. Pierre – Kanne

How American:

‘[Blogging]has given me the practice in performing imperfectly in public and moving forward unashamed. Updating my site daily has taught me self-discipline and given me reason to think deeply. I am a better writer.’ p. 29

Put it on a tile:

‘The happiness you derive from your weblog will depend on your interest, your ability to devote sufficient time to the project, and your commitment to keeping the rest of your life in balance.’ p. 35

Quotes from Rebecca Blood’s 2002 Weblog Handbook. I reread it earlier this week, and typed over these quotes. This sort of advise sounds ‘terribly American’ to most European ears; yet I cannot but agree. And she is still blogging (old-style): http://www.rebeccablood.net.

Well, do I really agree? I do agree with the second statement. I would like to believe that the first one is true as well, but I am not so sure that blogging functions a tool or a reason to learn to think deeply… I’d say one can find counter-examples.

But who cares? I spent part of this afternoon clicking and reading through the reports about how many weblogs there are now, worldwide and in the Netherlands, how many links they receive, how large their impact is on the MSM (to use the old blogosphere code for mainstream media). Yes, also I downloaded the pdf with the powerpoint-presentation of Paul Molenaar for Blogonomics 6, — via http://www.denieuwereporter.nl/?p=405 which contains the information that there are now about 600.000 bloggers in the Netherlands — of which 260.000 use web-log.nl, the horrible (imho) blogsoftware of Ilse (is it? I’m too lazy to even check). The powerpoint presentation is full of Fokke and Sukke cartoons.

Why am I so bored by this? Because it’s in the end only about numbers. Numbers which are important for old-world investers and advertisers.

3 loose, maybe stupid remarks, between brackets:
(1. Is that why the 260.000 of web-log.nl are mentioned?). (2. Probably anybody in the Netherlands doing a lot of surfing has stumbled many times on web-log.nl-blogs that turn out to not exist, the link exists, the blog doesn’t). (3. During Blogonomicsweb-log.nl is about blond models in tight T-shirts, as can be seen here: http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2006/04/exhausting_afte.html).

Another reason for my boredom is that in such reports and business-confernces like Blogonomics, (still) the old mass-media and journalism function as the main contexts. (Why count how many links blogs make to the old mass-media?) Of course there is still a big role for the ‘major players’ (like Guardian, BBC etc.). But you do not establish insight into that role by counting how often blogs refer to those major players. Oh well, or maybe it does.

(It sure isn’t accidental that after a week with lots of blogging about MySpace — at least I saw a few postings about MySpace, all refering to the same issues — both De Volkskrant and NRC have articles about MySpace. That’s not strange, that’s how journalism works).

The research of how stories travel through a network of interlinked sites — like the research done by Anjo Anjewierden http://anjo.blogs.com/metis/, is lots more interesting (again, immnsho).

Also much more interesting is Geert Lovink’s proposal (I know, I’m late to link…): http://www.networkcultures.org/geert/2006/03/24/blogging-the-nihilist-impulse/. He writes: “Blogs bring on decay. Each new blog adds to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century. What’s declining is the Belief in the Message.” I might be less nihilisticly-inclined than Geert. I’d like to stress the ‘constructing of a ‘new’ culture’ (which is not utopian, but a big mess….) instead of focussing on how that dismantles the old — but that might, in the end, be mostly a difference in rhetoric and style…

Trying to get into the top 100 of Technorati is subscribing to the logic of mass media. (And indeed, it’s missing the point about publishing online).

I’m beginning to ramble. Can’t make it cohere. (As Ez sez). It’s not really my field. I learned much more today from reading bits of the bookhistorian Roger Chartier. Amazon links to: Order of Books and Forms and Meaning. Discovered that by hitting ‘surprise me’ you can get many more pages to read ‘inside’.