http://throat-singing.blogspot.com/index.html is the (very nice) blog of Robert Beahrs – he writes about his travels around the world, researching throat singing. He visited the Jew’s Harp Festival, last summer & saw Koichi Makigami performing with Oorbeek. He calls is a “life changing performance of honest musical dialogue”.
Wow.
Writing takes time. Blogging takes time. My time is taken by packing, unpacking and moving stuff around. Boxes with books, boxes with papers, boxes with stuff. (The paper trail of one’s life). My time is taken by getting used to new things – I started working at V2_ last week. I will be moving house over the next few weeks. Blogging is not on my mind these days.
And then I’m part of the Offline – Online Publishing event at De Balie on the 19th of January: http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?articleid=92553&podiumid=media. With Alessandro Ludovico, Simon Worthington and Georg Schollhammer of resp. Neural:http://www.neural.it, Mute: http://www.metamute.org/ and Documenta 12 Magazines.
I will be speaking about Ubiscribe: http://www.ubiscribe.net, the POD we made, and about different time-regimes of editing. (Maybe I’ll use a different term in a weeks time – have to check on the exact significance of ‘regime’ in English, but for now the term is stuck in my mind.)
The days pass by quiet. A bit like the weather: quiet and grey. I am waiting more than anything else. Waiting to move. First back to Amsterdam. Then start a new job. Then move on to a new appartment in Amsterdam. In the meantime I am writing. (F. is also finishing work – so I’m not much of a spoiler of Xmas-festivities).
I am writing in a strange way, working on the same article now since 2 weeks? It’s a round-up of my research at the Jan van Eyck; the story is the one I’ve been telling in the public lectures earlier this month.
The framework was already there (in my head, in the powerpoints that I used in the lectures). I basically wrote everything down and added all the necessary or nice quotes and references. I could only get it ‘out’ by not being totally involved with the sentences that I typed out – by simulating that I was not wholly present while writing. Simply too much material. maybe afraid to finish? And although I consciously threw out quite a few subjects (like a comparision of blogging and notebooks, of blogs and commonplace books; and the whole public – private issue), I still ended up with over 20.000 words.
That was 4 days ago.
So it feels almost as if I’m trying to write a thesis.
I’m used to write texts of 1000 – 2000 words. Sometimes, sometimes I may write 4000 words.
I spent the past days making a first edit. Not working too hard – a few hours a day. Cleaning up, deleting doublures (there are still a lots – I tend to state everything five times in the same text), shifting whole paragraphs. Again doing that while feeling not totally involved.
The first edit is done. It still is 20.000 words long.
And I am afraid it still is too much of a simple description of the history, present and possible future of blogging – zooming in on issues of authorship and software – mostly software. (Well, I know what Latour says about descriptions, but I’m not so sure that my description fits his criteria…)
But, well, I hope I now have all the ‘material’ – to get fully involved with the ‘sentences’. I know I’ll be able to throw out at least 10.000 words.
I’ve put a pdf of my presentation at the RFID-workshop online, for download. In my talk I dealt with the development of blogging-software as an example of the co-development of software and uses/users, using both Latour and Andrew Liu’s ‘Discourse Network 2000’ as an inspiration. Showing how a genre is constituted both by needs of users/writers and by software that is developed in response to those needs. Well, this goes through stages — for instance at one point it is blogging software that actually defines the genre. Next stage — where we are now — is when blogposts can & are used and re-used in different contexts, aggregation/syndication, when one is blogging without ever looking at the back-end of the blogsoftware, or even ‘blogging’ automatically. (Et cetera — hope you catch my drift). I’m trying to formulate what this means for the concept of ‘publishing’.
This is also what I will be discussing next week in my lecture in Groningen (15.00, Radesingel 6, Frank Mohr Institute).
Anyway, the pdf is for download here: http://www.ariealt.net/mediamatic_rfid/.
The first half is the actual presentation I did, what follows is a recap, and it ends with a collection of reserve ‘sheets’ that cover issues that I expected Julian Bleecker to talk about (but that I wanted to have handy, in case someone would ask me about it).
Haven’t been blogging so much lately — at least not here. So I sort of feel that I have to update you (invisible readers) on my activities. Thing is that I’m feeling the pressure of the nearing end of my stay at the Jan van Eyck Academy. I’d like to leave here with 2 nice finished articles and, well, a some sort of ‘grouping’ of all the other stuff I’ve done/published here. (Like, for instance the bits & pieces on this blog, the many quotes I’ve gathered et cetera).
Now I am very very bad at organizing my own research, organizing my ‘findings’, thoughts, everything that comes before actually writing an article. If the preferred outcome is a text of say 1500 words, there’s no problem (I can do that relying on what’s in my head). If the outcome is a presentation, I have no problem at all: I’m not afraid to speaking in public and when speaking the words will roll out of my mouth. I have a scenario in my head, a rough form & direction and I can freely improvise around that. I love to do that.
(I’m afraid this is actually one of my weaknesses, since it enables me to do presentations without ever actually writing down my thoughts and theories beforehand, or for that matter, afterwards. Which means I’m left with, well, nothing definite & if I’m asked to come up with a paper afterwards I have a lot of work to do.) (Whoever cares for exact references in a talk?)
Well, so I have some very nice deadlines coming up:
Coming wednesday I’ll do a presentation at the Mediamatic RFID Workshop. I’m quite excited since Julian Bleecker will be speaking after me: http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-11944-en.html. (I hope my bio is updated, since it came out scrambled after a translation process — ah, yes, it’s updated). Also I’m looking forward to being in a more media/technology minded environment for a few days.
On wednesday 29th of November I will do a public lecture at the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen – that one will basically be an outline/summary of the research of the past year. It’s part of the series “Future’s Past: Re-Imagining Art & Media”: 15.00-17.00 Singelzaal, Radesingel 6, Groningen.
Well, and then there are the texts I’d like to write.
So, I decided to get organized. I gathered everything that I had saved in some form or another since january (webpages, quotes and remarks and sketches in rtf- and voodoopad-files, images, pdfs, print-outs, photocopies, and: the Ubiscribe POD plus this blog), sifted and put everything that I will use in one folder, all the text in one Voodoopad document. Partly this was procrastination, or it felt like it because it took much longer than I had expected. This time I made a point of registering the references; so I’m sort of halfway with a nice bibliography (still have to include some books). It is nice work. It feels like ‘working’. It’s clear what has to be done. (Unlike writing a text [as in: putting sentences in the right order]).
I also gathered all the screenshots (of using various blogging softwares for instance), organized them and made some that I was missing. Again: material to use.
I decided that I wanted to have handy the statistics – how many blogs there are (Sifry’s Technorati-statistics), what softwares are most used, et cetera. There are some good academic papers on that. I have, if I remember well now without looking at my Voodoopadfile, 4 different statistics of blogsoftware-use, and they vary so much that they render each other (almost) meaningless when compared. (And 3 of these researches are conducted in the proper scientific way, and in the same year). The researches do not say much about ‘blogging in general’,. They say something about blogging in the chosen sample, but what they state is quite general… Funny enough that makes my own simple not too proper scientific research (counting 204 blogs from my own environment) more significant. (?)
After looking at statistics for a while I again discovered that I am simply not so interested in those numbers. Although, yes, it is nice to note that many mp3-blogs use Blogger, and amongst philosphy and theory-blogs there is a rather large amount that use Typepad. And yes, it is interesting to look at things like average lenght of posts and frequency of linkage. But well, and then?
How much do the softwares actually differ — and are they used differently? (They do differ, but they also allow for identical use). I’m trying to come up with a bit a good writing there (using screenshots…), but I’m not sure it will lead somewhere….
So now I am preparing my presentation for wednesday – making use of all the organized material (well, sort of organized in any case). To my own surprise I began having fun with Powerpoint, the software I probably hate most. Using Powerpoint to organize my argument. Ough. (Usually I make HTML-sheets, but in this case I thought it would become too cumbersome. I have used Preview for presentations twice, and both times encountered computer problems during the talk (they had nothing to do with Preview, but still, I’m a bit superstitious in that respect). I do not have Keynote; I have Appleworks — but well, were’s the difference?) I know I should use OpenOffice. I probably will regret having a .ppt-file that is not easily reusable in another context, but well, I’m too far now… Actually, I have far too many sheets already and I am not finished with the argument yet…
The Guardian writes, in its editorial intro to the Web 2.0 special: “Everybody sitting at a computer screen, increasingly, wants everything to be all about them. This is our first glimpse of what people who grow up with the net will want from the net. One of the cleverest things about MySpace is the name.”
This has me wondering… On the one hand, all the ‘new’ tools are about sharing, collectiveness, communication. On the other hand, it always puts ourselves in the center.
Everybody sitting behind a computer screen is as egoistic as a writer?
Richard Lanham in 1974: “Prose written without joy can only be read in the same spirit. Given the average quality of American prose, speedreading it out of existence is probably the best thing. So we come to hate the word, and use it still more ineffectively.” From Style, an Anti-Textbook
It’s so nice sometimes to just make something, however simple it is, using old-skool html and some pictures.
This time I made screenshots of the different stages — or maybe different screens (rather than actions) — of writing & publishing a blog post. Respectively Blogger Beta, WordPress, Twoday.net and blogging from Flock.
No Typepad since I immediately erased my account after activating it and checking it out.
Big html-page here (may need refresh to have all the pictures load…): http://www.xs4all.nl/~ariealt/jve/2006_to_blog_small/to_blog.html.
Well, it won’t earn the prize for best design, and probably I should’ve resized the screenshots differently, but still, I like these kind of mosaics.
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.
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’….