There was no chance for live blogging at the SLSA-conference.

Here’s what I typed at some point: “No, no live blogging, and how I miss being able to quickly check something online, find a reference, an answer to a question, the name of an author mentioned, while listening to a presentation. How I miss multitasking, just reading some blogs while listening. How I miss it, to write down my notes in a disciplined way, and upload, while listening: my mind will not wander that much. But there is no airport here, not for me. And a marked difference between new media conferences and the academic world is that almost nobody here is using a laptop during sessions, which make me think I am not playing by the rules here when I have my laptop open and start typing.”

Ik beweer nogal ‘ns dat het literair debat gemigreerd is naar het internet. En dat zulks er — hee logisch eigenlijk — toe leidt dat de literaire tijdschriften (die op papier) aan belang winnen: de bloggers verwijzen ernaar, ik lees met ze mee (en ik ben niet de enige).

Vergeet de kranten, vergeet de publiciteitsmachines. Is het kenmerkend dat een reactie van Maarten Doorman op Vaessens inmiddels beruchte NRC-artikel (21 januari 2006 — diens inauguratierede was het toch?) in de krant werd afgedrukt, maar dat diezelfde reactie op het internet (in een comment-thread van de Contrabas) niet echt de meest intelligente was? Is het kenmerkend dat Bas Heijne — die de held van serieuze krantenlezers schijnt te zijn — zich pas vorige week naar aanleiding van Friedmans The World is Flat lijkt te realiseren dat er iets aan het veranderen is (ik moest zn column twee keer lezen, omdat ik niet geloofde dat hij werkelijk nog in een wereld leeft waarin drukwerk het bastion is dat zich verzet tegen de vervlakking van tevee en internet (?). Ik denk dan, man, kijk hoe RSS, Technorati, aggregatie, “web 2.0” de distributie van kwalitatieve inhoud veranderen…).

Hoe dan ook, voor ik echt begin te kletsen…

Goed voorbeeld van hoe de discussie zich over blogs verspreid, waarbij de nieuwe Yang en het nieuwe boek van Vaessens referentiepunten zijn.

Vriezen over ritme (ref. Mettes en Yang): http://blogger.xs4all.nl/sqv/archive/2006/06/08.aspx
Mettes over Vriezen: http://n30.nl/2006/06/2-of-3-dingen.html; ook nog Vaessens.
De Contrabas over Vaessens Ongerijmd succes: http://decontrabas.typepad.com/de_contrabas/2006/06/thomas_vaessens.html.

En ja, mijn opmerking: in de comments op de Contrabas vind je nog steeds de nodige goedgehumeurde pesterijtjes — maar Chretien Breukers hoeft allang niet meer te zitten uitdagen en trollen, en doet dat ook veel minder. Daardoor is de kwaliteit enorm gestegen, vergeleken bij een jaar terug. En de Contrabassers zijn — gelukkig — niet blind voor wat afwijkt van hun idee van poezie. Alleen zo nu en dan komt er nog wat flauwigheid voorbij. Maar goedgehumeurde flauwigheid kan ik wel hebben, netzoals oprecht gemeend theoretiseren dat uit de bocht vliegt of de voeten niet op de grond krijgt (wat wel eens gebeurt bij Jeroen Mettes).

En, nee, ik heb Vaessens nog niet gelezen, en nee, ik denk niet in termen van avant-garde wanneer het gaat om de transformatie van literatuur in tijden van internet. Het heeft heel weinig tot niks met avant-garde te maken. (Wat niet wegneemt dat er wel avant-garde-eilandjes zijn).

Hoe dan ook (2), het is fascinerend op zich dat een marginale left-wing (left-wing of the avantgarde, zo ver weg van het centrum) dichter in de VS is uitgegroeid tot zo’n beetje de meest gelinkte poezie-blogger/criticus van de wereld (Ron Silliman). (En terecht, als je het mij vraagt).

Hoe dan ook (3) — waarom schrijf ik niet in de comments op Samuels blog, of bij De Contrabas, of bij Jeroen Mettes (die ik niet persoonlijk ken)… Omdat ik hier mijn eigen podiummetje heb?

Hoe dan ook (4) — ik moet over mp3-blogs schrijven (deadline nadert), niet over poezieblogs.

Next weekend = Jan van Eyck Book Weekend. With a.o. a Tomorrow Book Projects Workshop; Stuart Bailey’s Manifesta print-on-demand shop, Gerhard Rühm (really!!), lots of Fluxus and Concrete Poetry books on display, and more;

and then of course, on sunday, 15.00 hrs. the presentation of Ubiscribe PoD 0.9.0, the publication we (Jouke, Sandra, Claudia, Inga & me) have been working on in the past 2 weeks — starting with putting content (text, images) into our wiki, ending, temporarily, with a paper publication. (In the wiki one can find already new stuff added). I just send some last corrections to Jouke. Tomorrow morning the pdf will be at the printers. Launch & learn is the term we’ve devised for this kind of ultra-quick production. It’s like learning to understand again/anew what editing is, what ‘editorial labor’ entails.

Programme for 20/21th May: http://www.janvaneyck.nl/0_2_3_events_info/arc_06_bookish_weekend.html.

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.

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’.

First spent time revisiting blog-theory anno 2002 (like Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook: http://www.rebeccablood.net/handbook/). I made some notes on yellow post-its.

Then went through folders on my harddisk in which I have stored webpages and pdfs ‘to read’; re-ordered the contents (I now have 4 different research folders), deleted some, printed the papers I really want/have to read this week.

After that I made an old-fashioned links-page, and visited (quickly) about 100 (?), 200 (?) blogs to see if I want to include them on this page (for further reference, to remember). I worked through VoodooPad-documents in which I had saved links, went though the linkslist of my ‘old’ blog, followed links on blogs that I was happy to revisit or rediscover, and, most importantly, used my own memory. I still have to go through the bookmark-files of both Firefox and Safari — I only bookmarks when I’m too lazy to do more than hit ‘command-D’ (so the bookmark-lists tends to be long and totally unorganized).

Will this compulsion to order lead anywhere?

I never really go to use delicious/ariealt. Although I do use the delicious-accounts of others, often to good result. What one uses or not, has a lot to do with, well, preferences. (What you like, what you’re good at, what fits your use if time and working methodology, how important design is, how important good writing, etc.).

I also don’t use RSS. (My blog does RSS though, and I know some people appreciate that). I used RSS for a while when I spent much time on trains. Before catching a train I would boot my RSS-reader, let the feeds stream onto my harddisk, to browse through on the train. RSS was / is a way to have online content when there’s no connection. (I hated blogs that only put a headline plus a lead in the RSS, or worse, only a headline). What I miss in RSS is the personality of the design, the typography, all that (subtle? — hopefully) visual stuff that adds to the ‘voice’ of the site.

Wrt design: there is a strange attraction to making all texts look the same: have it shown in the stylesheet / template of your choice. (But basically RSS-readers and services like Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) do not really look attractive).

I am put-off by really bad design. (That’s what I learned from visiting 100 blogs tonight, and quickly closing those which looked really ugly). But I’m not put off by generic Blogger/Wordpress/MoveableType-templates, as long as they are (a bit) clear.

Links-page and notes to come…

Here’s some of what I printed to read:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/.

3 hours in a train (Maastricht – Amsterdam + delay) gave me the opportunity to — finally — work through the passages in Flusser’s writing that I had indicated by sticking a small yellow post-it on pages. So that’s why there are so many Flusser-posts all of a sudden.

I wonder if i should go about this in another way — like putting the quotations in ‘pages’ instead of making them part of the blog. (And keeping the blog really as a more or less daily record of what I’m up to…)

Probably the right answer to this, from the perspective of ‘how-to-make-a-well-edited-blog’, is “yes, if you dump so much stuff at once, use ‘write page’, not ‘write post’.” (Although, technically speaking there’s no difference between pages and posts).