Finally I redirected https://ariealt.net to this page. You still landed on my old blog until an hour ago. I made a page for the archives from 2002 till early 2006 and also finally wrote an about-page.

I deciced for now to put my ‘affiliations’ only on the about-page.

Still to add: friends & blogs I read…

Last week I made another attempt at structuring my information-gathering behavior. I’m not sure if it is necessary, but I feel it is necessary. Generally I am relying solely on my own memory, being helped a bit by my browser who supplies a full url when I start typing www.cy… or n…. or blo… I visit a few blogs, maybe am reminded of a few places by glancing at the links-lists. But that’s it. I think I’m missing too much and forgetting too many good places. For instance, I always feel helpless when I’m trying to remember where to go for political news, or political commentary.

What I am searching for is something that would come close to one’s daily, personalized newspaper + weekly magazine. Information on topics (and from commentators and reporters) that you’d like to keep in close touch with. You pick up on it during breakfast, and it might keep you occupied later on in the day when you feel like catching up some more.

(And no my dear newspaper-journalists, todays newspapers do not have that function anymore. Not for me. However much I like newspapers — and last week I enjoyed reading De Volkskrant and the NRC in the park. It happens too often that a whole newspaper only contains one or two articles that I want to read (and pay for). That is including the news and including the cultural reviews and the sportspage. And looking at the development of newspapers I am very pessimistic. Yes, there have been good innovations: the routing has become much better, as well as the lay-out. But the content is diminishing, and I don’t generally identify a lot with all the lifestyle-stuff. The choice of what belongs on the front page is mediocre (NRC) to ridiculous (De Volkskrant) — and then we’re talking quality newspapers. Okay, I can live with that, but then, there are not many commentators or ‘columnists’ that I like reading. (The attention given to the Jan Blokker affair — almost 80 years old he leaves the Volkskrant for the NRC — is equally ridiculous. Yes, it shows very well how newspapers are managed, but hell, please give someone else a chance after 35 years. I cannot remember that I’ve ever been struck by a piece written by Jan Blokker. The same applies to Hofland. By which I mean to say: I do not want to go back to the “good old times” of newspapers. The problem with the ‘Blokker-affair’ is that the whole decline of the quality newspaper is seen in terms of the “good old newspaper” versus “the new newspaper of the evil manager”. That’s not a very helpful perspective when we try to find ways to ensure “quality information” and “quality journalism”.)

Sorry for ranting.

Getting back to topic. There are several ‘tools’ (? or rather techniques, or strategies?) to accomodate this situation (the problem of daily information-gathering). These are some of them:

— bookmarks. (They are usefull as ‘earmarks’ in a book. For me not useful for structuring daily information gathering).

— social bookmarking. (Great for discovering good stuff and getting an idea of the importance of certain sources. Not useful for structuring daily information gathering).

— put your own blog in the centre: your linklist is the list of blogs/sites to check daily. (I know I probably should do this. I tried in the past. I hardly used it then. Maybe it’s different when I would integrate del.ico.us and some Technorati-stuff. Maybe it’s different now I use WordPress. Yet I also know I’m stubborn).

— an old-fashioned personal links-page. (I made that. The lists became too long. I sometimes use it, when I get stuck or think I’ forgetting sources of information. Mostly I find out I actually did not forget anything.)

— use RSS and an RSS-reader.

Well, that’s the attempt of last week. I picked up on NetNewsWire again. Cleaned up the list of subcriptions (and rediscovered some forgotten sites) and then spent some time revisting blogs, searching and subscribing to feeds. In fact RSS sounds like exactly the solution for my ‘problem’. Well, it’s not the first time for me to think that. I tried it before. It worked when I was spending unconnected time in trains, I spent much of that time reading through feeds. I was back to personal memory and clicking links as soon as I was connected.

So I’m trying again, because I hope for a bit more structure, and more general and political information, now I’m reading less and less newspapers. Disappointment: blogs that are central for you that do not do RSS. Newssites that do not have feeds.

Live is not perfect.

More Danah Boyd on privacy (I’ve been catching up on reading RSS-feeds): http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/privacy/.

How much of our “private” information do we voluntarily reveal online? When’s the moment that we actually do not care anymore? At what point does the public – private difference not apply anymore to how we live, give form to and structure our lives? Do (young?) people make a difference between a public and a private self; or rather between different public selves?

Just wondering.

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.