Topic: Posts

I wrote in “The Advertising Bubble” that one of the ways to more effectively monetize content and “do better on the Internet,” was to combine efforts with other content producers. The key thought here is that, people only have so much time, and cooperation can allow you and your fellow content producers to pool resources, readers' attention, and business strategies.

I’ve also thought of this post as the “just because Wordpress, can be installed in a handful of minutes doesn’t mean you should,” post. The tools (and skills) required to build websites are fast, easy, and non-technical (by now) so that anyone can have a blog, or a website, or (hell, with enough time/money) a full fledged social networking site to rival digg or facebook. Just because sites are easy to build, it doesn’t mean that we need to build new sites. Just because independence is possible, it’s not always called for.

There are a lot of readers on the Internet, but there are only so many hours in the day. And having a dynamic site with new content, is something that requires a lot of work. Lots of people can pull it off, but a lot of people (with really good things to say) can’t. This is sort of the dirty underbelly of the fact that the Internet (and open source) is a great democratizing force: because everyone speaks easily and freely, the challenge to being heard isn’t opportunity, it’s shear volume.

I talk with a lot of people about working with the Internet, about using the internet to promote and build various kinds of projects, about blagging, and about strategies for success. There are things that I can help people do better like having good designs, writing top heavy content (I’m bad at this), ideas for more content, strategies for posting regularly, places to network with the communities that you hope to speak to, and among other tactics. All of these things should help lead to success; but beyond persistence, creativity, good timing, and a little entropy I have no good way of beating the “volume problem,” given current conventions.

The solution of encouraging group blogs rather that individual blogs is a good start. Each bloggers' responsibility to any given site is much lower than a single blogger’s responsibility to their personal site. There would be fewer (new) blogs as a result of the increase in collaboration, and possibly a consolidation of existing blogs. We would also expect to see blogs more tightly focused on niches rather than individuals: niche focuses tend to do really well on the web with regards to targeting audiences, so this is a good thing indeed.

Before anyone cries that I’m trying to suppress individuality (or expression, or identity), this is very much not the case. I think static websites are really important, my suggestion isn’t that people shouldn’t have websites it’s that they shouldn’t blog on them (by default). Given the state of syndication and aggregation content, it’s even possible for folks to have personal websites that aggregate their content from a number of different sources,¹ we get individuality and dynamic content without dividing efforts or audiences.

There are other solutions (curation springs instantly to mind) to the “volume problem,” and I’ll get to those soon. In the mean time, remember: group blogs are the future.

Onward and Outward!

I read something a few weeks ago (the problem with being slow to process things from blogs that post regularly), about digital ebook readers and the future of digital books.

I guess my thoughts are best summed up in a couple of points, basically that electronic texts will succeed as they: develop unique and presentation methods (hardware and software), and as the commerce/distribution models become more transparent.

1. Words on screens don’t work like words on paper. They just don’t, and we need to develop new ways of reading/writing that engage the medium better. We got prose out of the transition to bound-books, novels out of printing press (loosely;) the success of ebooks, I think will require some sort of new way of writing/reading/interacting with text, and no ebook implementation has gone there.

2. The potential for profit of digital goods is immense: distribution/production costs are much lower than their material counterparts, because printing, delivery, etc. aren’t factors for digital things. There is, however, value and work that goes into publishing texts, and we need some way of supporting creators. I’m not sure that the existing publishing/content industry’s models make a good example to follow, and “micropayments” (the stock alternate response) don’t seem to really work. I tend to think that fellowships funded by a subscription model/tax on connectivity is more the way to go. But that’s me.

At the risk of sounding vague (or overly polite) I had the chance to read/hear a few writers describe the mechanics of their work recently. To clarify, by writers I mean “fiction writers,” and by mechanics, I mean how the story happens (character, plot, narrative, conflict, development) rather than things about process (how writing happens) or business (how to live/publish). This was, as you might imagine, kind of awkward because the people who write the stories aren’t the best judges of what actually happens.

There are lots of reasons for this: readers are complex and contextually constrained (as are authours), and creators are too close to the story and the characters to really see have a productive perspective on what we’re writing. We can talk about what we meant to write, how we intended for a story to work, but while short measures of this kind of analysis aren’t harmful, longer amounts of this kind of talking is pretty unproductive because it detracts from the reader’s freedom and the ability of the text to stand on its own.

This isn’t to say that I’m opposed to writers talking about their work, but I think there are some kinds of discussion that work better. The first is your critical focus: it’s great when people talk about the ideas that linger in their minds when they’re writing the story. These are the big issues that your characters represent/grapple with, but stated in more concrete terms in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books, this would include nationalism, interstellar colonization, the challenges of a massively overgrown population, the problem of survival on a different world. In Cory Doctorow’s latest (Little Brother) the list of critical issues includes: political action, post-9/11 police powers, law enforcement statistics, youth identity. There’s lots of stuff to talk about, without talking about the character or plot development process.

The second kind of conversation is about process. Fiction writers aren’t the only people who write, and are certainly not the only kind of information workers in the contemporary world. As a result how we work, how we are able to summon creativity, how we manage both creation and business are all things that have a broad appeal, and a lot of my writing about productivity and process here falls into this layout. While there’s such thing as too much process talk, there’s a way to write about work and process that empowers and encourages lots of other people who do similar work. Where as talking about critical issues provides the opportunity to engage the content of the story, talking about process gives you the chance to communicate your experience of telling the story, without needing to offer analysis' of the text itself.

Maybe my response is my way of dealing with both “being a writer,” and believing in idea that “the author is dead.” Maybe this is sound advice, just because: I’m not sure.

Interestingly these two areas also represent the areas that writers often find work talking about/writing columns about. The best non-fiction writing that I’ve read from fiction writers are often essays that they write about what they interested in (and also write fiction about,) and while I don’t have experience at fiction writing workshops process of one sort or another is a big part of what happens at workshops, I’d expect.

I think part of the issue is that the mechanics of stories, is something that we both know a lot about intellectually, and something that we have to do very instinctively. I know what makes characters work, what holds plots together, I can talk a lot about how to make stories and characters better, but when I’m “creating,” it’s all gut instinct and I have to go back and edit (even outlines) into shape. My current goal, is not to “learn more about writing,” but “hone my instincts” (or “feel better”) about writing. Maybe the instinctive writing approach means that (at least of our own writing) our ability to explain what’s happening becomes a bit…

I’m not sure. All very interesting. Onward and Upward!

I wrote an article for my friend Melissa Barton about how to use computers/technology more successfully and more effectively, and it went live over the weekend. I’m really happy with it, and it represents all of the things I’ve been working through here, except tuned for a more general audience. It’s also under my given name (gasp!) as if the tycho thing wasn’t confusing enough as it is.

Emacs is great, and I’m a huge fan, but it’s not for everyone, and for those audences, thinking about what we learn from “advanced useage” and then workind to apply that to more general use can be quite powerful. This is a different take on the “how to attract general audences,” process. I guess I’m mostly arguing that rather than make software/hardware more “friendly,” better to (also) educate users to be more gruff?

In any case, that’s up. I’m also posting an extra tychoish essay on Wednesday because it didn’t get posted (as I would have hoped) due to my error a few weeks ago. Stay tuned for that. Also, maybe new Critical Futures this week?

cheers, ty

Backstory: Chris is something of an Operating system junkie, and likes to play around with things. I think he’s weird, but whatever. Also, he bought a netbook several months ago, and after much persistence on my part (and some epic failures of Ubuntu instalations,) he finally installed Arch Linux, and it worked amazingly well. Here’s a funny (ok, mildly amusing?) conversation about his latest system plan with only minor editing for understandability and comedic value:

Chris: I was thinking that I’d move some stuff off of my second internal hard drive and install the alpha version of Ubuntu to see how it works.

tycho: How it works? Like crap. It’s ubuntu, so it’s meant to be easy to install and usable, not fresh, robust, and hardened. Besides its an alpha, if you what stability just install Arch and get it done with.

Chris: [silence and pause]

tycho: now that we resolved this quandary what’s next?

Chris: [sighs and laughs] Nothing, really. [pause] I’m downloading Arch now, asshole.

tycho: [laughs] You’re welcome.

I don’t actually use Arch, because Ubuntu has been simple and I’ve yet to have a problem with it, but I would use Arch if I needed it, and I (seem) to recommend it to all my friends who are really geeky and are having problems with debian/ubuntu.

shrug

I watched the last episode of Battlestar Galatica, (I’d been behind several weeks) today, because I was tired of everyone else talking about it and staying away from reading things on the Internet because of it. This is a story that I’ve been quite fond of for quite a long time, and I was impressed with how well they wrapped it up. Really impressed. Good work indeed.

I’ve also--and I haven’t talked about this very much here, yet--been writing more seriously on my projects than I have in a good long while. It’s good to be back, and I’m often surprised at how important writing on my own projects (particularly fiction) is at keeping my spirits afloat.

Now that the novel is on track again, I feel less overwhelmed at knocking through other projects. My knitting is in better shape, I’m blogging better, I worked on an academic project, and so forth. There’s still outstanding work, and I’m getting back into it, and that’s a good thing indeed.

I’m busy, as always, and there’s too much to really go through it here, but, but! I feel inspired rather than daunted at the prospect. I hope you all have a good week as well.

So I was sorting through my org-mode files and I found a little snippet of code that I had lying around. I’ve had a problem with shell scripting for a while. I use bash a lot, and I’ve written a few functions, and procedural scripts that I’ve found useful in my travels, but anything that requires “logic,” often escapes me in tragic and epic ways.

Here’s the problem. I had a directory of notes that I had compiled for presentation in an ikiwiki blog for notes. As I wanted these notes to be in my org-mode system, I needed to take a directory of 60 or so files, and turn them into a single org file. As an additional bonus, I needed the files to be organized by date rather than by the alphabet. Also, as ikiwiki generated page titles from the filename, I needed to capture that information in the org-mode file. Here’s what I came up with

for i in `ls -t`;  do
   echo -e "$i" >> ~/org/legacy_notes.org &&
   cat "$i" >> ~/org/legacy_notes.org ;
done

It works as a one liner, but it works. I think previous attempts have left out crucial semi-colons or the do and done statements. No clue. Baby steps folks.

So while I’m a bit (ha!) of a tea junkie, I must confess that my tea brewing/tea pot equipment is pretty minimal. I have (had) a couple of tea pots that were obtained at church rummage sales, and I bought a small pot for afternoon/testing purposes recently, but other than that: not so much. I recently discovered that my standard pot which is a great stonewear ceramic beast has a defect in the (internal) glaze which I think means that it’s ready for retirement.

Former roommates will remember my general disregard for cleaning tea cups and the like, on the general theory, that a rinse + hot water + acidic tea is really all the cleaning one needs. I, however draw the line at “cracked glaze and exposed porous stonewear.” I have another pot, but it was a whim rummage sale purchase, and it has a wire handle (hard to hold,) a small opening (hard to rinse) and it dribbles effusively. This basically means the only tea pot I have at the moment is an old glass one. Which would be nice, except it looses heat at a truly astounding rate. Tip: glass tea pots not good.

There are a few things that are different about my tea making habits now as opposed to previous eras. First, I use loose leaf and strain either with a hand strainer, preferably some sort of tea pot infuser, or a hand made tea bag. I also, rarely brew individual cups any more. So I think my needs are a bit different than they once were. So new tea pot, here I come.