Heh, see, what happens when you don’t click refresh on /. compulsively? 1086 Domesday Book Outlives 1986 Electronic Rival. There’s also a link to a new Austin Chronicle article by Bruce Sterling (who apparently has a blog now) on SXSWi 2002 entitled Information Wants to Be Worthless. It’s a great article, with the type of flare and hucksterism and homeyness that that makes listening to Sterling so enthralling.
Category: Legacy
More links on mouldering media:
- Mefi on the Digital Domesday Book
- Saved, an article from Wired 6.09 (Sept 98)
- Digital preservation: a time bomb for Digital Libraries
- Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media Manifesto and the Dead Media Project
- EFF “Publications – Dead Media Project” Archive
- random search result: Free File Transfers from Obsolete Media and File Types (9-track tape or 5-1/4″ DOS Diskettes, some old system files, etc.) Offered by ISD through Spring 2003
The LA Marathon is today. It passes my apartment right around Pt 23 on the course map at the interesection on Western and Olympic. I’d take a picture, but my camera has been out of commission, however I got my Amex Gold approved, so I’ll probably be making some purchases soon.
Fun grids:
Heh, this post got overwritten, but luckily was in Jesse‘s cache. Saves me some typing. Remember, versioning is your friend… Also, as of now, casino is up to $15.15/click.
I was talking with a friend about searches at Overture (formerly
GoTo). Using their bid tool, you can
find out how much keywords are going for. Jesse found casino at $14.93/click and challenged me to beat him. Sex, pharmaceuticals, products all were pretty low. Even viagra was only $4.00. Looks like online gambling is the most lucrative for keywords. Hell, even casion is registered for $0.43/click. But I met the challenge: poker goes for $15.00/click. Yowza, these companies really are into the gambling. Of course, I’d have to go out of my way to get usage out of Overture. Their pay-for-placement results appear on: AOL, Altavista, Lycos, Netscape, Infospace, and Yahoo. I’m a Google man, Dottie.
Those of you who use the Google Toolbar may have noticed the PageRank bar. If you mouseover them, you actually get an integer ranking on a 0-10 scale.
| General | |
|---|---|
| 10 | |
| Yahoo! | 10 |
| DMOZ | 9 |
| NYTimes | 9 |
| CNET | 9 |
| IBM | 9 |
| Amazon | 2 |
| eBay | 8 |
| Blogs | |
|---|---|
| Blogger | 8 |
| /. | 8 |
| K5 | 8 |
| Scripting News | 8 |
| Metafilter | 7 |
| Robot Wisdom | 7 |
| kottke | 8 |
| mathowie | 7 |
| meg | 7 |
| brad | 6 |
| ernie | 6 |
| dinah | 6 |
| nikolai | 6 |
| brig | 6 |
| alison | 6 |
| ryan | 6 |
| zeldman | 7 |
| steve | 6 |
Hmm, that’s a little longer then I thought it’d be but I started going a bit overboard on that list (the blog list started out as a general thing and ended up with a who did i meet at sxsw list). Most blogs rank between a 6 or 7. I only found one going through my mental sxsw and currently reading lists that was higher(the big K, of course). Besides the Google home page, the only page w/ a PageRank for 10 that I could find was Yahoo! I’m sure there are others (though not many I assume). Some of these may very well be private pages that Google uses, of course. random($foo) scores a 6.
Sorta related, there’s a great page on how Scientologists have googlejacked Scientology (via mpt).
Hmm, ok, so installing seems to have given me the rendering problem in Mozilla that Paul mentioned to me (doesn’t render CSS at all). Flushing the cache seems to have fixed it.
My drivel may not make sense, but it validates, dammit. Until I find a better place to put it and since I have way too many windows open, some random links that I chased down while I was thinking about the last post:
- djhistory.com
- Alan Lieu, English 25 (Literature & Culture of Information) Study Materials: Class Notes
- Among DJ Spooky’s articles: Uncanny/Unwoven, Dark Carnival, Future Tense
- Also: DJ Spooky: It’s all Jazz, DJ Spooky’s Deconstruction, DJ Spooky Interview
- Post-Positions: Culture on the Move
- Techno Schmechno: a postmodern approach to electronica
- Turntabling – January 98 article on turntablism
- Revisiting: CTHEORY, Postmodern Culture, Postmodern Thought, TAZ
I just got back from seeing Scratch tonight at the Nuart (just Melo D of the Beat Junkies was there, not the whole crew or anything), and yes, it was a pretty cool documentary.
Doug Pray, the director, was also there and asked a favor of us in attendance to tell someone to go see the film if we thought it was good, so by all means, if you’re in LA, check it out at the Nuart, it’s playing for 1-week only there. It’s also opening up at a few other places, mostly in big cities. Oh, interesting, it’s opening at the Dobie Theater on the 22nd. (Saw a few movies and ate quite a few lunches there while I was working in Austin)
The movie is primarily about turntablism, but also touches on other aspects of hip-hop culture and also briefly (very briefly) touches on some of the artistic implications of sampling and remixing.
Some things that struck me:
- The scene with DJ Shadow in the basement of records. People tend to forget all the massive amounts of “stuff” that’s been created. Before mechanical reproductions (paper, vinyl), almost all of this was lost. Now however, it’s been captured, but not in any way meaningful way organized. Or, in the case of Jazzy J, catalogued, but only within the mind of one person. Digital media offers the promise of allowing us to be able to connect and share all that was once lost or left mouldering away, but there are those among us who would see that no one profit from this to protect their one small agendas.
- The commentary at NAMM was both funny and saddening. Ironic that many who view themselves as more cultured are themselves so locked into such stifling paradigms. Art (like the universe) is by it’s very nature not a zero-sum game. While people are free to create, it will keep on expanding (and citing the former point, no doubt be forgotten if certain people have their way). That’s a good thing.
- Also, funny how insulated hip-hop is from the rest of the electronica world. Tangent: Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music is back up (turntablism is off of hip-hop under breakbeats)
In any case, the tension between a movement finding it’s own identity and relating to others was interesting, as is the underlying thread of expansion and reuse and reconfiguration that is at the heart of DJ Spooky‘s argument of the DJ as the epitome of the postmodern artist (which I agree with, and which in my belief simply a codification of the process of creation for any artist, regardless of any delusions of sole authorship).
fun mozilla stuff:
- The March 1 nightly is super cool. The JS Debugger now does profiling, so you can tune your JS intelligently. More info @ mozillazine
- mr idontsmoke informs me about the ‘Properties’ context menu in Mozilla. Mouse over, right click, and select ‘Properties’ to see all kinds of gory details of the element your in. This is one way around Mozilla’s limited tooltip display.
Clearing some stuff out of the toblog queue:
- mathowie on The future of music
- scottandrew chimes in
- related and recent: Lessig on Control & Creativity, more on /.
- speaking of /., how about a homemade gauss gun?
Semi-formed thoughts: the open source/free software movement at the forefront of the intellectual property battlegrounds; an important codification of an alternative to the control model that media corporations and large-scale property owners have been (successfully) pushing toward; OS as precuror to more evolved IP licensing designed to combat and subvert; needs to extend beyond the digital sphere.
OK, less talk, more programming.