The H Line

<3 <3 <3 Time Capsule <3 <3 <3

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Pownce leaves private beta at 3 a.m. EST tomorrow.

(Also tomorrow: My second semester at grad school.)

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For the past couple of years, I’ve bookmarked certain things as “digests” and others as “blogs,” but the distinction is difficult to define. i.e. My new fave for MP3s, Phlow, calls itself a magazine, but it could just as easily be considered a group blog.

Where’s the distinction for you?

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Upcoming shows in NYC…

Cool Kids + A-Trak @ The Rose Center for Earth and Space, Jan. 25

Cornelius @ Webster Hall, Jan. 26

Bell @ Cake Shop, Feb. 1

Being of note for a day is fascinating. Particularly when it’s for something that’s all but unrelated to you as a person/writer/student. Internet fame is so intriguing, in fact, that Graffiti Research Lab co-founder James Powderly and others are teaching a class on it at Parsons.

But what is “internet famous”? A friend or two called me that over the weekend, and my response was usually a shrug. Sure, it’s exciting to see the Y axis of your stats graph expand exponentially with each hour. But a high amount of page views hardly equals fame. Right?

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Here’s “internet famous” as it’s so eloquently defined on Urban Dictionary:

I’m thankful that it wasn’t the second definition that brought my blog into the eye of the digerati (and, really, you should be, too). But it wasn’t the first, either.

For that first definition indicates that I would have had to participate in some kind of forum with the intent of becoming “internet famous.” In the case of my posts on Tobias Wong, I really didn’t do anything at all. Just reported the facts as I saw them, as any girl with a background in journalism would do.

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So how did I go from having an all-time high view count of about 35 to more than 1,000?

Well, literally, I exposed the inside joke — er, Work of Art — by Tobias Wong at Design, Wit and the Creative Act, which then got passed along to key players in the tech/design community: Steven Heller and Jason Kottke*.

The play-by-play:

Initial hours after Heller linked to me.

Initial hours after Kottke linked to me.

And, well, you saw what happened next.

*I should note that in the case of Kottke I passed along the info directly, but in the context of an e-mail that said, essentially, “Hey, I found out about this conference through you and boy did some kooky things go down there.”

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I’d like to tie this in with my thoughts on our increasing dependency on peer reviews, whether of events (like the Core 77 panel) or wine or the meaning of strange occurences in our daily lives, such as “when a guy you met once at a party keeps sending you cake every 4 months over the course of 2 years, but otherwise does not get in touch at all, whether via email, sms, phone call. And doesn’t ask you out either.”

But maybe the larger conclusion to draw is that we still turn to experts to get our information despite the proliferation of review communities. My findings were up for about 12 hours before Heller and Kottke linked to me, and it was only when these trusted sources explicitly or implicitly verified my info that these posts became “important.”

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For those dozen or so of you who are pondering sticking around: Welcome. And thanks. Here’s a song for you to pass along to someone that you love: “A Little Bit” - Lyyke Li, via Mad Decent.

And another that’s just plain cute: “The Shadow” - White Williams, via Yellow Stereo. If you are lucky enough to live in city where you can actually ride a bike, it’d be quite good for that.

These awards don’t mean anything to me, and I imagine they don’t mean a whole lot to the people who are actually nominated, but this morning I am procrastinating and therefore have made a list of who you should vote for. If I didn’t post about a category, it’s because I have no opinion about that category.

Oh, hey, look at that! I only have an opinion about one category…

Best Music Blog - Fluxblog.org.

I may be ever so slightly biased because Matthew Perpetua has become a good friend of mine since I’ve been here. But, really, the stuff he posts is always delightfully catchy and danceable. And he actually knows how to write about it.

Need proof? This is from his latest post…

“Hold On” - Holy Ghost

This is city music. Specifically, this is New York City music. Holy Ghost! don’t even try to hide that in the lyrics. It’d be like putting a rubber George W Bush mask on a large house cat and trying to fool a visiting dignitary that it was, in fact, the president of the United States. (I CAN HAS EXEKUTIVE POWERZ?)

In this race for cultural supremacy, I think the proper decision is clear.

Today I finished setting up my account with soup.io, an aggregator that displays all of your streams from your various accounts on one easy-to-digest page.

I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. I had a tumblelog on Tumblr, but was frustrated by its precarious position between blog and aggregator. I didn’t want something that looked like a blog without a comment option. I just wanted a page that I could direct people to and say, “Here. These are all of my accounts and there’s a stream of my latest stuff.” And that’s exactly what soup.io does.

It’s extremely easy to set up your page. You can test it out without even giving them your e-mail. They have several built-in options (flickr, del.icio.us, twitter, etc…), and also the option to add any RSS feed you like. In my case, I chose the RSS feed from this blog and my Clipmarks feed, in hope that it will give me more incentive to use it.

It’s not without its kinks, of course. The updates aren’t instantaneous — especially from a custom RSS feed — and they’ve temporarily disabled the custom CSS option after discovering some bugs. But that’s to be expected, and hasn’t inhibited my enjoyment of the service/site.

I think if there’s one big-picture kind of concern I have here, it’s that you don’t have to provide your password in order to have your accounts streamed. So someone could just as easily set up another soup.io account and stream my content on their page and say, “Look! Here’s all my stuff!” Those people would be liars. And liars are bad.

Personally, I’m pretty loose and carefree with my content, as long as people give me a link or some kind of credit — and even that’s flexible in certain situations. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that it could get out of hand.

However, it won’t.

I don’t say that because I think people are inherently good and the internet is a big cuddly bed that we crawl into so we can pass around pictures and songs and videos to one another in hope of making the world a happier place. I’m not that delusional. In this case, I just don’t think it’s enticingly naughty enough for a ne’er do well to even mess with. The result would only be mildly offensive, which is hardly worth the trouble.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve been feeling rather… lacking in verbosity. Probably because most of my energy has been devoted to midterms.

Luckily, I am communicating through a medium where words are no longer necessary. Here, we are communicating in a space where we don’t have to create anything at all to express an idea. You don’t have to reveal even the tiniest bit of yourself. Not a single typed letter. Not one stroke of the pixelated paintbrush. All you have to do is link to something. An article, a picture, a song, a video, maybe even a feature-length film. You post a hyperlinked URL, a reader follows the link, and there you both are, occupying the same one-page world in asynchronous time.

Many professional bloggers make their living by posting links and adding a few sentences of opinion. There’s Kottke. And design blogs, like SwissMiss. Both interesting, well-respected and part of my daily blog diet.

Now I’ve noticed that there’s a growing number of sites that post links with even fewer words. Sometimes none. It’s not linked-to content for the purpose of commentary, it’s just linked-to content. Items neither created nor critiqued. An information remix.

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I’m fully aware that this is an incredibly old idea, and one that isn’t unique to the Internet. Homer (or somebody) sampled oral tales and stitched them together to create the Illiad and the Odyssey BCE. Mozart ripped off a gavotte dance rhythm in a piano sonata in the 18th century. Toward the beginning of the 20th century, the dadaists remixed visual art using collage; toward the end, musical artists such as John Oswald were mixing and mashing songs in the way we’ve become familiar with today (with the law close behind).

But what’s occurring now is different. All of the artists mentioned above were creating new works from old art. They culled together ideas in order to comment on them, or make them anew. I’m not so sure that that’s what’s happening with information remixes.

the things magazine blog is the first that I noticed doing something close to the information remix concept. In the words of the things about page, its writers (a cohort based at the Victoria & Albert Museum/Royal College of Art*) report on “objects and their meanings.” But the things blog is not as straightforward as this mandate would have you believe.

Each post is a sprawling amalgam of links and their descriptions, introduced by a large, striking image for a header. These posts are in partly narrative form, but usually even the most coherent descriptions are interwoven with sections of links separated only by forward slashes, the relationship between linked-to content ambiguous and undefined.

To me, these are the sections that manage to communicate the most. It’s not commentary, it’s not an opinion, it’s not some kind of new creation. It’s more akin to a mood. The kind of feeling evoked after reading Harper’s Findings. In this sense, such posts are more like a mix tape or mp3 mix than a remix. Maybe information composition is a better term.

By joining these links together, the post’s composer represents an idea, a mood, an experience. Sometimes this mood is born from the similarity of the linked-to items, and sometimes it’s a product of the tension caused by their juxtaposition. Often the initial effect is disorientation, but as time goes on, patterns of meaning emerge. It’s an experience not unlike listening to an aleatoric piece by John Cage.

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Other blogs create this feeling across the entirety of their domain. These encompass a broad, seemingly unrelated range of topics. Here, the disorientation is caused from post to post, rather than line to line within a single post.

My most recent find in this category is Fed by Birds, whose goal is to cover “strange creatures, complicated clothes and forgotten books. And robots.” And there are others, like Basically Whatever, started by a friend of mine. There, he and his collaborator post, well, exactly what it sounds like.

But do you notice how different those two moods are? There’s a reason why it’s called webspace. Clicking through to a page is like opening a door onto a mysterious room, and the opacity or clarity of the windowed door into that room is determined only by the context of link from which you traveled. Fed by Birds has the mystical and ancient feeling of a Victorian reading room, while Basically Whatever has the contemporary neon flair of a hipster nightclub.

While their creators might not agree, I think that’s exactly the point of such blogs. Of course, the primary goal of the information composition is to share information and use hyperlinks to usher readers along to other strange and mystical rooms. But the more interesting aspect is the result: the distinctive feeling evoked by these posts and blogs. It’s not an effect created by narrative sites, or even mini-review sites such as Kottke and SwissMiss.

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It’s important to note that all of the examples I have given are group blogs (if even just a pairing). That’s because when a work has multiple points of authorship — even when so closely selected and defined — it becomes a distributed narrative. This is, perhaps, the only kind of narrative possible for these blogs. A singular voice would be too easy to predict. Only a group could create the kind of organized chaos that’s essential to the information composition.

In this way, each member of the group plays a part in setting the mood of the (web)space. Just as good interior design becomes great with the implementation of the unexpected, the feeling of disorientation and surprise evoked by these blogs is heightened by the participation of multiple authors with varied but related interests.

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Not long from now, we won’t achieve all of this through linking — it will be thinking. You feel something or have an idea. You want someone else to understand your thought. So you press the node on the side of your head, and there the thought is in someone else’s mental inbox — which has the feeling of being private, but is in fact monitored by an overarching force (Google?). But maybe we’ll be in some other universe then.

*one of whom also writes for The Morning News