lovehatethings 2008: my first eBook

Want an idea of how much I wrote for lovehatethings over the second half of 2008? I've published my own eBook, which took little additional work other than layout. No supplication to publishers, no caring about money. Enjoy. It's FREE, and it's under Creative Commons license, so you may share and add value to your heart's content.

Without further ado, click here for lovehatethings 2008. 

Sure, some of the stuff may be a bit dated, but I just thought about doing this last week.

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Thanks to all my Posterous LHT followers...

In the time it took to leave and return from Vegas this week, I broke the 200 follower threshold of Posterous users.

While I know 200 is a relatively small number over the expanse of the web, having that number (from one community) enjoy some of the things I've written and shared enough to come back and include me in their feeds is humbling. In just over a year I've come to know many small aspects of all of you through your posts.

I can say, without reservation, that without the simplicity and effectiveness of this platform, I would have had a near impossible time expressing myself and maintaining lovehatethings in its current fashion.

Thanks Garry, Sachin, and the team for helping lovehatethings reach at least 200 pairs of eyes and ears.

anthony

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Podcast 99 - 365 Days of Love, Hate and Things

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lovehatethings - 365 Days of Love, Hate and Things.mp3 (8370 KB)

Celebrating the first anniversary of lovehatethings.com with a year's worth of lessons learned and a rant on a topic that has dominated the week: Net Neutrality.

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lovehate: 10 Things I've Learned Since Starting Lovehatethings One Year Ago

Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of Lovehatethings and I figured Anniversary Eve would be a good time to reflect on the past year's most valuable lessons in my latest round of blogging. Lovehatethings is not my "side" blog or my picture/clip repository; it is my only solo blog.

1. Subject be damned - I thought, when I first started lovehatethings, that I would try to stay on things tech and web culture with a dash of ephemera thrown in for good measure. I soon came to grips with the fact that no matter how I tried to craft a theme or topic for the blog, ultimately I was the theme. While I never wanted or considered lovehatethings to be a lifestream (and it's not) I was hoping I would have time to write longer sweeping pieces about pop culture on a more regular basis. In lieu of essays and longer reflections, the ephemera fleshed out the opinion and what resulted was a clearer scope of my views on culture instead of the culture itself.
2. Staying current is currency - Having more time in the summer to keep up posting made the first couple of months easy to satisfy at least a post per day, and even when I have had little time to "construct" a written post, I have always tried to maintain some output on a daily basis (this is post number 483 in 364 days).
3. Podcast or Perish - Lovehatethings is/was my first foray into podcasting (I know I arrived on the scene late). 98 podcasts later I've gone through scripted, unscripted, rants, recoils and rambles with the only expectation being that I would have a blast doing them and learning by them... mission accomplished.
4. The medium is the message - In so much as anyone can put up content and hope that people consume, I really have to thank the Posterous team for giving me tools that allowed me to gain greater distribution control of content over the past year. Posting and podcasting by email, notifications, analytics, custom domains - anything I could've wanted in this first year was not only provided but made simple. My career isn't coding, but it does entail some heavy duty communication. I loved that I could handle the words while someone else handled the code.
5. Buying into the community - My work with lovehatethings prompted a greater interest in the subcultures that are blogging and podcasting and social media in general. I attended Podcamps, tweetups, and become an advocate among friends and peers for social media growth and involvement.
6. Words are not dead - As much as many web consumers seem transfixed with keyboard cats and memes-a-plenty, I have found more value in words over the past year than I have in a long time - and this comes from an English teacher. I do not, nor will I ever buy into the fact that a blog idea should be said in as few words as possible. The artistic sensibility in blogging should be found in words. While brevity is certainly economical, I don't read a blog or listen to a podcast to get headlines as quickly as possible. I want to be entertained and a well-crafted story, sentence, or turn of phrase can make the topic more enjoyable no matter how bland it should be.
7. Fueled by stupidity - While I could easily accept others accusing me of this, I really mean to say that the stupidity of the world around me has really inspired some of the better posts on the blog. Whether it's a celebrity or a person who cut me off in a parking lot, disgust, disbelief and sometimes outright rage inject prose with a certain maliciousness that is therapeutic. It is also this stupidity, especially by people around the city, that inspired the Impromptu Podcasts that started up as a way to relieve the podcasting bug when longer written pieces were too far between.
8. Readers and listeners are irrelevant - Not to insult you if you're reading this now, but if I was doing all this work for someone else, without getting paid, and agonizing over results, it all wouldn't be much fun. And it has been fun. I've always enjoyed watching band that were having fun on stage. I don't care how sloppy the arrangements or how many missed notes, but show me a band that smiles at each other and the crowd and I'll show you a crowd who smiles back.
9. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - As much as many Social Media people like to trumpet the vast differences between "new" and "old" media, the basic construct remains the same: sender to message to receiver. That the feedback loop has been shortened, when required, is an improvement, but has always been available even by Pony Express. The basic tenets of any media studies still apply: know your audience, know your medium, know yourself.
10. The new web realities - Authority is awkward. Recommendations are required. Networking is knowledge. Parsing is premium. Cognition is key. And while some of you will recognize the acronym PWEI from a band called Pop Will Eat Itself, I've become half convinced that such is the fate of the web as bloggers write about other bloggers who write about other bloggers and somewhere in there is a fact or two. Facts are like Waldo.

Tomorrow - the Anniversary Post!

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Impromptu Podcast 39: Without Me, My Domain is Nothing. Without My Domain, I am Nothing.

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fbtsomp039 - Without My Domain, I Am Nothing.mp3 (6074 KB)

Ever been declared dead and had to prove yourself still alive? That's kinda what I felt like this past week after having my domain redirect go wonky and then having some well-meaning, but ineffective, people try to fix it, followed by my ultimate decision to transfer... six days of HELL.
 
And on the seventh day, I realized my domain was more than my address, it was my home. Funny I discovered the problem while staying out of town at a hotel. That's what my online life has felt like all week.
 
Included in this Impromptu Podcast is a short pre-recorded piece based on the Marine Creed called My Rifle. I have adapted it to suit my feelings toward my domain.

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Impromptu Podcast 37: Twitizen Journalism

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fbtsomp037 - Twitizen Journalism.mp3 (6998 KB)

Yeah, I can ramble a bit, but when someone says "Citizen Journalism" it kinda gets my back up a bit. It's not that I don't think the person on the street can't contribute to the ongoing dialogues and diatribes about everything from the crucial to the mundane. It's simply that, almost all the time, it ain't journalism. And with Twitter, there's even less of a chance... but I digress... give a listen.

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Podcast Forty One - Oh Bloggers, Wherefore Thou Art?

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lovehatethings - Oh Bloggers, Wherefore Thou Art.mp3 (6804 KB)

A brief podcast concerning the following questions:
 
Are blogs art, and should bloggers be able to receive art's funding?
Is there any simpler way to change the channel on my TV than a casual press of my thumb?
And, as much as we complain about abbreviations and acronyms... have things really changed all that much over the past 60 years?

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lovehate: Are Blogs Art?

For years, it has been incumbent on "forward-thinking" governments to sponsor the arts and the artists around their countries through endowments, grants, and special project funding. Many of these artists believe that they have the right to make a living as artists, and further believe that the government should be paying them to do it.

While I agree that the arts are important to a culture, I have always had a hard time believing that anyone had the "right" to make a living from taxpayer funds. I've been a musician since I was five and have, not once, ever thought that anyone owed me the ability to make a living while honing my craft. My pursuit of art (and craft for that matter) comes from passion and willingness to pursue it. 

Part of my criticism of government funding for the arts comes from the bodies that oversee it. I've always held the notion (romantic though it may be) that art should exist unencumbered for its own sake and not beholden to anything. The structures and preconceptions that often come part and parcel with arts funding preclude this freedom. To apply for a Canada Council grant in the arts one must automatically pigeon-hole their idea into limited parameters and variables to satisfy the board making the decision. That board, by its nature becomes a gatekeeper to "art" and, by my view anyway, severely impedes artistic integrity.

I do however appreciate the idea that many great artists use funding to hone their craft where they might otherwise have to spend their days working a non-related occupation. That said, is the chosen artist really chosen on merit by the board, or how well they can fill out a grant application?

And all this to lead to the title question: Are Blogs Art?

I would automatically answer "no" under the definitions I hold true for the term, but when I put some blog writing up side by side against short stories or poetry, I have to reconsider. Aside from the basic tenets of communication and education and information, how different is the blog writer from the poet. I would like to say that the poet hones their craft and the resulting artistic products, while rife with meaning were only true to their own outcomes and not the expectations of readers. But I know poets who write for a purpose. They have an endgame in mind when trying to promote a message. This tends to be what bloggers do all the time: have a message, convey it through words and ideas. Does it make sense that the poet gets funded and blogger does not?

Does one hold a higher moral obligation than the other? Sure, a poet can be cryptic and hide meaning without being blunt and overbearing, but some of the best poetry hits you right over the head like a sledgehammer. I've read blogs both cryptic and blunt, both flowery and caustic. While one would rarely mistake a blog for poetry or the other way around, I would never claim that the intent, talent and skill required to write for one form was any greater or less than the other. I have read crappy blogs and crappy poetry and brilliant examples of both. The level of craft on both is high, and I cannot figure out how any Council or board could figure out the difference.

So in my best McLaughlin Report method of answering the question, are blogs art? YOU'RE ALL WRONG! The real answer is, I don't know. What I do know is that I'm certainly not comfortable saying one should have funding and the other not. For all of the defenses that could attributed to the importance of art can also be attributed to new media. And all of the people who write incoherent poetry are more than matched by those who write inconsequential blogs.

And I should know... I've written both many times.

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lovehate: Footnote to Favicon

Media authority is getting winnowed.

Even just within the world of the web we've moved from longer form blog entries to shorter form commentaries to microblogging. There has been a persistent belief, since our formalized education, that opinions should be backed up by proof or some other substantiative measure. Such examples used to be in the form of quotations with carefully constructed footnotes and bibliographies all meant to validate the expertise of our sources and the wisdom we showed in choosing them. There was an expectation that if one backed up an opinion from several so-called experts with innumerable of degrees after their names, that the opnion became valid. Authority was reduced to our effectiveness to parse the researched opinions of others and, in turn, call it research ourselves.

Blogging reduced the opinion authority down to a buy-in on the blogger's established integrity, established through experience, or some percevied experience found through a Technorati rating or the like. Opinions didn't have to be so much established as simply linked up to other opinions that, in themselves, were largely unsubstantiated. The authority of a blogger's opinion was given leeway as we expected more entertainment and information than hard facts. We didn't, and still don't, read blogs for news. We read for insight, and the currency that is not evident on most major news outlets anymore. After all, how often does CNN talk about tech gadgets or iPhone apps? Blogger authority was reduced to link selection and how many people linked back to you.

The explosion of microblogs has reduced authority even further because 140 characters offers little more than a sentence with an attached link. What we are left with is an implied opinion that can be gleaned only by a perceived "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" on the link's efficacy. But ingesting information from microblogs is often an exercise in profound filtering as one has to suffer through lifecasting and other such minutae. Not that there isn't a place for those things within the microblog environment, but when searching for information and authority, it seems like most of the credence we are willing to give a tweet or like entry is through what we assume the tweeter is trying to say, instead of what they are actually saying. A funny thing happens though with the persistent use of url shrinking utilities. With shrunken web addresses, it's become impossible to know the source before you actually go there. Relative web and domain experience gets rendered useless when trying to determine most microblog authority. Much of any positive or negative expectation comes down to the microblogger's avatar.

And so we move from footnote to links to avatar with the ultimate reduction in newsfeeds and the shortcuts that take you there from your row favicons on your browser's bookmark bar. A small pixellated area of real estate becomes the annotated bibliography of your life. Where the grad student still spends months putting together annotated bibliographies for research topics, we have reduced years of research to tiny graphics. If anyone asked you to rate or assign a value to any of those favicons, you could probably talk for minutes or hours on each one. You could rate their effectiveness, efficiency and usefulness to you in your daily browsing. Authority for you has been reduced to a small pixel box that guides your day to day web experience.

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lovehate: "Getting" Twitter

The greatest thing about the advancements in web technology are that at least, for the time being, they continue. Don't get me wrong, I understand the PC is a tool that will eventually be replaced and the net, as we know it, will become radically different. Just as we went from Grammaphone to turntable to reel-to-reel to 8 track to cassette to CD to download, the PC does have a shelf life as does the this tool we call the web. But, for the time being, the learning curve is immense and expanding.

Perhaps the greatest advantages that I've found lately, however, are not necessarily discovering new websites or technologies, but new ways to use existing ones. Through integration, aggregation, and applications, web programmers are opening up vast new frontiers in web usage and viability.

As an example, I think I'm starting to "get" Twitter. And it's not that I didn't understand the technology or the concept or even the appeal that the platform had to some people. I'd figured there was a way to use the tool properly that I just hadn't figured out (and didn't even necessarily care to take the time understand). In the same way that many non-musicians listen to a jazz improv and find it confusing or self-indulgent noodling. There may even be some who love music and understand the appeal without necessarily it liking themselves. That's kind of where I felt with Twitter.

I was aware of Twitter a long time before I signed up and even longer before I really started exploring it. Going to my page at twitter.com just seemed stale to me. It seemed, for the longest time, like a weak pretender to a sole aspect of Facebook that was cool enough but not compelling. And I followed the requisite Twitterati to see them lifecasting (which I abhor) and tweeting pearls of wisdom to the adoring masses who sat around all day praying for the @reply. But, as anything on the web, one way communication isn't going to cut it and absolutely no one (I mean zilch) was following me.

I also knew that the easiest way to get followers was to ramdomly follow 10,000 people in the hopes that 1,000 follow you back. I've never been like that on MySpace or Facebook, so I certainly wasn't going to do that on Twitter. I much prefer to pursue an organic growth of followers and, at the time of writing this, I am following 117 people and have 114 followers. Of those followers I assume a certain percentage of spammers and dead profiles. I'm thinking that somewhere around the 100 mark is the stage one critical mass it took for me to find a balance between being just updates from Twitterati and more meaningful content from people that I have formed some sort of relationship with, even if it's just online. I suppose I could have reached higher numbers quicker, but I don't know that I would have cared about what anyone was saying at that point and, as such, may have lost interest altogether.

In addition to reaching this first step of discovering the benefits and relative potential of Twitter in capture my interest in more than an obligatory refresh or two every hour to see how many dozen tweets Scoble had up, the evolution of the API and its associated tools became what truly galvanized this new experience. I found Tweetdeck and, in doing so, gained a whole new appreciation from Twitter by simply being able to visualize the workings and the interactions. I started up search columns devoted to specific hastags and events. I was starting to add followers based on shared interests or, at the very least, evidence of an ability to contribute to something I cared about instead of randomly throwing darts at a print out of the fail whale.

And in learning this first step where I'm getting more out of Twitter than I thought possible, perhaps the most important thing I've learned about this, and other microblogging platforms, is that the API rules the roost. The explosive evolution of snippet commentary has all of its value in aggregation, and in aggregation the value is in the content, and in its content the value is in the users. I know enough to know that a thousand or ten thousand random follows on Twitter will not get me any of the value that 100 thoughtfully chosen contacts will.

Be it Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Plurk, or any social network, you and your content are indistinguishable. Just as when you are not in the room, all that remains is the story of you, social networks are ALL story. The stories are told through podcasts, blog posts, references, subreferences, suggestions, advice, maxims, insights, and links. The snippets are you. How many close friends do you have in real life? How many regular friends? The interaction with one friend over one drink on one night of the week will give you more content and sources for relevant aggregation than a thousand random snippets.

I think I've started to "get" Twitter, but, even better, my hope is that I haven't even started to "really get it".

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