lovehate podcast 192: Wired is Dead... and They're Not Alone

http://www.jjchandler.com/tombstone/

Click here to download:

lovehate192.mp3 (8155 KB)

If I was Wired or the LA Times or FOXNews or the Wall Street Journal, etc., I'd call my podcast journalism. Such is the very reason journalism is dead.

NOTE: Learn why MAY is a three letter obscenity.

lovehate podcast 188: Why Do I Do This Shit I Do?

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lovehate188.mp3 (8551 KB)

A reflection on how and why I jumped into the social media sphere when I did, and some of the benefits I reap from participating in its inherent creative outlets.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

Click here to download:

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.

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.

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?

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.