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October 29, 2022

Why I liked Twitter

I’ve been on Twitter for a long time. A very long time. In fact, I was introduced to it as a way for a bunch of friends to let one another know what bar they were about to go to. It seems to have strayed from that vision a bit.

I have not yet decided to leave it, although I’m starting to check in at Mastodon. Here’s what I use it for, in no particular order, and not without embarrassment:

  • Quick check on breaking news. It’s by no means comprehensive, and what trends is by no means always important. But I find some of it worth a click even as a distraction.
  • Quick commentary on issues of the day by people I follow because they’re good at that.
  • Issues worth knowing about raised by strangers who know about them.
  • Keeping up with fields I’m interested in by following people who I don’t know, as well as some I do.
  • Engaging with people I otherwise wouldn’t have kept up with.
  • There are people I know just barely in real life who I feel quite close to after many years on Twitter together. 
  • Engaging with a low bar of social inhibition/anxiety with people I don’t know, sometimes leading to friendships. 
  • An outlet for my stray thoughts and, well, jokes.
  • A medium by which I can publicize stuff I write.
  • A number I can cite to publishers as if people automatically read the stuff of mine I’m publicizing on Twitter.
  • The Twitter I’m on is often very funny.

Switching social platforms is hard.

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Categories: cluetrain, free culture, social media Tagged with: social media • twitter Date: October 29th, 2022 dw

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February 24, 2021

Free “The Realist”

I just stumbled across an open access archive of 146 issues of The Realist, Paul Krassner’s 1960s political and cultural satire magazine. Thanks, JSTOR!

I read it when I was in high school and college in the 1960s and early 1970s. It was far more savage than MAD magazine, more explicit in topics and language, and went after riskier targets. The epitome of this was his parody of William Manchester’s book about the JFK assassination, The Death of a President — a parody that ended with an act by LBJ on the plane carrying Kennedy’s body to Washington that is still so crude and shocking that I’d have to use euphemisms to describe it. Instead, here’s an article that puts it in context.

That was Krassner pulping a topic with a meat hammer, but The Realist was often more clever and addressed very real issues: craven politicians, the abuse of power, the institutionalized oppression of the vulnerable, the US as a warmonger, the heartlessness of capitalism. To be clear, the LBJ article also addressed real issues: The growing JFK hagiography, LBJ’s lust for power and crude lack of empathy, the masculine all-consuming and sexualized power dynamic, the media’s genteel cowardice, etc. It just did so atypically in the form of a short story

Krassner was one of the co-founders of the Yippies. He published The Realist until 2001. He died in 2019.

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Categories: culture, free culture, humor, libraries, open access, politics Tagged with: humor • open access • satire Date: February 24th, 2021 dw

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January 15, 2021

Mom at 100

My mother, Sherry, died 29 years ago today. On this birthday she would have been 100.

Here’s what my sister-in-law, Meredith Sue Willis (“Sue” to us) posted on Facebook about her.

This would have been the 100th birthday of my mother-in-law, Sherry Weinberger, Andy and Ellen and David’s mom. She was a magnificent lady, a left-liberal activist, a folk guitarist and guitar teacher, a gifted friend. She used to put out a meal for twenty on the lake house porch, wearing hoop earrings a lavender and blue outfit, drinking a margarita and smoking a cigarette. Then the party started. She was what they call a balabusta in the home and an organizer in the neighborhood. I, like dozens of others, was fascinated and lifted up by her generosity and vivacity.  

Sue captures much of my mother in those few details. You won’t be surprised to hear that Sue is a wonderful and respected novelist.

I am loathe to say more because I won’t get it right, but I’m going to anyway.

She was a wonderful mother who sacrificed much to devote herself to her children. That includes giving up on a career she had just begun at The New Republic, which was at that time the intellectual center of the Left.

She was so, so social, hospitable to all, making parties but never pushing her way to the center of them. She was happy to talk, and laugh, and wouldn’t say no to a little flirting. So many people thought they were very special to her. And they were.

And when we said she was a balabusta, I don’t think we meant it in its actual Yiddish meaning (“homemaker”) which I just learned, but rather as a ball-buster: She didn’t take shit from anyone, especially from men. In the early 1950s (I was born in 1950) she was well-aware of the inequality among the sexes (as we used to say), including in her own marriage.

As Sue notes, she taught folk guitar, and she did so in the 1950s before the big Folk Music Boom in the early ’60s when Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary were stars, and there were actual folk singing shows like Hullabaloo and Shindig! on the national networks.

She cared about folk music because it gave literal voice to Black people and to all the workers whose lives are so hard that we avert our eyes. She cared about folk music because it brought the world’s cultures into our community and household. She cared about folk music because it gave her work while being a “homemaker” and mother. She cared about folk music because it gave her a little financial independence from Dad. She cared about folk music because she was a proficient guitarist with a beautiful voice.

She cared about many other things and people, but always with the same mix of personal connection, love of differences, and a commitment to a world in which there is more music, more love, and more justice.

PS: She hated Donald Trump from the moment he got the public’s eye. I wouldn’t know how to break it to her that the worst person in America actually became president.

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Categories: culture, free culture, personal, politics Tagged with: folk music • mom • personal Date: January 15th, 2021 dw

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April 1, 2020

Free novels by Meredith Sue Willis to read while alone

Meredith Sue Willis, the noted novelist and my sister-in-law, has made six of her novels available for free, as e-books, until April 20th.

Sue, as her family members call her, brings characters to life in just a few words. Her novels tend to be centered on places that she brings to life as well – small-town West Virginia, rural Massachusetts, even a cruise ship before that phrase conjured a plague ward.

Give ’em a try. And you well might like her free literary newsletter as well.

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Categories: culture, free culture Tagged with: books • covid29 • culture • free culture • literature Date: April 1st, 2020 dw

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February 26, 2020

My 2004 Blogroll

Blogrolls were early social networks.

Y’see, back in the old days of the Blogosphere, there wasn’t any Facebook or Twitter. Your blog was your presence on the Web. And because people are relational, not independent autonomous agents, many bloggers posted a list of the other blogs they read and sometimes responded to. It was a way of building a networked community.

Blogrolls were good, generous things. I’ve been intending for a long time to post one on this blog again. As a first step, I went to the WayBack Machine, AKA the blessed Internet Archive, and looked up 2004 editions of this blog. I randomly chose the April 1 edition and copied its blogroll. (WARNING: Put on protective eyewear before viewing that old edition.)

Here is the blogroll, unaltered. Many of the links work because the Internet Archive, blessed be its name, automatically inserts links back into the Archive. I suspect that precious few of these blogs are still around. But they were magnificent in their day.

Akma
Jennifer Balderama
Hank Blakely
Blog Sisters
Tim Bray
Dan Bricklin
BurningBird
Marc Canter
Cory Doctorow
Dean Campaign
Betsy Devine
Paul English
Ernie the Attorney
Glenn Fleishman
Dan Gillmor
Gonzo Engaged
Mike Golby
Seth Gordon
Steve Himmer
Denise Howell
David Isenberg
Joi Ito
Jeff Jarvis
Steve Johnson
Kalilily
Pete Kaminski
Jason Kottke
Eliz. Lawley
Adina Levin
Lawrence Lessig
Living Code
Chris Locke
Chris Lydon
Joe Mahoney
Marek
Kevin Marks
Tom Matrullo
Ross Mayfield
Scott McCloud
Megnut
Peter Merholz
Misbehaving
Eric Norlin
The Obvious
O’Connor Clarke
Frank Paynter
Jonathan Peterson
Chris Pirillo
Reed/Frankston
Howard Rheingold
Dave Rogers
Jay Rosen
Scott Rosenberg
Steve Saltire
Doc Searls
Jeneane Sessum
Clay Shirky
Social Software
Halley Suitt
Gary Turner
Mary Lu W.
Dave Winer
Amy Wohl
Gary Wolf
Steve Yost

Free Newsletters I read
David Isenberg
Lockergnome
RageBoy’s EGR
Slate’s Today’s Papers
Steve Talbott
Ted Stout’s RF
Dylan Tweney
Amy Wohl
World Wide Words
JOHO (mine) )

Paynted

TopTen First Names at Google award I've given to myself.

I miss your daily presence, my webby friends. Long live blogrolls!

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Categories: blogs, culture, free culture, internet Tagged with: blogrolls • blogs • internet history • social networks Date: February 26th, 2020 dw

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January 13, 2020

In the public domain, but encumbered

It is fantastic that 14 Paris museums have put images of 150,000 artworks into the public domain. Go take a look. It makes the world visibly better.

But …

…The images are easily accessible one at a time for a human who is browsing. You can also click to download it, and then do whatever you want with it. But they are, apparently purposefully, difficult to batch download. That deprives us of the ability to set computers onto the images and their metadata so that they can discover relationships, and patterns of relationships, among them. That’s a lost opportunity.

I understand it’s hard for institutions to give up on the credit they deserve for maintaining these artworks. Items put in the public domain can be passed around and duplicated without any reference to the source that made them available, or even to the artist who created them. But in return, the culture gets to freely share those images, and to incorporate them into new works, which helps to preserve and extend our shared culture.

So I don’t want to be ungrateful for this enormous gift to the world. But one more step – say, an open API that enables batch download – and the world can benefit even more from these museum’s awesome generosity.

(Hat tip to Keith Dawson.)

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Categories: culture, free culture, open access Tagged with: art • culture • free culture • museums • open access Date: January 13th, 2020 dw

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December 31, 2019

Early animation

Here are links to the earliest cartoons in Riochard Brody’s excellent article, “Draw Stars,” in the Dec. 30, 2019 New Yorker. (Note: Racist and other stereotypes below.)


Emile Cole, Fantasmagorie, 1908, restored. (Original)

Winsor McCay, Little Nemo, 1911:

McCay, Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914:


Max and Dave Fleischer, Out of the Inkwell: The Tantalizing Fly, 1919 (remastered):

The Fleischers, Jumping Beans, 1922 (remastered):

Wallace Carlson (Bray Studios), How Cartoons Are Made, 1919:

Wallace Carlson, He resolves not to smoke, 1914:

Gregory La Cava, The Breath of a Nation, 1919:


Joseph Sunn claymation: Green Pastures, 1919:


Wallace McCutcheon’s merging of Green Pastures with live action, in The Sculptor’s Nightmare:


Howard S. Moss stop action, Mary & Gretel, part 1, 1916:


Mary & Gretel, part 2:


Walter Ruttmann’s abstract Opus 1, 1921:


Lette Reiniger’s silhouette Cinderella, 1921:


Bryant Fryer’s silhouette Follow the Swallow, 1927:

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Categories: culture, free culture, liveblog Tagged with: animation • culture • history • movies Date: December 31st, 2019 dw

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September 4, 2019

Two bloggers meet again

I met Brad Turcotte, who goes by the professional name Brad Sucks, back in the Age of the Blogosphere. He was, and is, an indie musician who embodies the spirit of the open Web. He’s also an awesome song writer, singer, producer, and one man band.

Weirdly, we have been friends since way back when – Why weirdly? Take a look at the photo – although we’ve only met in person twice, including today. Brad was in town, so we had a long beer and a longer conversation. What a pleasure. And, frankly, a privilege.

You should listen to his music because it’s good. You should support him at Patreon because that’s one of the services that actually helps artists. We should all be working to enable creative people like Brad to flourish; he’s what the Web was made for.

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Categories: culture, free culture Tagged with: free culture • music • open web • web Date: September 4th, 2019 dw

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December 3, 2016

[liveblog] Kyle Drake: Making the Web Fun again

Kyle Drake, CEO of Neocities, is talking at the Web 1.0 conference. His topic is how to “bring back the spirit of geocities for the modern web.” The talk is on his “derpy” Web site

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

“When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability,” said Why the Lucky Stiff. “Remember when everybody created Web sites?” Kyle asks. (He points to a screen capture of Mark Zuckerberg’s homepage, which is still available at the Internet Archive.) In the spirit of fairness, he shows his own first home page. And then some very early 90’s-ish home pages that “highlight the dorkiness of the 90’s Web.”

“They looked bad. But so what? They were fun. They were creative. They were quirky. They were interesting, And what did we replace them with? With a Twitter textbox.” Those textboxes are minimal and the same for everyone. Everyone’s profiles at Facebook has the same categories available.”It seems strange to me that we call that new and Web pages old.”

We got rid of the old Web because it wasn’t profitable. “This isn’t progress. It’s a nightmare. So, how do we take the good things about the old Web and modernize it? How do we bring back the old idea of people creating things and expressing themselves?”

That’s why Kyle founded Neocities. 1. It brings back free home pages. 2. No ads. 3. Protects sites against being shut down. It’s open source, too. It currently hosts 100,000 sites.

“This is not nostalgia,” he says. Web sites do things that social networks can’t. A Web site gives you more control and the ability to be more of who you are, with the confidence that the site will persist. And the good news about persistence is that pages still render, often perfectly, even decades later. Also, the Internet Archive can back them up easily. It also makes it easy to create curated lists and collections.

He’s working with IPFS so that Neocities sites can be community hosted.

QA

Me: How does he sustain it financially?

A: You can be a supporter for $5/month

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Categories: cluetrain, culture, free culture Tagged with: distributed web • indieweb Date: December 3rd, 2016 dw

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July 13, 2016

Making the place better

I was supposed to give an opening talk at the 9th annual Ethics & Publishing conference put on by George Washington Uinversity. Unfortunately, a family emergency kept me from going, so I sent a very homemade video of the presentation that I recorded at my desk with my monitor raised to head height.

The theme of my talk was a change in how we make the place better — “the place” being where we live — in the networked age. It’s part of what I’ve been thinking about as I prepare to write a book about the change in our paradigm of the future. So, these are thoughts-in-progress. And I know I could have stuck the landing better. In any case, here it is.

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Categories: free culture, future, open access, philosophy Tagged with: ethics • publishing Date: July 13th, 2016 dw

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