I was checking the look of an earlier day's page and saw that someone had responded to my link to Rebecca's essay Weblog History. One thing I realized is that I'll need to go through old posts and assign categories to them in some cases. (This one needs to get the 'syllabus' category for the filtering to work right.) Another is that I'm still somewhat perplexed by Radio's upstreaming model vs. FTP. At least with FTP I know when I've put a file. I realize that this is intended to make things easier by automating them. Actually, I think the real problem is that Radio doesn't necessarily re-render pages when I change the design, so most of the categories still have an out-of-date design, as do many past pages. How do I force the themes and templates to be reapplied up and down the line?
Anyway, in the comment Brian Dear says, "Alas, Rebecca is not aware that the first blogs appeared around 1973." I wrote a reply in the comment but then realized that it's extremely unlikely Brian will ever see it. (Even if these comments triggered notification e-mail, he used a fake antispam address there.)
I know from the Well that Brian is working on a history of PLATO, an educational computer network the prefigured the Internet in many ways. I'm curious now about exactly what he meant: were there logs or journals in the PLATO system? I know very little about it. I'll see if I can track him down and ask him to elaborate.
From the site for his project:
I'm looking for anything and everything: anecdotal, historical, educational, recreational, personal — the whole range of PLATO experiences.
I'd especially love to hear from people who worked on or used PLATO at other sites, like CDC in Minneapolis, CERL in Illinois, other universities across the U.S., and at sites like South Africa, Belgium, and Sweden. Also, corporate/industrial users at the FAA, United Airlines, and all of the other far-flung places and organizations that were a part of what became the PLATO network in the early 80s.
7:54:30 PM 
say what []
More required reading here for keeping up with the ongoing dialogue in blogspace. It doesn't surprise me that science fiction writers like Sterling and Cory are playing such a big role in shaping the emerging philosophy of this internetworked world we're building.
I've always felt that my hypergeek years of reading sci-fi from Bradbury, Asimov, and Heinlein, to the Niven/Zelazny generation, through the cyberpunk era (everyone still genuflects to William Gibson) and lately the more literary fiction of Iain Banks (not forgetting genre-splitters from Philip Dick to Doris Lessing) gave me a bit of head start into the future or, more importantly, a way to project forward current social and tech trends and imagine where they might lead.
I said to one of my writer friends last year "We're all science fiction writers now." That is, unless you're writing historical work, just writing about the present involves narrating an sharp evolving edge of technological and cultural change.
Funny now that I often get the same thrill I used to reading sci-fi from reading brilliant reconstructions of earlier time period (so, in fact, historical writing is just as much as way of commenting on humanity-through-time-including-now as futuristic writing), such as the completely realized Aubrey/Maturin world of the late lamented Patrick O'Brian and Alan Furst's brilliant WWII espionage thrillers.
Back to open source, here are a few choice quotations to tempt you into reading Sterling's whole talk:
Open Source, basically, is about hanging out with the cool guys.(Funny, I pitched a project to my agent last year that would have been a profile of the leading personalities in the open source movement. My working title was Open Sorcerers.)
It's very tribal, and it's very fraternal. It's all about Eric, and Linus, and RMS, and Tim and Bruce and Tom and Larry. These are guru charisma guys. They're like artists, like guys running an art movement. Guys who dress up with halos and wear wizard hats.
And, here, some choice words about a few industries with which I'm somewhat familiar:
Given that there is a ferocious triple dominance of Microsoft on operating systems, Intel in chips and Dell in hardware, the computer industry is finally getting boring. Almost as boring as my own business, the book business. It's still pretending to innovate, but its glamour routine has gotten all ritualized. The machines are slow, the programs are bloated, the changes are cosmetic, just like the heyday of Detroit's Big Three carmakers, so many years ago.
categories: memewatch syllabus
7:23:07 PM say what []
The thought: wouldn't "Radio Free Blogistan" make a good name for an actual radio show? Say, one hour a week each featuring a different blogger as a guest to talk about their hobbyhorses? Anyone who can come up with fresh ideas and compelling content on a nearly daily basis probably has some interesting projects to talk about or ideas they'd like to push around.
It could either be an on-air radio show (I have no idea how you pitch radio stations or syndication networks) or maybe Internet radio. But Internet radio is dying now, right, because of the exorbitant (?) licensing fees for copyrighted music, right? But what about Internet talk radio? There's no barrier to that besides the streaming server and bandwidth, right?
Just a thought.
categories: metablog
6:53:19 PM say what []
A version of that Blogger template is now being used at mediajunkie: junk mail. Again, this is a pure CSS design with all the style declarations in the HEAD. It should be easy to grab and modify for any Blogger site, just by changing the details of the CSS specs. For this site, I retained certain font and color choices that were a legacy of (a) Mena Trott's Blogger template, and (b) color and typeface modifications I had already made.
I plan to make a further clone of the basic CSS design, one for Movable Type templates (although I'm as yet not as experienced with the options for thse). As I get them ready, I will make all the templates available and finally write up the tutorial that's meant to go around them.
categories: fireweaver metablog
12:03:31 PM say what []
Suladog, a Livejournal friend of mine who's a film writer, told a little story about the mixed feelings some of her peers have about embracing the potential of community through the Internet:
... two very close friends...one is the creator of a couple of hit TV series .. the other is a journalist for national magazines ... we were talking about the internet and I mentioned all the journaling that's out there ... and how I have online friends ... and how people talk and debate and argue and laugh and share about all sorts of things online ... and I was getting blank stares.[suladog]
Turns out these two never venture online, short of research or ebay. The idea of writing posts or letters and getting to know people online made their jaws drop. They both mentioned how they were out of touch with the outside world,how they wished they had people to discuss stuff with. I told them that there was a myriad of sites out there with all levels of discussion and debate. Political (one's a libertarian), cultural, spiritual.
Somehow they both have the notion that the internet is only for people under 30. Of course I disabused them of this. They then seemed interested in making some sort of internet contacts, but when I mentioned writing posts, or comments, or e-mail they balked.
They didn't want to have to write anything to anybody, they didn't reallty want contact with people. They were just shutting themselves off from the world and then complaining about the fact . [My husband] said that he felt he was watching two old friends drift out to sea somewhere, and how we were trying to throw them a line.
They just feel that there's someting going on out there that they're somehow ineligible to participate in because they're not in their 20's. It actually was rather depressing. These were two people obsessed with their age, and complaining about a culture that they felt they were being left out of, when in fact they'd locked the door on the inside.
categories: metablog x-syndicate
2:44:06 AM say what []
Caveat Lector posts some preliminary musings about XHTML2. The old typographer in me is most thrilled by the concept of continued paragraphs. Believe me, it's almost as exciting as discovering a working em-dash character.
categories: fireweaver
12:12:10 AM say what []
The navigation comes after all the entries, and it even reads fairly well, aside from things like my RSS-feed blogroll, which repeats the final names for the tinyCoffeemug-type images. Worse, the HTML is in the macro, so I'm not sure how to put in the alt text that should be there. Still, this makes me really happy.
categories: fireweaver metablog
12:02:57 AM say what []
