Day: October 14, 2007

This is pretty obvious but apparently isn't obvious to print media trying to get hep to the whole online thing. From Daily Kos:

Bloggers use links to give readers the opportunity to view their source material. When a blogger makes an assertion, you can typically check the validity of that assertion by following links to that blogger's source, and decide for yourself whether it's been properly analyzed.

When traditional media use links, they tend to point to that media outlet's collection of archived articles on the proper noun they've attached the link to.

So when a blogger says, "President Bush today announced his intention to invade Liechtenstein," that blogger would tend to attach the link to something like "announced his intention," and have it point to a newspaper article or White House press release containing a quote from Bush, saying, "I intend to invade Liechtenstein."

When a newspaper says, "President Bush today announced his intention to invade Liechtenstein," the links are on "President Bush," and "Liechtenstein." And they link to archived articles about President Bush and Liechtenstein, in every other context in which that paper has written about those subjects.

Useless.

Unless, of course, you don't know who President Bush is, or more plausibly, what Liechtenstein is. In which case the links are perfect.

The Kos post is patting Frank Rich on the back for using substantive links--he's one of the few writers at the New York Times who does. Of course, his articles will soon be full of link rot (old, broken links) like my blog posts are. The issue for me isn't so much that substantive links are great--they can be annoying distractions and lead to lazy half telling the story, like I did a few posts back. For me the issue is how stupid the Times' fake links are.

Notes for an intro I may or may not give at Galapagos tonight. (Either way it won't be this long and involved--I only have a minute or so to talk.)

Although this was billed as a performance it is actually a demo.
The "demo scene" emerged in European computer geek culture.
Programmers got together and set up monitors on folding tables and showed each other what they were working on.
Tonight I am demo-ing a CD of music (four songs dj-ed together into a continous mix) and a DVD of 15-20 animations.
The two will run simultaneously--the points of contact between them are fairly random.
Although I'm calling this a demo I'm not a programmer, but an artist using a home computer to make images and music.
The visuals are as "original" as the software allows--I try to use the simplest programs so it is clearer what is "mine."
Some of the images originated on the Internet but all of those have been manipulated or added to.
The music is all "mine"--i.e., it's all live synthesis written and performed by me and tracked down for CD, although the music-creation software programming and hardware wiring is a "default," that is, someone else's work.
All of this content (images and audio) has been published to the web on my blog(s).
Part of the reason I'm demo-ing it is to see how it "scales up" to big screen projection and a club-sized PA system.
I tried to pick work that was fairly transparent and iconic--that would read or sound clearly no matter what the environment.
We'll see if it works.