The black and white part of me wanted to name this post “analog vs digital.” But there is absolutely no need to create a rivalry here.

Gina stepped down from EIC at Lifehacker the other day and wrote a sentence that I know I’m going to come back soon: “The bottom line is this: for someone who loves making things on the web, spending 100% of the time blogging about what other people are making is simply untenable.”

This goes back to yesterday’s post about conversations online, but it’s even deeper than that.

I’m more interested in expression than a dialogue, at least at the moment, though it’s probably fair to say that this is a long-term deal with me. And maybe that’s part of my frustration: we haven’t found a way to take the internet and really get away from the conversation-mode.

And when you look at the possibilities online, they seem endless, but when compared to the world, they are so limited. Everything runs in a browser, in an OS. We are layers deep already, forced to display in pixels, always in windows in monitors.

Walking through the Rodin sculpture garden at Stanford on Saturday, I was struck by scale, by dimensionality, by texture. And by frustration.

There most certainly are ways to marry these, to fuse them in ways beyond youTube or dodgeball or video installations. Like using the internet to sell your used underwear, there must be ways to flip and invert and use the strengths of all of these to produce something engaging and interesting.

It isn’t an either/or or a versus. We aren’t yet living in the matrix; we need both systems. We just have to find more interesting ways to glue them together.*

* We being me mostly. I’m still attempting to move away from both online product sales and location-aware/based online items. I am sure there are other ways to tie the digital to the analog — or the physical to intangible.

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I keep coming back to Jason Scott’s post “Fuck the Cloud” in my head. (Yes, there are other things bouncing around up there, but I’ve already explained I’m on a roll here.)

I understand his point and his frustration. But right on cue, a service turned up in my feed reader that offers to back-up your digital service content. Let me be clear however: their implementation, as I understand it, is awful. As in, don’t use it. You pay them, give them your credentials and they back-up your stuff to Amazon S3. Thanks, but no.

The problem, as I see it, isn’t this notion of the cloud or the problem of having your data on servers you don’t pay for. I know it’s silly, but extrapolate Jason’s issue out — even though I pay for hosting for madeofglass, I don’t maintain the server. I don’t rent the space. I don’t own the wires or silicon and I have no control over the electricity that connects you to this server. At some point, the control breaks down.

And of course you keep copies of items you post to these services. That’s common sense.

What has really turned his argument on his head, for me, is the ah-ha moment where I realized that most (all?) of these services are about conversations.

I am a packrat. And I backup furiously. And, for a long time, I saved every IM convo I had with Rachael. Loggers and histories and records, I saved so much. And one day I woke up and realized that there was zero reason to spend time on this.

Most everything Internet-related revolves around conversation — the notion of comments, chats, emails, sharing media, blogs, facebook/myspace — it’s all about conversations. And, in reality, conversations are impermanent things. They are fleeting and don’t need to be backed up.

Who cares where this stuff is?*

Sidenote: This is all a very literal interpretation of his complaints; waxy linked a more basic retort the other day, though the argument there is more about renting/owning, which is good and logical when we are talking about other people’s media. But Jason was originally talking about his own (or, self-made works, even if they weren’t his explicitly).

Two elements that do overlap are these: “Free things don’t generate strong feelings of ownership.” and “As more items are invented and manufactured – while the total number of hours in a day to enjoy them remains fixed – we spend less and less time per item.” The former is extremely true and represents my own personal shift in media the last 10 years — from buying DVDs to subscribing to Netflix to streaming from Hulu. The second item is far more important in this context.

As more and more items become available to us and as we improve personalization systems, it will be easier and easier to only be exposed to things we like. I used to think this was a huge problem and, to some extent, I still do. There is something to be said for spending time with things you don’t like (see: my moving to LA); this notion is best argued for when combined with social media viewing (see: talking about Lost over the water cooler).

Part of this whole stream of thought has been about how to move writing and media past these filters and find a way to make the very notion of reading/writing more interesting.

* Fair to say that I do care. But I think I care less about where the data lives and more that the very act of creating a dialogue on facebook is tedious for me. I haven’t found the sweet spot for myself yet. But I don’t need a personal copy of all my facebook activity.

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The internet rewards quantity and consistency. Having a routine of posting, being dependable to create content online is what builds an audience. Well, one thing that builds an audience.

But the “real world” doesn’t quite work the same way. Or perhaps it just works on a slower scale — daily isn’t the requirement. But the net effect is the same — you can spend 2 years, 5 years writing a book or creating a work of art. And your audience will still be there.

Once again, there is some kind of balance here between these two items, but so far I am not seeing it. The “big names” online are big because they are frequent and consistent — granted, it’s also because they are good, but there is little doubt that peeps like Kottke would be as large if he posted once a week.

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Ok, now this might be getting silly. This is a slight addendum to my other 2 reviews of QoS. ( review 1 and the second)

Nick sent me this review of Quantum of Solace, as I seem to be moving into defense for this movie*. Though if this guy’s biggest issue with the film is that it’s too realistic, I suggest he stick with Die Another Day.

The newest issue of Final Crisis came out**, kicked ass and I have some pull quotes:
Morrison on the style: “We had widescreen comics and decompression and super-compression. This is channel-zapping comics.”
And a review: “Throughout the series, Morrison has been using what I’ve been calling a “pointillist” style, where he shows a quick scene here, a quick scene there, all so you get an overlying sense of universal dread.”

The notion of this skipping around, the full picture never seen — and the notion of seeing reaction more than the action is something I like and expect to see more of.*** The Martin Amis interview I linked to a few days ago reinforces this in my head — I’m unsure what the true literary name for this style will be, but it is reflected in the internet, our consuming of media (where comments are nothing but reaction — online, we are never present for the actual event) and the whole 21st century/post postmodern movement.

Have you noticed anything like this in other pieces of media?

* I don’t love this movie. I think it is remarkable because I see stylistic and directional choices that are hanging out at the periphery at the moment. For now, it’s a perfect example in film of where I think we are going with film.

** Here is one other review of FC, which I really just ought to point out for the zillionth time that I am really enjoying. I’d tell you to run out and read it, except that it is prob too comic booky for you. I mean, unless you already are familiar with the New Gods. That might be a decent barometer. But from the first comment in this post: “I love the book, but the problems that people in my circle have come down to the extremely sudden start/stop of the scenes, the very loose connection from one scene to the next, and the general chaos of it all” Zing!

*** I’d be lying if I said that I don’t see some of it in my own novel as well, but I hate tooting my own horn.

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Ok, it appears I am now writing on a theme; apologies for those of you who weren’t ready for me to spend 1500 words and a bunch of posts talking about vague ideas of publishing online. I left off talking about Web 2.0 and the difference between services and creating. There are some weird overlaps though, items that have popped up to me in the past few weeks.

Like selling your by-products online. (Kinda NSFW, thanks to Vice’s naughty photos.) I mentioned a few days ago about how we don’t get to decide how media consumed and it’s this article that tied it together for me with the Gladwell ideas of timing and genius.

Creating isn’t just about having the genius to create something unique and interesting. That’s tough enough. But it needs to happen in line with popular culture. And there aren’t rules anymore — it’s beg, borrow, steal time. Selling your used underwear online is just as legitimate as another part-time job. Finding ways to make money online in combination with the real world, whether artistic or not, is exactly the point.*

And so I have spent weeks wracking my brain thinking about publishing online, writing for audiences and how one might step out of the notion of ‘blog blog blog’ as a way of building an audience.

Suddenly, I’m less interested in marketing my novel to you and somehow sneaking it through your service filters.

Suddenly, I’m far more interested in finding new ways to convince you to read. Of course I want it to be my stuff. But I’m also thinking about things like the iPhone, Rss feeds, Twitter and goodness knows what else as ways of integrating story-telling into daily life.

Tumbarumba seems interesting, but it looks like it is going the opposite direction of me: I want to find ways to make reading and consuming easier and more rewarding. I’m not convinced that making a game of reading fiction is more fun. It’s conceptually interesting but it doesn’t reduce the effort.

But it goes further — it’s recalling that the internet isn’t limited to the web; that email and texting and networks and bittorrent and a whole host of other pieces are available to make use of. It’s part of the challenge — finding new ways to glue all of this together, along with products like the iPhone/iPod and the Kindle.

At the moment, I don’t have solid solutions. This is as far as I got in thinking before finding out I had medical issues that totally derailed my thinking. I’m sure I’ll have more — and I welcome any dialogue; I imagine I am moving towards a ’see what sticks’ type of thing. And I’ll keep you updated.

* This is a no-brainer, but my personality drifts so hard to black/white, it’s often very difficult for me to get to the shades of gray. This is one of those times.

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Keep with me on all of this.

Think about all the crap you consume on a daily basis. I don’t mean food and packaging or even your clothing. I mean information and media and how you spend your downtime. When you relax, when you say, “Let’s watch a movie.” or “I want to read a book.”

At least for me, there is a narrow band of items I know, love, trust. And there is a larger band of services that I use to filter the stuff I love. And all of it comes down to convenience.

Said another way: I like a limited number of creators. This has become more and more obvious to me as I have delved deeper into rating systems. I’ve been rating on Netflix a lot recently and I’ve been much more active in my iTunes, trying to rate songs and albums*. And in doing all of this, I rate most things as a 3 on a scale of 5. 1 and 5 are rare, 2 and 4 are less so. It’s just a big bell curve. A very steep bell curve, really.

And to wade through this morass, I use stuff like iTunes, Netflix and Google to keep track of those few items I like, against the ocean of stuff I am lukewarm about.

And living here, in Silicon Valley, people are always looking and thinking about services. About Wordpress and Twitter and and Flickr and Google and heavens knows what all. It’s the nature of the game now — you build services so you can get people to come contribute content.

This is Web 2.0.

And from time to time, I can convince myself I have an idea for a service, one I never end up building or documenting. That’s a bummer, sure. But ultimately, it’s not what I want to spend time on. That part is my day job anyway — and if you talk about any of the services above, odds are that you can’t name people who worked on any of them.**

The notion of publishing to a service is touched on a little less politely by Jason Scott in his post “Fuck the Cloud.” For the most part, I agree completely with him — but the caveat is that, currently, we need both our own data stores and services. And finding ways to tie them together is the challenge. (This is a slightly different use of the whole application vs data discussion that has existed forever.)

But it really isn’t what gets me hot at the end of the day. At the end of the day, I want to find new ways, interesting ways of telling stories. But it isn’t quite that easy.

* Did you know iTunes has an album rating field? It’s cool, but like many of iTunes neatest features, it’s missing 1 or 2 details and thus is just shy of uber-cool.

** Ok, maybe you can name 1 person or 2. Or if you live here and travel in web dev circles, we can get up on 2 or 3 hands. But really, every single one of those services required the effort of numerous people doing a lot of stuff. Pointing to a single vision for these things is close to impossible.

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I’m only posting this because, even a couple of hours after the chat, I’m still frankly bemused and left to wonder: Am I not explaining this right? How many different ways can I ask the same question?

*Note: you’ll only find this of any interest whatsoever if you’re a web geek. If not, move along…

Welcome to Earthlink LiveChat. Your chat session will begin shortly. Feel free to begin typing your question.

Please hold for an agent. While you are waiting, please feel free to begin typing your issue in the box below. Try to be as descriptive as possible. Once an agent is assigned to the chat, click SEND to transmit what you have typed. 

‘Sharon G’ says: Thank you for contacting EarthLink LiveChat, how may I help you today?

Me: Hi. I’m setting up our website on an Earthlink hosted account. We have not yet transferred over our domain name, as we wish to first verify and test the new site on the new account. Until then, we are leaving our old account active. In the interim, as we test, what URL may we type in order to view our Earthlink hosted account in a web browser, given that our actual domain directs to our old existing site?

Sharon G: Hello, Please give me a moment to read your message. 

Sharon G: Thank you for staying on hold. 

Sharon G: I am sorry for the delay. 

Sharon G: I understand that your domain is transferred form another provider to EarthLink. And you want to check the domain is working or not. Am I correct? 

Me: Um, no. We have set up an Earthlink hosting account. We have another hosting account where are domain currently resides. We will transfer the domain name once we have verified that the site is up and tested. SO, I need a URL of the Earthlink hosted account, be it server address or other, where I can actually view the test account. Once we have done all of our testing on the new account and are sure we have the site running correctly, then we will contact Network Solutions and transfer the domain. Make sense? So, I need an address where I can view my site which doesn’t need our domain name.

Sharon G: I understand your concern. 

Sharon G: I am sorry to say you, but but you need to contact our Web Hosting phone support to resolve it. Because, it is the something that can be done from our server end. As a Live Chat representative, I do not have privileges to access it due to security reasons. Please call our Web Hosting customer service at 800-955-0186

Sharon G: Is there anything else I may assist you with today?

Me: Actually, it doesn’t technically have to involve server access. In most instances, as I understand it, the URL would be something like:

Me: http://earthlink.net/hostaccount/yadda/yadda/index.html

Me: If I still need to dial in and speak to a rep, I understand.

Me: Again, we’re just talking about viewing. I already have ftp access.

Sharon G: Are you referring to Control center of the domain? 

Me: No, I don’t think so. I’ve been to my control center. What I’m actually hoping to get is an actual, physical URL that I can type into a browser which will let me view our site, that is irrespective of our domain name, which currently points elsewhere. Make sense?

Sharon G: Yes, please let me know your domain name to pull up your account. 

Me: [theactualdomainwehavebeentalkingabout].org

Sharon G: Thank you for the information. 

Sharon G: Please use the link given below to access your website. 

Sharon G: http://www.[the actual domain we have been talking about].org/index.htm

Sharon G: Is there anything else I may assist you with today?

Me: That actually won’t work, as our domain name currently directs to another provider. We won’t be switching over the domain name until the Earthlink account is up and running. So, typing in that URL will only take me to our old account with Charter. See? That’s why I need the URL of the server address at Earthlink.

Me: I do appreciate your patience in this matter. =)

Sharon G: I understand your concern. But I see that your domain is already released from our portal .Name servers for the domain are se to WEBHOSTING.COM

Sharon G: *set to WEBHOSTING.COM

Sharon G: Is there anything else I may assist you with today?

Me: Right. Looking at the WHOIS with NetSol shows that the domain name points to SBC servers. Which is where it will stay until we test the new account with Earthlink. See, we are coming TO Earthlink FROM SBC (Sorry, I think I said Charter earlier). But first we need to test it. And to do that, we need a viewable URL on the Earthlink Server.

Sharon G: I am sorry to say you, but you need to contact our Phone support regarding this. This can be accusable form our server end. 

Me: I’m not entirely sure what that last part means. 

Sharon G: I am sorry to say you, but but you need to contact our Web Hosting phone support to resolve it. Because, it is the something that can be done from our server end. As a Live Chat representative, I do not have privileges to access it due to security reasons. Please call our Web Hosting customer service at 800-955-0186

Me: Alrighty. Thanks.

Sharon G: Is there anything else I may assist you with today?

Me: I don’t think so.

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