Rowan Lipkovits (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} reluctance) wrote,@ 2009-01-07 10:04:00 |
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Shocked into action
At the news of LiveJournal's impending Russian Large Hadron Collider AOL Hometown Black Hole Layoff Implosion, I made like a good little goomba for whom nostalgia and history are nigh paramount, and backed up my entries and comments.
The client I used includes some curious tools for varying kinds of statistical analysis, some of which revealed somewhat underwhelming truths (such as: while I have never dipped below two posts a month (often at least one of which was an event promotion crossposting of some kind or another), that could be described as my mode average) and surprising categories of analysis (which senses are evoked most frequently, for instance, or whether one's word choices reveal a prevalent Freudian drive in the oral, anal or sexual category.)
One thing that came up was a table of the most frequently-used words, a list of which I figure pretty aptly sums up my existence (by which I mean my activities, implicitly binding the two together) over the past five years, with most of my projects figuring prominently. No big surprises, but some top nouns (and how often they were invoked) include: accordion (345), music (272), Vancouver (244), Friday (209), Rowan (196 -- let's hear it for speaking in the third person!), event (174), Planks (156), Varieties (153), Butchershop (152), stage (151), performance (148), events (141), band (139), poetry (136), game (131). I guess I have pretty confirmedly sold my soul to show business... only down around 100 appearances do I begin discussing trivial matters such as eating and sleeping.
(A further step I'd like to see, while we're generating word-frequency tables, is looking at word pairs to permit us to Markov chain in our own voice to reveal subconscious truths, like that perennial phrase "touch-hungry to an almost painful extent" I keep invoking.)
At the news of LJ's staffing sneeze Jen (whose conspicuously un-explicitly-linked LJ is next on the backup pile: "don't make rude posts on my behalf!!!" she asks while feeding me her password for the Windows-only archive program. Fear not, I respond, I will only make polite ones) supposes that this must translate into a migration boom to blogspot and the like. I figure that for ease-of-use alone the rats would be fleeing the sinking ship on to one of the many LJ clones making use of the same codebase, not least because they are presumably autonomous from LJ, Inc.'s parent corporation and hence inured against its ailments.
Which of course made me think back to why I maintain a LiveJournal account in the first place given that I only post using it on average twice a month (, as I just found out.) At the time (2003), all my post-hosting needs were met by everything2.com (which rather than catastrophically evaporating all your contributions in one grim crash would instead gradually haemorrhage away 80% of everything you put into it over a period of a couple of years), itself adopted following a couple of tentative toe-dips into the not-then-ready-for-prime-time h2g2 (somehow managing to sink beyond the enormous boost its central premise promised) and diaryland (for whom prime time was never really on the menu). Previously I'd enjoyed forum-style postings on TABNet, our holdout then (more nominally now) from our brief but formative dial-up BBS echomail network days '94-'98, but a great diaspora was underway and rather than inviting friends into the fray and building up the forum activity people at that heady turn of the century were instead spinning their activity off elsewhere, inviting you to join them at thematically-related but technologically-unattached satellite services, where they would discuss themselves and might deign to grant you permission to make a few comments while basking in the light of their radiant eminence. Because we were their friends and were interested in keeping up with what they were up to, and because we were nerds and didn't do so over phone calls or regular real-life encounters, we slunk away from "our" shared online space to these new personal fiefdoms and watched, aghast, as personal essays were soon supplanted by an endless series of quiz results (a trend I'm pleased to report has been reversing ever since, barring the occasional meme -- which is now generally understood to belong under a LJ-cut. It's almost civilized now!)
(Paragraph break for readability!)
Keeping tabs on 50 people in one forum was easy -- visit one website, no problem. Keeping tabs on 50 people across 50 different, often standard-noncompliant websites was not so trivial a feat, especially in the pre-RSS reader era. Somehow eventually LJ, despite its egregious offenses at the time (for me, the very notion of the cliquey and exclusive invite code system was anathema -- isn't elitism what I came online to get away from in the first place? -- and three people had to offer codes to me before I would take one of them up on it) began pulling the lion's share of my peers, a certain demographic with certain wants and needs. I'm sure from the posters' perspective, its privacy, security and screening capabilities were what sold it; from this /reader's/ POV, the automation of the friend's list blogroll functionality were what wore down my principled resolve. Finally, I can read it all by visiting just one site -- plus get access to protected posts I've only heard about secondhand, PLUS get the ability to comment where anonymous postings are outlawed. (Plus, as it turns out, using LJ as an RSS reader itself -- as long as you have a friend with a paid account to import the feed.)
These qualities describe both why LJ was a killer app in 2003 and why Facebook really has I think effectively supplanted it contemporarily. Similarly, if you opt out, you miss out on a lot, while if you opt in, you may be cut in on a loop that involves a lot of signal so similar to noise they may as well be indistinguishable. But instead of keeping tabs on 250 people who express themselves in paragraphs, I can now keep tabs on 650 people who express themselves in oneliners. (Perhaps in some far flung future I may be part of a social network of five thousand people who express themselves solely in mood icons, while my grandchildren might participate in a network of a million people who set themselves either to 0 or 1 every morning.)
(Outta gas!)
While dwelling on digital ephemerality, I took the opportunity yesterday to pull down HOTU's entire selection of PDF-gamebooks, a recently-revived passion of mine, before they go the way of its tragically unparalleled (and now totally unavailable instead of only mostly) overlooked computer game collection.
...
In totally unrelated news, thanks to the last minute, I am slated to be a guest on Wax Poetic, Co-op Radio's weekly poetry radio show, this afternoon at 2 pm (PST)... a nice complement to my December Poetry Slam feature spot (which I still hope someday to tell you more about) despite having long since set my poet's hat aside. I prepared 25 minutes of supporting poetry material from YouTube last night at 1 am (old hat now following my initial double-dip Friday, my terrifying spree of being behind the control board for the first time... for two and a half hours!) before discovering this morning that the show is only a half-hour long -- so Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate probably will not make the final cut, as interesting as it is. If you like, you can tune in to 102.7 fm (at least, you can try, depending on atmospheric conditions), Star Choice satellite radio station number 845, or there are a few choices of online audio streams for high-bandwidth surfers if you prefer.
Edit: immediately following the posting of this entry, an unknown AIM account asked me "Wouldn't a kitten the size of an elephant be fun to play with?" Looks like a return in fine form from the Great Hatsby prankster bot! Who knows what they'll do if LJ goes under.
At the news of LiveJournal's impending Russian Large Hadron Collider AOL Hometown Black Hole Layoff Implosion, I made like a good little goomba for whom nostalgia and history are nigh paramount, and backed up my entries and comments.
The client I used includes some curious tools for varying kinds of statistical analysis, some of which revealed somewhat underwhelming truths (such as: while I have never dipped below two posts a month (often at least one of which was an event promotion crossposting of some kind or another), that could be described as my mode average) and surprising categories of analysis (which senses are evoked most frequently, for instance, or whether one's word choices reveal a prevalent Freudian drive in the oral, anal or sexual category.)
One thing that came up was a table of the most frequently-used words, a list of which I figure pretty aptly sums up my existence (by which I mean my activities, implicitly binding the two together) over the past five years, with most of my projects figuring prominently. No big surprises, but some top nouns (and how often they were invoked) include: accordion (345), music (272), Vancouver (244), Friday (209), Rowan (196 -- let's hear it for speaking in the third person!), event (174), Planks (156), Varieties (153), Butchershop (152), stage (151), performance (148), events (141), band (139), poetry (136), game (131). I guess I have pretty confirmedly sold my soul to show business... only down around 100 appearances do I begin discussing trivial matters such as eating and sleeping.
(A further step I'd like to see, while we're generating word-frequency tables, is looking at word pairs to permit us to Markov chain in our own voice to reveal subconscious truths, like that perennial phrase "touch-hungry to an almost painful extent" I keep invoking.)
At the news of LJ's staffing sneeze Jen (whose conspicuously un-explicitly-linked LJ is next on the backup pile: "don't make rude posts on my behalf!!!" she asks while feeding me her password for the Windows-only archive program. Fear not, I respond, I will only make polite ones) supposes that this must translate into a migration boom to blogspot and the like. I figure that for ease-of-use alone the rats would be fleeing the sinking ship on to one of the many LJ clones making use of the same codebase, not least because they are presumably autonomous from LJ, Inc.'s parent corporation and hence inured against its ailments.
Which of course made me think back to why I maintain a LiveJournal account in the first place given that I only post using it on average twice a month (, as I just found out.) At the time (2003), all my post-hosting needs were met by everything2.com (which rather than catastrophically evaporating all your contributions in one grim crash would instead gradually haemorrhage away 80% of everything you put into it over a period of a couple of years), itself adopted following a couple of tentative toe-dips into the not-then-ready-for-prime-time h2g2 (somehow managing to sink beyond the enormous boost its central premise promised) and diaryland (for whom prime time was never really on the menu). Previously I'd enjoyed forum-style postings on TABNet, our holdout then (more nominally now) from our brief but formative dial-up BBS echomail network days '94-'98, but a great diaspora was underway and rather than inviting friends into the fray and building up the forum activity people at that heady turn of the century were instead spinning their activity off elsewhere, inviting you to join them at thematically-related but technologically-unattached satellite services, where they would discuss themselves and might deign to grant you permission to make a few comments while basking in the light of their radiant eminence. Because we were their friends and were interested in keeping up with what they were up to, and because we were nerds and didn't do so over phone calls or regular real-life encounters, we slunk away from "our" shared online space to these new personal fiefdoms and watched, aghast, as personal essays were soon supplanted by an endless series of quiz results (a trend I'm pleased to report has been reversing ever since, barring the occasional meme -- which is now generally understood to belong under a LJ-cut. It's almost civilized now!)
(Paragraph break for readability!)
Keeping tabs on 50 people in one forum was easy -- visit one website, no problem. Keeping tabs on 50 people across 50 different, often standard-noncompliant websites was not so trivial a feat, especially in the pre-RSS reader era. Somehow eventually LJ, despite its egregious offenses at the time (for me, the very notion of the cliquey and exclusive invite code system was anathema -- isn't elitism what I came online to get away from in the first place? -- and three people had to offer codes to me before I would take one of them up on it) began pulling the lion's share of my peers, a certain demographic with certain wants and needs. I'm sure from the posters' perspective, its privacy, security and screening capabilities were what sold it; from this /reader's/ POV, the automation of the friend's list blogroll functionality were what wore down my principled resolve. Finally, I can read it all by visiting just one site -- plus get access to protected posts I've only heard about secondhand, PLUS get the ability to comment where anonymous postings are outlawed. (Plus, as it turns out, using LJ as an RSS reader itself -- as long as you have a friend with a paid account to import the feed.)
These qualities describe both why LJ was a killer app in 2003 and why Facebook really has I think effectively supplanted it contemporarily. Similarly, if you opt out, you miss out on a lot, while if you opt in, you may be cut in on a loop that involves a lot of signal so similar to noise they may as well be indistinguishable. But instead of keeping tabs on 250 people who express themselves in paragraphs, I can now keep tabs on 650 people who express themselves in oneliners. (Perhaps in some far flung future I may be part of a social network of five thousand people who express themselves solely in mood icons, while my grandchildren might participate in a network of a million people who set themselves either to 0 or 1 every morning.)
(Outta gas!)
While dwelling on digital ephemerality, I took the opportunity yesterday to pull down HOTU's entire selection of PDF-gamebooks, a recently-revived passion of mine, before they go the way of its tragically unparalleled (and now totally unavailable instead of only mostly) overlooked computer game collection.
...
In totally unrelated news, thanks to the last minute, I am slated to be a guest on Wax Poetic, Co-op Radio's weekly poetry radio show, this afternoon at 2 pm (PST)... a nice complement to my December Poetry Slam feature spot (which I still hope someday to tell you more about) despite having long since set my poet's hat aside. I prepared 25 minutes of supporting poetry material from YouTube last night at 1 am (old hat now following my initial double-dip Friday, my terrifying spree of being behind the control board for the first time... for two and a half hours!) before discovering this morning that the show is only a half-hour long -- so Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate probably will not make the final cut, as interesting as it is. If you like, you can tune in to 102.7 fm (at least, you can try, depending on atmospheric conditions), Star Choice satellite radio station number 845, or there are a few choices of online audio streams for high-bandwidth surfers if you prefer.
Edit: immediately following the posting of this entry, an unknown AIM account asked me "Wouldn't a kitten the size of an elephant be fun to play with?" Looks like a return in fine form from the Great Hatsby prankster bot! Who knows what they'll do if LJ goes under.
