tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post5378814880559053724..comments2023-04-20T08:42:51.694-04:00Comments on Annals Of The Hive: mise-en-scènes: Most Of The Web's Are A MessBilly Gladhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-45766669210116472712011-03-14T22:00:46.083-04:002011-03-14T22:00:46.083-04:00Agreed on the collective narrative.
I'm inte...Agreed on the collective narrative. <br /><br />I'm interested in this as an historical phenomenon. It happens, from time to time, that collective stories come forward, and individual heroes recede. I've been shocked as - since the late 1960's/early 1970's - the individual hero has pretty much fallen over and died. In music. The novel. Politics. Social movements. <br /><br />I think what happened is that we HAD a collective story, led by our heroes, and then "our generation" (which I think is our collective) basically... abandoned its story. Its youthful dreams. Entered its "wilderness years," if you will.<br /><br />And what we're faced with now is a collective coming to terms with that. Either dying as 100 million assholes who resent that they abandoned their youthful dreams, or... by attempting to redeem the damn things.<br /><br />Yup, we had great writers. Really. It makes me laugh, to tell the truth. I've been part of some great groups over the years, really smart people, really good writers. The Hive was as good as any. If only the rest of you weren't such pricks. <br /><br />Yeah, people are gonna move to Twitter. I'm fine with that. At 157,641,999 blogs, I don't mind a bit of winnowing. Besides, there've been 80,081 new blogs created in the last 24 hours... And 1,303,763 blog posts put up. [I don't feel so bad about not putting one up today now.] Seriously, let some of the froth move to Twitter. We have to get to where there are lots and lots of blogs which go from hundreds of readers to thousands, I think. And so on. <br /><br />As for FDL and such... Alexa says they're the 3,819th most popular blog in the US. Not bad. (TPM is 820.) People spend about 4 minutes there on average, per visit. So maybe there're are people who just visit to check their blog and comments a lot, I donno. <br /><br />But it has 2,492 sites linking in. So, my guess is you've got 2,500-25,000 dedicated readers there. And I'll bet >50% of them have their own blogs, each of which have... 10-100 readers. And so on. So if you write something great, something that sticks - thousands of people will pick it up, at some stage along the chain.<br /><br />Will you get credit? Hell no. <br /><br />Will you make money? No chance. But I wasn't planning on it. Methods for doing that are years out, I think. <br /><br />Will you change things? Possibly. And that's where it gets interesting.Quinn the Eskimohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17476587042538779513noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-61334183373443064642011-03-14T20:37:05.784-04:002011-03-14T20:37:05.784-04:00I mention a few exceptions, and I know there are m...I mention a few exceptions, and I know there are more. I began to think about this when I re-read the Annals a while back. That and, of course, experiencing a lot of sites that are pretty crappy over the last few years. The thing about the Annals is the original posts never rise to the level that the posts plus comment threads do. Proof to me that the collective narrative is more interesting than any individual narrative. I've also come to appreciate the importance of funding. At its peak, the Hive had as good a team of writers as any site on the web. If I could have funded it properly so that everyone could work on the Annals full time, I think it would have been something. But we have to deal with the web as we find it now. And I hear blogs are on the way out. People are moving to twitter and face book now, or as Mansky suggests, to their own "professional" sites. <br /><br />Everything you say about the technology and usefulness of the web is true. But, to me, that doesn't make it very interesting to talk about. <br /><br />Here's what's interesting to me right now. If you go to Firedoglake's front page and click on the sitemeter, you see that they get 86,000 visits a day -- but it took them 3 or 4 days to get 500 members to sign-up to support them at $45 per year. Average visit length is 12 fucking seconds!Billy Gladhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15770091064802428657noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3178004664613178789.post-26790200944786709102011-03-14T18:20:02.337-04:002011-03-14T18:20:02.337-04:00Too harsh, I'd say. What with the graveyard, d...Too harsh, I'd say. What with the graveyard, degraded, no art, no future, dumbed down, etc. <br /><br />Reminds me a bit of looking at the book, c. Gutenberg & decades thereafter, and deciding it was domed to be limited to the mass production of indulgences. Or to TV in the 30's and 40's.<br /><br />Let's face it, a lot of this is generational. But just for me, as a oldster/latecomer, it's changed.... everything. I prefer e-mail to the phone or the letter. I prefer Google and Yahoo to the stacks. I prefer Wikipedia to Britannica. I vastly prefer the ability to get "news" not just from one local paper or the networks, but from 1001 sources - aggregated at Pulse, Vibe or whereever. I prefer Facebook for staying in touch with extended families, as compared to the phone tree. I'll take Amazon over any bookstore, and Kindle over a hardback. I like YouTube over the video store. Online banking beats bricks and mortar ones. eBay beats yardsales. Skype beats phone. StumbleUpon beats my weird friend Harold. MapQuest and GoogleMaps beat the foldable kind. iTunes and Torrents beat video and record stores. TED beats Economics 101. Video games beat board games. All that software that let's us do it ourselves, all the ability to track and detect stuff, all that beats what came before. Even the world of Wikileaks beats the world of no Wikileaks.<br /><br /><br />Now, you'd probably argue that none of those are new art forms, or even art re-designed for the Internet. <br /><br />What amuses me about this, is that you'd use the Internet, and write a "Blog," to argue your point. Blogs being - IMO - an early form of something which never really existed before. A something which, at times, come near enough to being "art" that I'd have to let it in. <br /><br />That is, we can love the old forms, but TV and film and books were pretty much one-way pipes, with >99% of us on the receiving end. But what to do with this maniacal world of TENS OF MILLIONS of people with their blogs devoted to sports, art, craft, animals, heroes, spirits, villains, porn and everything else fascinating...? There's nothing like it before, other than Circus sideshows and oddball conventions. Yes, we had diaries and newspaper columns and specialty magazines... but 1,000 people writing on something is a lot different than 100,000,000. Plus, this is free. Plus, it updates within seconds. Plus, it's global. Plus, you can link to anything in the world. Plus, it's more visual. etc.<br /><br />So.... your complaint then becomes the somewhat narrower one of, that most/all of the sites here have no narrative. Interesting. You really saying that all these "diaries" have no narrative? Maybe not. But that's perhaps more a comment on our lives than on the sites, and I'm not sure I'm down with that. If it's just that there's crap on here, and redundancy, yeah. That. <br /><br />But if I was looking for new art forms on the web, I might not go far amiss than to point people to, say, the Blog called "Annals of the Hive." <br /><br />Some might even think it had an interesting narrative.Quinn the Eskimohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17476587042538779513noreply@blogger.com