Appendix: Raw Notes
p. 5. “[so-and-so] grouped a bunch of webloggers into high school cliques
and called me a jock” the shit-talking begins, this is comfortable, nothing
has changed.
p. 5. “Dave decided I must be ‘brain-damaged’ because I used frames.” first
thought: this is worthy of publication? second thought: oh, wait, these are
raw blog posts republished. third thought: 
Tracked down the Dave Winer post myself, to ensure ‘brain-damaged’ was the
actual wording. (It was.) Quote just below it:
Dad says I shouldn’t criticize other people on my site. He’s right, in theory.
But in practice, what I don’t like is just as much a part of my personality as
what I do like.
— Kate Adams
(Personal aside: I once criticized the cover of a Philip K. Dick book publicly
on the Internet. The only response my post receive was from the illustrator
that had designed the cover. She basically said: “Thanks, that hurt.” You might
think she had no business replying to my post and should have just taken the
criticism. But she didn’t like my criticism - which is “just as much a part of
her personality” as anything else, I suppose.)
p. 9. Good Rebecca Blood quote: “These weblogs provide a valuable filtering
function for their readers. The Web has been, in effect, pre-surfed for them.”
p. 11. There seems to be a recurring theme that Blogger made blogging “too
easy” by just having a single textbox to post in. Didn’t realize it was that
much of a progenitor to Twitter.
p. 12. Filters as their own thing: “I really wish there were another term to
describe the filter-style weblog, one that would easily distinguish it from the
blog.”
(No indication of the tools available to the ‘filter’ blog are given - except
that it has access to other filter blogs. Also, there are about five different
blog types alluded to - none of them matter now.)
p. 18. The author seems to say that communities, in order to survive, must stay
small - and credits The WELL with the best approach.
I don’t know The WELL - but it’s still here today. Wonder if it is considered
intact…
p. 20. The term ‘webpools’ is used here several times. There are many, many
outdated terms and awkward language choices in these essays. These are really
cool to me because the language was in such flux - and it reminds me of how
repulsive the word ‘blog’ was at first. (I invent crappy words, too - guilty.)
p. 27. Having a good ‘link checker’ is mentioned. Interesting that this
technology is nowhere to be seen now. (Href.cool has a simple, dumb one I made -
but it’s proven essential.)
p. 31. Some discussion about crediting sources. The discussion is basically
“this is a virtuous thing to do” vs. “it clutters up the blog”. This misses the
point (imho) - the point is to aid discovering related blogs.
p. 32. This is so funny: “But what about a weblog for the homemaker?”
p. 32. “Wouldn’t it be great if all the neurosurgeons in the world had one
place to go for up-to-date information about the numerous changes in their
field?” No. Hard no.
p. 35. The need for one’s own domain name. I used to think this wasn’t very
important. Starting to come around.
p. 37. “fram” - friend spam. This was nostalgic - ahh right, basically, e-mail
forwards were the Facebook of that era. Again, recurring theme of: people need
to become better, more disciplined independent writers and publishers. That is
what the Web asks of us.
p. 43. omgz, a spoof of “we didn’t start the fire” in the middle of the book.
“Wetlog, BrainLog, NeoFlux, and Stuffed Dog…” this is amaaazing.
p. 49. beebo.org?? wtf, this is the second time this has come up. “a blog
best-seller list”? The captures on Internet Archive do not explain this well
enough for me.
p. 51. It’s becoming clear that Blogger was the poster child of its time.
Strangely, people don’t really trace the lineage of Twitter or Tumblr back to it - nor
does it come up in the Friendster, Myspace, Facebook dynasty. It’s just kind of
this useful website that appeared and is still here. Strangely, Google has
managed to keep it low-key, ad-less, customizable - seems like a completely
ignored utility. There even seems to be a “New Blogger” dashboard for mobile.
I wonder what keeps this thing going?
p. 52. Fears about blogging becoming “too easy” - leading to “blogorrhea”.
Yeah, that panned out.
p. 54. The Bicycle story.
This seems like some kind of a precious take on memes. Or, alternatively, a
satire on a template blog post. The self-loathing returns.
p. 59. Damn, this is serious shit-talking!! (Like on the level of Bernhard’s
The Woodcutters.) I need to talk about this in more detail later.
p. 68. Blogs as “exteriorized psychology”. Sure. But no. Hard no.
p. 70. Where did Jorn Barger go? Seems like perception that he was antisemitic
turned against him? Nah, it’s got to just be burn out or something. Everyone
should retreat from the pulpit at some point. (Actually, not sure why I’m
asking where he is - most of these blogs are vacated. I think
people didn’t want out of blogging what it ended up giving them. There was
definitely something of a gold rush.)
p. 76. This Julian Dibbell has some good stuff. “Does it even count as irony
that Barger’s rigorously unfiltered perspective is perhaps as good a filter as
can be found for the welter of the Web?” This is a good question! And it
really confuses the topic of what makes a good algorithm or a good editor.
The discussion kind of stops at: it’s a sensibility.
p. 78. Blogger was a one-man business in 2001 after initially having a team.
It really squeaked by. This is cool. It actually survived.
p. 82. “I do think there was a blog concept. Then there were a couple blog
concepts. And now we’re getting closer to a blog concept again.” Lol. I think
we’re back to a couple blog concepts again.
p. 87. Comment about 2001’s “p2p hype” drowning out interest in blogs. It’s
interesting that blockchain took that space for awhile. And it’s interesting
that some p2p+blog projects have a niche community now. It’s also interesting
that those were seen as competing at the time - I can see how people would think
that, but those were clearly two different crowds.
p. 89-98. No real interest in this chapter (on the Kaycee Nicole Hoax) -
although veracity of information continues to be a big topic. Was a topic in the
radio and newspaper eras, too.
Reply: Just-in-Time Kohaiships
I need to chasten you here and perhaps move to prevent you from putting me on a pedastal because I am absolutely just as screwed and wrong-headed as anyone you’ve met and I constantly have to fight my own shit-eating grin. Yeah I’ve hung out in all of those places, trolled and gaslit-up in my time, sometimes as “eddie touch” and sometimes as “simply chudder chess” - that’s all buried now, I can’t even find the stuff. This lacks credibility, but it’s true, whatever.
There was once an online forum that I was on where people just loathed me. Almost everyone in my life knows about this - because the forum had a lot of real-life friends - and everyone on the forum had little 64x64 pixel avatars. And there was this one popular user that had an avatar of a little kid’s face - I guess it was kind of iconic within this group. And I started using the avatar as my avatar - and it came to knives. It was rough - because I did it for many weeks and people hated it because they would think it was this other person posting when it was just me and my shit. People were messaging me “I will cut you” or gtfo and I really enjoyed it - but the forum eventually died and now we’re here talking to each other instead.
Things have changed for me since some of my surrounding family members have died - a number of people my age and four children. And this has also led to me meeting other people who have had to go through accidents with multiple deaths. That side of my life eclipses whatever is happening online - I just come here to play and escape. So maybe that helps explain my perspective - the problems of Reddit, imageboards and so on just seem like virtual play by comparison. But it’s much more than that - I just appreciate being alive for today and getting to write you a letter. Every day I feel grateful to breathe and be on this world with whoever happens to be here. So yeah - especially you too![1]
This is a fun description, it’s very true. I don’t think there’s any curing the sickness - life outside the Internet is sick in its own way. I think I like the idea of directories because it doesn’t go head-to-head with Google. I don’t like waging head-on war against the enemy. It’s too straightforward and just seems naive. It alerts the enemy.
I like directories because they’re surreptitious. You’d never notice them. I really think subterfuge and peaceful, lulling work can defeat anything. I’m not saying that directories will win - they’re a total longshot, of course - and head-on attacks have the advantage of alerting your allies, too.
I was anti-search when I started getting into directories. But this fragment of a conversation with this guy Brad changed my mind a bit. Maybe it’s just that we need balance or something between directories and search. (Like how TiddlyWiki itself is a balance between directories and search.) So I guess you’re right - thinking “post-searchengine era” sets a course that way.
Brad is also starting an old-school forum to talk about directories if you’re interested. Maybe my question for you wikifolk is - it could be enough to just say “my whole wiki is a directory” - but what could a more finely curated directory look like in TiddlyWiki?
Yeah, I should write some thoughts about this - because I have some specific recommendations for link-hunting in 2019 that I think everyone should know. But it also mainly comes down to just surfing. I have a big page of links that list rabbitholes that I haven’t fully explored yet - I usually just pick back up there. (Like - if you just started at philosopher.life and branched outward from there, who knows where you’d end up. Like really - you’re going to find a lot more of the web from that approach than searching on Google for, say, “cool links” or something. Or typing three random words into Google.[2])
I’m still learning how to get around the 2019 web tho. Might be a matter of finding good shit and then working backwards.
Hey, with the group chat - I have a page of ‘springboard’ type prompts that I can throw out at first, but I have a feeling that there’s enough unresolved discussion between us all that I think it’ll reel out of control no probs.
Always honored to hyperchat, chamy. (oh hey - I’m not saavy to the origins of ‘chameleon’ as a nick for you - but it haaaas to do something with the face, right? Triangle head, circle eyes, straight line mouth? Slurpy lil face.)
Have to say - I realize that you are probably taking everything I say as if it were construed - like Kaycee Nicole type shit - and I totally understand that. Which is why I try to minimize my expression of this type of thing and just say it when it’s relevant and get back to leeching and linking. ↩︎
Just wrote a script to try this. My sample phrases were: “junkie ampitheatre anarchy”, “preempt typing electrostatic”, and “ordination intellectually feminists” - cept I searched with no quotes. It’s interesting to see that Google tries to make sense of these phrases and I usually get shipped off to The Atlantic or JSTOR. Ooo I like this fourth phrase: “cagey gorgonzola admiration”… ↩︎