Posts Tagged ‘Web 2.0’

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Friday, March 30th, 2012

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And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Cyber Sex With A Bot Girl: It Was Bound To End In Disappointment!

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

“Amy Hastings” sent me a friend request on Facebook on 12 February 2012. I think “she” had four or five friends by the time I accepted. She didn’t have a profile picture or any other photos up on “her” page. I waited to see what happened next and wasn’t particularly surprised when “Amy” sent me an unsolicited message. Here it is followed by my and “her” replies:

Amy Hastings on February 13: I have some really erotic photoz, but I can’t post them here. Do you have an email or mobile number I can send them to? That is if you want to view them.

Stewart Home on February 13: I wouldn’t want to view them if they contain anything illegal or feature anyone under the age of 21. If you can clarify what these are and assure me that they don’t feature anyone under 21 then I may be interested. Thanks.

Amy Hastings on February 15: I relaly (sic)  am turned on so I put tgoether a page clcik (sic) to http://*************** betetr (sic) sign up clarfiy (sic) you’re 18+ ok giong (sic) to in aasp (sic) my usernmae (sic) is missE934 see u three (sic)

Stewart Home on February 15: Sorry but if this isn’t dodgy can you please answer my questions. Are you able to assure me your pictures don’t feature anyone under 21 or anything illegal? Until I know that I won’t go and look at them. If you don’t answer my questions then I will assume that the material in question is illegal. Thanks.

When after 10 days I heard nothing more from “Amy” I unfriended her. “She” still didn’t have a profile picture but by this time had 50 friends. I haven’t checked out the link “she” sent me as I wasn’t interested in her ‘erotic photoz’: I was just curious to see to what extent ‘she’d’ engage with me – and if ‘she’ had I would have gone on to tell her I found the number of typos in her messages a huge turn off and to insist politely but firmly that ‘she’ needed use a spell checker to sex ‘herself’ up!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

You Didn’t Read It Here: Summaries of 10 Blogs I Decided Not To Post

Saturday, February 18th, 2012

Many of the posts on this blog originate as ideas sketched out in note form. I work on these ‘ideas’ until I think they are ready to post or else I decide to discard them. Not all my binned blogs reach the stage of completed first drafts – but here is a list of 10 that underwent varying degrees of revision before I decided against posting them….

1. “The First 3 Letters of Espresso Are ESP, So Is Coffee a Psychedelic Drug?” -  I guess I was high when I came up with this blog title. In the cold light of day it didn’t seem worth following through!

2 “Chatham Is Fucked” – inspired by my first trip to that  town in 15 years. It was almost as depressing to write this as it was to visit one of the more blighted parts of the so-called “Garden of England”. A post on this subject would have been way too much of a turn off for my readers.

3. “Bill Ayers: Fake Leftist” – a critique of the former Weatherman explaining in simple terms why he is a reactionary tosser despite the pseudo-revolutionary posturing in his crap book Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist. In the end I preferred not to give this right-wing twit fulsome coverage on my site. It just isn’t possible to take Ayers seriously when he talks about ‘joining’ the working class in the same way as he might join the masons or the boy scouts. Ultimately I figured a relatively short review without direct citations from the book and placed on GoodReads (rather than here) was the best way to deal with vanguardist scum like Ayers.

4. “Synchronicity II at Tiwani Contemporary” – a lively exhibition of African photography running from 3 February to 17 March 2012. I went to the opening and spent as much time talking to Grace Ndiritu (who is in the show) as doing anything else there. While I had fun, the private view didn’t attract your usual London art world rent-a-crowd, so there weren’t enough people about who I recognised for me to be able to write an insider account. Indeed, apart from Ndiritu, I only recognised the likes of curator Caroline Hancock (who has been based in Paris for some years) . Shame as the work is definitely worth seeing, although I was only really familiar with James Barnor’s pictures before I went.

5. “Reading: A Town More Like All The Others I’ve Been To In England Than Any Other I’ve Ever Visited….” – middle England considered as a postmodern simulacrum. At first this idea seemed funny but the more I worked on it the scarier it became! The Stepford Wives can eat their hearts out!

6. Review of “Untouchables: Dirty Cops, Bent Justice and Racism in Scotland Yard by Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn” – necessary background reading if you want to understand how the phone hacking scandal unravelled into also being a sordid exposé of corrupt relations between the cops and the media. In the end I felt reading the book was a lot easier than providing a summary that covered all the ground.

7. “Chicks On Speed at The Showroom, London: 14 February 2012″ -  a great night but writing about it didn’t add anything to what I’ve already said about COS.

8. “Uncreative Writing, Conceptual Literature & Flarf Poetry” – checking what was online under these headings, I found more than enough information to satisfy me. And so in the true spirit of ‘uncreative writing’ I decided not to add my voice to this discourse. Of course, this doesn’t preclude me from copying and pasting something written by someone else on the subject (without crediting them) at some point in the very near future!

9. “10 Reasons To Be Unfaithful To Your Lover” – in the end I didn’t really feel it was necessary to explain yet again why smashing monogamy is an integral part of destroying patriarchy! And my attempts to come up with laugh-out-loud lines floundered at point six.

10. “Why I’m Even More Bored With Facebook Now Than I Was Last Year (If That’s Possible)” – like point one, this never got beyond me typing up and saving the title. Facebook proved too boring to contemplate!

In many ways blogging has been superseded by the status update and the tweet. Information just keeps getting more and more compressed. But shrinking 10 potential blog posts down into one – as I’ve done here – is one way of keeping the superannuated form of blogging relevant! Back in the 1980s your typical postmodernist hack made an academic career of disappearing up his or her own arse. Web 2.0 has taken us way beyond postmodernism and the academy. Our turdy tongues have passed through our own guts and re-emerged from our mouths; enabling us to really shoot the shit in style!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Instant Blogs

Sunday, February 5th, 2012

Instant blogs were first marketed in the USA in November 2002 under the brand name Technorati. The Technorati platform was founded by Dave Sifry, with its headquarters in San Francisco, California. Tantek Çelik was the site’s chief technologist – obviously they should have used someone else. The fact that Technorati is virtually useless can be demonstrated by the fact that it’s link to the feed from my rss worked for a few months and hasn’t uploaded anything now for more than two and a half years. Technorati’s ranking system is equally stupid and promotes tired and conventional views at the expense of innovation and smart thinking. The content of instant blogs has varied over the years, but with the maturation of Web 2.0 now generally consists of the following:

3 parts bullshit (can be cut & pasted from other blogs).

2 parts worthless opinion (can be cut & pasted from other blogs).

1 embedded video.

Seasoned with lots of pictures.

Mix all together.

Serve on WordPress, Blogger or LiveJournal.

Can be fortified with swear words! Fuck, cunt, motherfucker, shit, etc.

Can be thickened by adding gratuitous insults or spam links!

Instant blogs are on the whole self-referential, narcissistic and not quite vicious or crazy enough to keep me entertained. By way of contrast I’m sexy, seductive and smart! I’ve also gone beyond narcissism to become an ego-maniac on a world historical scale; and I’m so self-referential that my tongue has not only disappeared up my own arse, it has emerged once again from my mouth! No one makes an instant blog the way I do – compare and contrast and you’ll find this one is better than anything else on the net! Sarcasm and irony can only take you half-way there – you also need infinite, absolute negativity. And I’ve got that in spades!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Occupying my future, reclaiming my past!

Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

Asserting that ‘we are everywhere’ is probably more convincing than the claim that ‘I am everywhere”. Nonetheless it doesn’t take much suspension of disbelief before I’m able to convince myself that indeed “I am everywhere” – after all, I’ve been billing myself as ‘an ego maniac on a world historical scale’ for years! Recently I stumbled upon someone on Goodreads with my name who has been promoting my books rather energetically over there – unfortunately this Stewart Home can’t possibly be me since he joined the site in July 2007 (whereas I joined yesterday) and he’s based in the USA. My author profile at Goodreads is here.

When I read what other people write about me it can often seem like I’ve been even busier than I actually am. Reviewing my recent White Columns show in the New York Times on on 18 November, Roberta Smith wrote: “A brochure written by Mr. Home explains a lot, if not everything. For that, there is his lavishly detailed Wikipedia entry, which also appears to be his handiwork.” To me the entry in question has an inconsistency which makes it obvious it is a collective effort rather than mine. I suspect that some of the imbalances in the article are the result of other people using Wikipedia to promote themselves. For example, while many of my books and exhibitions are passed over without discussion, there is a bizarre passage about the Evening Falls nightclub (including the fallacious claim that I didn’t read there). Likewise, when I last checked, no one had updated my list of exhibitions on this Wikipedia page to include my recent White Columns outing.

Moving on, I’ve also seen some nutjob using web 2.0 comment facilities to allege that I write my own Amazon reviews…. of course they offered no proof, and had obviously missed the fact that I just don’t take the user generated content on that site very seriously. As you’ve probably gathered by now, way too many of my leisure hours are spent reading about myself for me to have the time to write reviews of my own books for Amazon. Likewise, it will come as little surprise to most of my readers that one of the things I love about the web is the way it allows everyone to turn over their own past – and in some cases rediscover material they’d pretty much forgotten. I didn’t have any images of the Anon exhibition I’d been a part of in Luton back in 1989 until John Wynne posted some photographs of it on his Facebook profile. I immediately snaffled those featuring my contributions and added them to my Flickr photostream – where they look absolutely fantastic in an utterly weird eighties appropriated post-pop art kind of way. Likewise, earlier this year I finally got around to putting an image of my ‘original’ Art Strike Bed onto Flickr, done several years before Tracey Emin attempted to recuperate this particular assault of mine on the sensibilities of the London art establishment.

I could use this piece as an opportunity to write about how I’m attempting to replace the planking fad with a craze for photos of people standing on their head – there are currently a dozen pictures of me doing headstands on my Flickr profile (see if you can find them all). However, rather than banging on about my topsy-turvy online presence, I’m now going to get even more self-referential and obsessive. What I’d like readers of this blog to do is tell me in the comments below whether I used the best possible title for this post, or whether I should have reversed it so that it ran: “Reclaiming my future, occupying my past”?

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Shaming The Spammers Part 1: Trish Stevens & Ascot Media, The Self-Styled New Media PR ‘Experts’

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

One of the rip-off outfits that persistently sends me spam emails is Ascot Media of Houston, Texas. I thought I’d shame this scamster operation by commenting upon and correcting one of their missives. The individual behind the Ascot Media rip-off  is called Trish Stevens, and while there are some sites online talking positively about this scam operation, they are  probably all run by Trish Stevens under other names – or at the very least people paid to promote her, or with a financial stake in the company! I’d expect a successful PR ‘guru’ to have lots of social media connections, and so I found it rather telling that Trish Stevens only had two contacts on her LinkedIn profile when I checked it just now (note added 13 October – since I posted this blog about 28 hours ago, Stevens appears to have added more than 400 contacts to her LinkIn profile; good to know a bit of criticism has forced her to work harder at her con, but it leaves me wondering how many of her new contacts are profiles she has created herself). Likewise, the Ascot Media profile on the MySpace platform is really abysmal – 71 friends, and some worthless promotional content for schmucks who have presumably paid Stevens thousands of bucks in the belief she’d hype their books into the New York Times bestseller list.

On LinkedIn, Stevens states she received her ‘business education’ at Harlow Technical College in England. For those that don’t know, technical colleges are places British kids used to go roughly between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, mostly for non-academic subjects and often as apprentices. The photo Trish Stevens has chosen of herself to place online really cracked me up too – in it she looks more like one of the women you see working on the check-outs at the British bargain bin chain Poundland than a media savvy public relations ‘guru’. Obviously this last point is on one level extremely superficial but then in PR image is everything, and it would really make me laugh if someone started spamming Trish Stevens with emails about how she desperately needs a personal trainer to whip her into shape.

So let’s make shame more shameful by commenting upon and correcting a spam email sent to me from Trish Steven’s Ascot Media Group. I’ve put my observations and corrections in CAPITALS to differentiate them from the spam.

Dear Mr. Home:

The Holiday Season is just around the corner and this is the best time of the year for PR. JUST AROUND THE CORNER IS A RATHER CLUNKY PHRASE, ‘APPROACHING’ WOULD HAVE SOUNDED MORE PROFESSIONAL, BUT THEN THESE SPAM EMAILS APPEAR DESIGNED TO SEND PEOPLE AROUND THE BEND, SO JUST MAYBE THE PHRASE IS APPROPRIATE BUT STILL VERY CLUMSY. I RATHER DOUBT IT IS THE BEST TIME OF YEAR FOR PR UNLESS YOU ARE AN ALREADY ESTABLISHED NAME. IN THE OVER-DEVELOPED WORLD WHERE A FESTIVAL KNOWN AS CHRISTMAS IS CELEBRATED BY PEOPLE ACTING LIKE TURKEYS, THERE MAY BE HIGHER SALES OF GIFT ITEMS SUCH AS BOOKS, BUT THERE IS ALSO MORE COMPETITION TO GET MEDIA COVERAGE BECAUSE OF THIS, SO OVERALL MOST AUTHORS AND MUSICIANS ETC STAND LESS CHANCE OF DOING WELL IN TERMS OF PRESS RIGHT NOW. People are in the buying mood and the media are still operating in full force during this season. THE MEDIA OPERATE FULL FORCE TWENTY-FOUR SEVEN, WE HAVE ROLLING NEWS COVERAGE ALL YEAR ROUND.  THIS CLAIM IS A CLICHÉD TRUISM BECAUSE IT CAN BE APPLIED TO ANY SEASON. LIKEWISE THE PHRASE ‘BUYING MOOD’ IS UGLY AND SILLY, AND ACTUALLY PUTS ME IN THE SORT OF MOOD WHERE IF THE PERSON WHO WROTE IT WAS IN FRONT OF ME THEN I MIGHT TWAT THEM (THAT’S A UK SLANG EXPRESSION MEANING GIVE THEM A REALLY HARD SLAP).

Remember, at Ascot Media Group we do not only guarantee publicity for all of our clients, we monitor all of the incoming media hits each week to make sure you are getting them regularly throughout the campaign. BUT WHAT DO THEY ACTUALLY COUNT AS COVERAGE? SPAM COMMENTS ABOUT YOU ON A COUPLE OF BLOGS THAT NOBODY READS?  OR A  JPEG OF YOUR BOOK COVER ON ASCOT’S MYSPACE PROFILE WITH ITS SEVENTY-ONE FRIENDS? ALSO THAT SENTENCE NEEDS REWRITING – ‘WE DO NOT ONLY GUARANTEE’ IS A SERIOUSLY UGLY PHRASE. The Select Advantage plan is our most popular because of its low cost and results. I THINK WE CAN SCORE OUT ‘AND RESULTS’ BECAUSE IT ISN’T QUANTIFIED. THE RESULTS MIGHT BE SIMPLY TO LEAVE YOU SCREAMING WITH RAGE. SO ASCOT – PROBABLY FRAUDULENTLY – CLAIM ‘SELECT ADVANTAGE’ IS POPULAR BECAUSE IT IS CHEAP, REGARDLESS OF THE FACT IT IS INEFFECTIVE.  Most of our clients receive between 40-80 hits from the media each month, some get over a hundred. DOES THIS MEAN ASCOT SET UP OR HELP YOU SET UP SOME SPAM WEBSITE TO PROMOTE YOUR BOOK OR WHATEVER, AND YOU THEN GET BLACKLISTED BY EVERY JOURNALIST WHO HAS THE MISFORTUNE TO BE DIRECTED THERE UNDER FALSE PRETENCES? Most get national media hits YEAH, RIGHT, ALL THE OTHER CHUMPS PAYING ASCOT BUT NOT YOU! Please see our testimonials (with full contact information) at: LINK DELETED BY MISTER TRIPP – DON’T BOTHER LISTENING TO SHILLS.

The Select-Advantage plan works great for everyone, regardless of talent, book, product, service, genre, whatever it is we publicize for you. ‘REGARDLESS OF TALENT’, SO THIS APPEARS TO BE A SERVICE USED BY THE DESPERATE WHO HAVE ALREADY BEEN RIPPED OFF BY VANITY PUBLISHERS OR WHATEVER. There are several reasons it works so well: THE MAIN ONE BEING THAT A FOOL AND THEIR MONEY ARE EASILY PARTED, SO THAT EVEN ASCOT MANAGES TO CON THE ODD SUCKER OUT OF THEIR DOUGH.

1. We professionally write an amazing press release for your approval REALLY? BECAUSE THAT SENTENCE FAILS TO BE EITHER PROFESSIONAL OR AMAZING. THE WORD PROFESSIONAL NEEDS TO BE TAKEN OUT, OR ELSE THE PHRASE ‘AN AMAZING’ SHOULD BE REPLACED BY MOVING ‘PROFESSIONAL’ TO THAT POINT IN THE SENTENCE AND PUTTING AN ‘A’ IN FRONT OF IT. A COMPANY THAT USES SUCH ATROCIOUS SENTENCES IN ITS OWN PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL ISN’T CAPABLE OF WRITING A SATISFACTORY PRESS RELEASE FOR ME.

2. We distribute your press release over 50,000 media personnel each month, directly, individually addressed to their email boxes, with a personal introduction “requesting” an interview or review. All major outlets are included in the distribution. IN OTHER WORDS JOURNALISTS ARE GOING TO BE SPAMMED WITH MESSAGES ABOUT YOU, AND AS A RESULT THEY DEFINITELY WON’T GIVE YOU COVERAGE EVEN IF THEY MIGHT HAVE BEEN INCLINED TO DO SO BEFORE YOU PISSED THEM OFF WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM ASCOT MEDIA. ACHIEVING MEDIA COVERAGE IS ALL ABOUT THE QUALITY OF CONTACTS, NOT THE QUANTITY – THIS IS VERY DEFINITELY A QUESTION OF LESS IS MORE & FIFTY THOUSAND IS A JOKE AT YOUR EXPENSE! & LET’S JUST SKIP GOING INTO THE FACT THAT THE WORD ‘TO’ IS MISSING FROM BETWEEN THE FIFTH AND SIXTH WORD OF THE LAST ASCOT MEDIA SENTENCE QUOTED HERE.

3. The media leads come in from every direction across the US and Canada asking to interview our clients. PERSONALLY I DON’T BELIEVE THIS, BUT EVEN IF IT WAS TRUE IT WOULDN’T DO ME MUCH GOOD BECAUSE I’M MOSTLY LOOKING FOR COVERAGE IN EUROPE – & IT IS ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF ASCOT’S  SCATTER-GUN SPAM APPROACH: UNLIKE GENUINELY SUCCESSFUL PUBLICISTS THEY DON’T BOTHER TO CAREFULLY TARGET AND CULTIVATE SPECIFIC PEOPLE. These leads are for television, radio, newspapers, magazines, Internet and bloggers. BUT I THINK WE CAN SAFELY CONCLUDE MOSTLY FOR PLACING SPAM COMMENTS ON BLOGS WITH A READERSHIP THAT SOMETIMES GOES INTO DOUBLE FIGURES, BUT MOSTLY STAYS UNDER TEN.

4. Most importantly, we “monitor” the incoming requests you receive from the media to make sure you are getting plenty of hits. “Hits” means that media outlets write back after reading your press release and say… ”Yes, I would like to interview this person.” Or, “Yes, I would like to provide a review,” etc. NOTE THAT ‘HITS’ ARE MONITORED BUT THERE IS NO MENTION OF ANY ACTION BEING TAKEN SHOULD YOU BE GETTING NO HITS AT ALL (AS WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY BE THE CASE).

5. Our reach is so wide that it’s inevitable that you are going to get plenty of media activity. WELL BEING BLACKLISTED BY THE PRESS AFTER PAYING TRISH STEVEN’S TO RUN A SPAM CAMPAIGN IS MEDIA ACTIVITY, IT JUST WON’T LEAD TO ANY COVERAGE. Feel free to call any of our clients to find out for yourself. I READ THIS AS CALL OUR SHILLS, PEOPLE PAID TO SAY THIS COMPANY IS GREAT. DO ASCOT REALLY EXPECT ME TO BELIEVE THEY’D PUT ME IN TOUCH WITH A DISSATISFIED CLIENT (AND THERE ARE BOUND TO BE SOME, POSSIBLY A HUNDRED PERCENT OF THOSE WHO’VE PAID TRISH STEVENS FOR HER ‘SERVICES’)?

It’s really that simple. Best of all, we eliminate the high costs that inhibit many people, who simply cannot pay the high fees of standard PR firms, by cutting out the middle-man (the publicist), allowing you to work directly with the media on all the hits you receive from us. IF YOU’RE GOING TO CUT OUT THE MIDDLE-MAN THEN DON’T WORK WITH TRISH STEVENS OF ASCOT MEDIA EITHER, COZ SHE’S A MIDDLE-WOMAN This approach works for the media and our clients, and has proven successful time and time again. LIKE I SAID, IF CUTTING OUT THE MIDDLE-MAN OR WOMAN IS SO GREAT THEN GO FOR IT AND DON’T WORK WITH ASCOT MEDIA.

It is exciting, it’s a lot of fun, and we love making our clients happy (please see the testimonials above). THERE WAS NO TESTIMONIAL ABOVE.  Below my contact information is a new testimonial recently received. I DID SEE ONE BELOW BUT IT WAS SO BORING AND RIDICULOUS I’VE REMOVED IT TO KEEP THIS BLOG SHORTER.

The cost for this package is only $895 per month. THAT’S FOR HAVING SOMEONE INEFFECTIVELY SPAM THE MEDIA ON YOUR BEHALF. IF YOU WANT TO INDULGE IN SUCH RIDICULOUS PURSUITS WHY NOT CUT OUT THE MIDDLE-MAN IN THE FORM OF ASCOT MEDIA, GO DIRECTLY TO A SPAMMER AND SAVE YOURSELF EIGHT HUNDRED BUCKS A MONTH? It is such a low price but has such high results that even other PR firms buy our plans for their clients. YEAH, RIGHT, BUT THAT WOULD ONLY BE THE CASE IF THESE OTHER PR FIRMS AKA ASTROTURFERS DIDN’T HAVE THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO DO THIS THEMSELVES, WHICH OF COURSE THEY DO! Here is a link to all of our plans: LINK DELETED BY MISTER TRIPPY.

Please feel free to call me if you have any questions, I’d be more than happy to answer them. REALLY, THEN IN THAT CASE WILL YOU ANSWER THIS QUESTION? “WHY DON’T YOU FUCK OFF AND DIE – OR AT THE VERY LEAST STOP SPAMMING ME WITH YOUR CRAP?” I look forward to speaking with you. NO YOU DON’T YOU SHAMELESS LIAR – YOU’RE JUST HOPING TO RIP ME OFF FOR A LOAD OF WEDGE. Thank you. AND FUCK YOU TOO!

Kind Regards, Niki Williams
Ascot Media & Aston Publicity

IT SHOULDN’T NEED SAYING, BUT ANYONE WHO IS ANY GOOD AT WHAT THEY DO WON’T NEED TO DRUM UP BUSINESS BY SENDING OUT SPAM….

And before I go I should say that what I find particularly funny about this scam is that it appears the marks paying Ascot Media for their utterly worthless ‘services’ are actually forking out their own dosh for the ‘privilege’ of assisting Trish Stevens with search engine optimisation (SEO). Ascot encourages self-published authors etc. to do their own publicity, and this will include websites and social networking profiles on which they can link back to Ascot Media. Those links will raise Ascot’s Google rankings, and result in those trying to research Ascot Media being more likely to click through to Trish Steven’s propaganda about this rip-off operation, rather than an objective appraisal by someone who realises it is a con.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Web 2.1 – A Revolution in Plumbing?

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

My impression is that I’m not the only person to have found that Web 2.0 is proving less interesting these days than it was five or six years ago. I don’t think this is simply because for my social (networking) circle the novelty has worn off. It has more to do with the fact that the web is less chaotic than it was and corporations have learnt how to better use and control social networking. Friendster fell out of favour because it kicked out fakesters (those that refused to use their ‘real’ identities) and it was continually crashing due to lack of server capacity. MySpace allowed people to adopt any online identity they felt like taking – so it appealed to the fakesters, among others. One of the things I liked about MySpace was its willingness to jump on any and every online fad going, which made it more of a culture clash than most other parts of the web – and I particularly dug the blogging features. I’ve detailed my use of MySpace in an article on the main part of this website – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/praxis/myspace.htm.

MySpace had lots of faults but it was fun for a while. The platform being bought out by Murdoch’s News Corp (via the Fox subsidiary) led to MySpace suffering a slow death, since its old media purchasers had no understanding of what they’d acquired. That didn’t stop the fools at News Corp from messing around with their new toy. Facebook took up the slack, after initially appealing to over-privileged college kids and other conservatives who couldn’t stand the anarchic nature of MySpace; and partly because one of the central features (alongside photo sharing when that was introduced) was the status update – which required less effort than writing a blog. Twitter took the status update and transformed it into pretty much the only feature on its site. Facebook quickly became a place to do little more than post links when the company made attempts to claim ownership of any original content distributed directly from its severs. No one in their right mind would want to give FB CEO Mark Zuckerberg anything too interesting to claim as his ‘copyright’. Facebook’s current revamp looks a lot like a tail-ending of the failed MySpace. Facebook is now being promoted as a place for sharing media. Zuckerberg’s site for college squares and their post-degree clones has always been uptight and preppy, but in recent months the boredom factor there has definitely increased.

I know I’m not the only person in my social networking circles to try out other sites in recent years. I’ve found the take up at Identi.Ca too low for it to work very well for me – although I’m still posting: http://identi.ca/stewarthome. VK might have turned out better for me if there hadn’t already been a number of Stewart Home fakester sites on their servers prior to my arriving there: many users assumed that I couldn’t possibly be running my own profile on ‘their’ site (a corporate Facebook clone but with more than a few toes dipped into the darkweb). VK is most popular in Russia and since my books sold very well in Russian translation, I’m well known there. So I’m plodding on with VK too: http://vk.com/id121464913. I’ve been working with Diaspora alpha but initially went to a pod that didn’t suit me. I’ve just switched to another pod that seems much better: https://diasp.org/people/36032. Fingers crossed that Diaspora takes off once it goes fully public, the potential for something really good is definitely there. I’m at many other places – including of course Google+ – but to take just one example, I can’t even remember the last time I logged in to my LastFM account: http://www.last.fm/music/Stewart+Home. I have managed to post new material at YouTube quite recently (a public reading from one of my books which I give standing on my head): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z70hEvWbaWg. I hope to update my Vimeo profile at some point in the future: http://vimeo.com/stewarthome. The same goes for my site on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewarthome/.

Instead of waiting for a social networking platform that I find viable to either appear or reach its potential, I figured I’d return to blogging here – albeit on a more sporadic basis than in the past. This is in part because I’ve found the current Guardian newspaper series on “How to build a profitable blog” by Andrea Wren completely vile.  Rather than opening up the possibilities of blogging, Wren’s series is all about closing them down and reducing web 2.0 to a narrow focus. Viz, her desire to turn ‘creativity’ into money. Wren and her mentor Craig McGinty may or may not make a fortune from their blogs, with some added help from the Guardian series that is boosting them – but most of their foolish followers won’t get a pot to piss in from setting up online sites. It is only by moving away from an obsession with monetisation and hits that blogging can become in any way exciting. Search engine optimisation is so last decade, and I’m still of the opinion that content counts, alongside the quality of interaction between a site and its visitors. I’ve never focused on a single subject to the exclusion of all others either here or when I blogged on MySpace. Unvarying subject matter may or may not deliver a target audience to advertisers, but it is also the road to unadulterated tedium.

Finally – and just in case you’re interested – the revolution in plumbing (and many other areas of design and engineering) is allegedly coming to us all very soon via 3D printing rather than web 2.0. And in recent days as I went through a slew of old social networking sites I’d joined, I found that some had wiped my profiles, but many others remained just as I’d left them when I’d last logged in two or more years ago. That said, the entire Twine platform had disappeared and when I typed their url into my browser I was redirected to the Evri site (who I understand have both bought out Twine and wiped my account from the site they’ve merged into their own). Meanwhile, I was excited to discover my Tumbler profile could be be updated from my new Diaspora account. Other places I’ll start updating again – mostly with links to here – include Stumble Upon, Digg and Delicious (the latter two had both ‘lost’ my old profiles but I set up new ones). As for my WordPress site blog, Live Journal, Blog Spot and Bebo profiles (among many others), I’m curious to see how long they’ll stay up if I never log in again, let alone update them…..

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Blog closed until further notice…

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

I’ve already written about my experiences of producing the first season of the Mister Trippy blog at MySpace. It is obviously a little early to write about the second season in any depth since this is its closing post. There is also less need to write about Mister Trippy season two because I’ll be leaving the posts up rather than taking them down as I did with not only with the first season of Mister Trippy, but all my MySpace profiles (to protest about the platform’s support for US imperialism), in Spring 2008.

Having produced posts for the first Mister Trippy season daily, I found it far easier to blog every other day in this second season (except for the first month, which was daily). That said, at exactly a year long, this season was also quite a bit shorter than the first. While the comments remained an integral part of the blog, there were considerably fewer than during the first season. I’d view this as a consequence of hosting season two on my own site rather than a social networking platform, and also because I didn’t concentrate on replying to comments as much as I did during the first season. That said, I appear to have more readers here than when Mister Trippy was hosted at MySpace, but far fewer of them commented and those that did made less comments than on the first season of the blog. From a conventional media point of view, upping both the number and percentage of lurkers is probably a good thing, from a full-on committed to Web 2.0 perspective it probably isn’t so good, although it does make life easier! That said, there have still been loads of great comments containing both solid information and some really way-out humour on the season two blog!

A few facts and figures. Mister Trippy season two ran from 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2009, during which time I posted 193 public entries (including this one). As I write this there are 5,007 approved comments split across these posts. Likewise, between myself and the Askimet anti-spam software 10,207 comments were blocked or removed. All the blocked or removed comments were of a commercial nature. Obviously the number of approved and blocked comments will increase as time goes by, although probably not at the same rate as when I was posting on a regular basis.

I’ve found this blog and the main website to which it is attached a good way of alerting people to information I’m seeking. It has enabled me to locate individuals, unearth facts, and in particular extend my knowledge of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson and her bohemian social circle – as well as my first cousin once removed Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones (a legend for audacious Robin Hood-style thefts from the rich and famous, as well as a successful 1958 prison escape with a subsequent two years on the run). That said, while – for example – I now know that Francois Raymond who exhibited photographs of my mother in 1967 is dead and I have contact details for his brother, I’ve drawn a complete blank in my attempts to nail down the fate of Malcolm ‘Grainger’ Drake.

One of the things I’ve always tried to do on this blog, as well as the main site to which it is attached, is put information online that wasn’t previously available via the web. The pieces I’ve posted about my mother’s circle and Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones are good examples of this. When I began researching my mother’s life there wasn’t a single entry about her online. It is because of my efforts that a search engine request now brings in more than 15,000 results for Julia Callan-Thompson, rather than none (which was the result I got from my early web searches for her). There was material about Ray The Cat on the web before I started blogging about him, but by locating a primary source in the form of Ray’s testament about his life and going back to contemporary press coverage of his exploits, I’ve expanded the range of material available online and shown that recent retellings of his escape from Pentonville Prison completely distort the facts (and that the confusion appears to begin with inaccuracies introduced by Mad Frankie Fraser and his ghost-writer James Morton). However, to see this you’d need to read through all my blog entries on Ray The Cat. My research is ongoing and I revise what I have to say on the basis of what I discover. Putting material online is important, there is unfortunately a growing trend (particularly among the young), to look for information on the web and if it can’t be found there then to assume it doesn’t exist.

My research methods appear to confuse some of those I’ve spoken to, since I’ve had the odd email complaining I’ve not written up a story as the person recontacting me originally told it. I always try to find as many sources as possible for what I write. Sometimes these provide me with conflicting information, and some people even provide more than one version of the same story over a period of time. Using archival records where they are available, and all the oral history I am able to collect, I try to reconstruct events as accurately as possible. This can result in a specific person’s recollection of events being discarded; not because I necessarily think the individual in question is lying  – memory can play tricks and the person concerned may simply be mistaken about what happened. Someone claiming to have direct knowledge of something does not automatically make them a reliable source for the subject. I work from all the evidence available to me and sometimes this will indicate (or even prove) that a particular individual’s memory of a specific incident is faulty or fraudulent.

Moving on, I trust that the interest of media professionals in blogging is waning, since it has had a deleterious effect on the activity. There are individuals who take up blogging in the belief that it might make them famous. Although this is unlikely, it doesn’t stop people trying and thus producing narrowly focused blogs with very limited subject matter, or else simply going in for egoblogging. One of the elements of this blog that proved particularly popular with a large swathe of readers were my reports of London art world openings. It would not be difficult to construct a blog around nothing but reports of this type, but for me it would become boring and is therefore to be avoided, despite – or rather because of – the fact that it would lead to me being viewed as a greater conventional ‘success’ than is currently the case.

Likewise, most newspapers seem to have given up on investigative journalism, or even research, and at a time when we need much more of it; clearly it is those with particular interests and specialised knowledge who are far better qualified to do this than so called media professionals, and blogging is a cheap and efficient way for the ‘real’ ‘experts’ – in other words, amateurs like you and me -  to gather and disseminate information. I’m not seeing as much research based blogging or other web reportage as I’d like, but hopefully there will be more of it in coming months and years – and far fewer blogs being updated via Twitter feeds. I’d also like to see the majority of bloggers trying a little harder with their writing. While splurging something out is a great way of getting it down, you do then need to rewrite and revise. I’ve always tried to compose my blogs the night before I posted them, so that I could give them a final rewrite in the morning. Too many blogs look like their author hasn’t read through what they’ve posted even once! If you’re not prepared to read your own writing, you shouldn’t expect anyone else to do so either!

In conclusion, while I wouldn’t rule out a third season of the Mister Trippy blog, I’m not committed to doing  one either. I’ll just see how things go. For now I’d rather concentrate on other pursuits. I will continue to update the main website to which this blog is attached – check the new additions page if you want to see what is being added. Wow, this may also be one of the least humorous blog I’ve written over the past year, so I obviously do need a break from Mister Trippy!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art Writing

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

On Saturday night I read at Volatile Dispersal, a festival of art writing held at the Whitechapel Gallery. The event proved so crowded and popular that it was hard to take very much in. I found this ironic because after I’d used my FaceBook account to remind people about the event (I list all the public events I’m doing initially on my homepage), among the comments I garnered were the following:

“I like the idea of ‘art writing’; its the best phrase I’ve ever come across (Barry Watten?) to describe the efforts of those of us who spend anywhere between 5 to 50 to 75 hours on one text, which is little more than a page, only to have said text become tucked away appropriately in a ‘slim volume’ which no one in their right mind will pay 10 dollars for when all is said and done… go boy!” Volker Nix.

And: “Yeah Volker, writing that nobody will read, not even if you put it online for free…I used to see that as being somehow radical (and I still kind of do)…but now I think the only real reason for engaging in these practices is simply because you enjoy it (is that somehow radical?)” Robert Chrysler.

There were various events going on in different parts of the Whitechapel Gallery, I was programmed to read in a small upstairs space alongside a whole host of other ‘art writers’, and this segment was curated by Francesco Pedraglio. Since I was on last, I was more focused on getting into the mood for my reading than paying attention to what other people were doing. That said, it is decidedly amusing that some of those engaged in ‘art writing’ are clearly unaware of experimental poetry by the likes of Bob Cobbing, so they are able to cover old ground as if it is fresh (and I guess it is for them, if not me).

What I found particularly curious about the event was that a number of people were participating in Volatile Dispersal who I knew but I managed not to meet on the night. I was able to hear Sally O’Reilly read because there was a speaker system relaying the sound from the room in which I also performed into the adjacent bar – but the event was so packed that I was unable to get into this small gallery for the majority of sessions before mine. I looked out for Sally afterwards but it was so busy it was easy to miss people, and I didn’t ‘see’ O’Reilly at all that night. Others advertised as being present who I failed to clock at all included Babak Ghazi (whose downstairs event clashed with mine) and Laura Oldfield Ford. Yet more, such as Mike Sperlinger, I spotted across crowded rooms – but in most cases was unable to attract their attention before they disappeared.

Among those I did manage to speak to were Crow, Bridget Penney, Bridget Lowe, Katrina Palmer, Maitreyi Maheshwari, Gavin Everall, Jane Rollo, Nick Thurston, Anthony Isles, Jonathan Allen, Benedict Seymour, Maria Fusco, James Brook, Chris Horrocks, Jeremy Ackerman and Hilary Koob-Sassen. I also had a reasonably extended conversation with Rob La Frenais about Toshiba ripping off Simon Faithfull in their current ad campaign. Nothing wrong with plagiarism of course, but Toshiba and the ad agency they used initially claimed this blatant steal demonstrated the commitment of both parties to innovation. Ho ho! La Frenais was telling me corporations can’t get away with this kind of rip-off in the world of Web 2.0 because tweets, blogs and comments on sites like YouTube and Facebook have spread the story around the world and forced Toshiba to backtrack – so they’ve apparently paid Simon Faithfull some wedge to say nothing, and are now claiming the ‘innovation’ was not launching a chair into space using weather balloons (as Faithfull had five years before them) but in using this for an ad! Doh! If that’s Toshiba’s idea of ‘innovation’ then I think I’ll stick to using consumer electronics made by Apple, Asus, Panasonic and Sony (among others) and avoid Toshiba (unless they send me some nice freebies). And BTW, why so few mentions of The Association of Autonomous Astronauts in regard to all this too?

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Another banned YouTube video is now available via Vimeo

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

I reported on an earlier YouTube banning of my work in a blog I posted in September, and shortly after I’d written that YouTube pulled another video of mine, Nude In Melbourne. The point of the second piece, which was clearly lost on YouTube’s half-wit censors, is that I may or may not be nude in this short: you can’t tell because anything that might break the YouTube rules is hidden by a camera… but that didn’t stop the platform from banning it. However, the video is now available again via Vimeo:

<http://www.vimeo.com/7103351>

Due to the hassles I’ve been getting from YouTube, I decided to post my recent video Two Strippers straight to Vimeo:

<http://www.vimeo.com/7217171>

Nonetheless I’m continuing to amuse myself by posting selected pieces to YouTube. Recent additions to my profile there include I Wanna Die In The TV (which realises my desire to bring back the test card back), William Burroughs In Hell (two jokes with some groovy visuals) and In The Street Today – Paris (a psychogeographical exercise inspired in part by the camerawork of Stephen Dwoskin).

Raymond Anderson recently pointed out that ‘you tube’ is a common insult in Scottish playgrounds, and thus a very appropriate name for a platform that has its brains in its arse as far as understanding its own rules on forbidden material goes. While all corporate web 2.0 operations are selectively blind, deaf and dumb, when it comes to appraising content it seems that YouTube is consistently dumb, thick and stupid….

I’ve also found it curious in recent weeks how frequently both YouTube and Facebook have been either down or failing to function properly. While I don’t want to completely ignore those whose web use is largely restricted to corporate social networking platforms, we still need to get it on with web 2.0 software on our own sites: which is, of course, one of the reasons this blog is to be found here.

And talking of corporate platforms that don’t work, the Technorati overhaul last month resulted in some major glitches. My own entry has lost all my fans, comments, and it now links to the homepage of my website instead of this blog (with the result that the feed has lost all my blog entries and all my ‘authority’). I’ve emailed Technorati to tell them this, since I’m unable to do anything about it by logging-in, but of course they’ve done sweet FA about it. I always thought Technorati was a waste of time anyway, and this just serves to underline that!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!