Category Archives: Technology

The olden inbox

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I was reading a discussion of the “vernacular web” by internet artist and theorist Olia Lialina. Amid her exploration of the elements that made up classic mid-’90s webpages, she talks about how in those olden webpages, at the bottom of each page, there’d be a link imploring the visitor to email me.

And I read it and chuckled a little at memories of how webpages used to be. But then I read this in her closing paragraph:

Getting emails from visitors to my site is something I really miss, more than starry night backgrounds and clumsy framesets.

I cranked opened my old mail app and trawled through some emails from almost 10 years ago, from random people out there who were just emailing to say stuff. I felt like I was glimpsing a relic of a bygone era, a less hip version of those photos of modern Detroit ruins.

I had my tonsils out on Saturday. So i searched the internet and came across your site. May I say how you describe the experience amazingly?? You made me laugh, and then cry, because it hurt too much to laugh!!
- Jo

I thought I’d send you a postcard of the home town you escaped.
- Ross

I am at work on a saturday nite (UGH) but your very unique POV has made the last few minutes tres interesting
- Jermeny

No postings for a while, I hope that you are OK.
- Harry

Thanks for brief tour from a fat, balding, impotent, socially dysfunctional sexual pervert with a small willy who is afraid of women (and horses)! Have a safe one!
- Paul

I stumbled on your weblog just now and thought it’s the best thing I’ve read for ages.. I never get around to complimenting people on stuff like that, so today’s the day. nice one.
- Vanessa

I have trouble buying shoes too. It sucks.
- Cherie

Back then, I’d usually reply. Sometimes it would end at that, but other times it would turn into a bit of to-and-fro correspondence, and a few times I ended up meeting the person on the other end of the email, and occasionally friendships were formed.

And I’d do the same when I came across a webpage I enjoyed. I’d send off emails with slightly guilty admissions. “I stayed up all night looking at your photos of historic Minneapolis! Your website is great!”

On average, I received about two or three emails via my website a month. But now, I’d probably get that many emails in a year. And – curiously enough – the people who do email tend to be older. My inbox is instead filled with mailing lists and bacn – those emails you sign up for but never actually read.

So where is the website feedback today? Well, with my website now in WordPress, there is room for comments at the foot of every post. On the chur post, this has turned into a space for people to share their theories of the word’s origin. (It’s short for Christchurch! No, Howard Morrison invented it! No, it’s Jamaican! No, it’s…) On the Newton post, codgers share their memories of the pre-motorway suburb.

But there’s no specific space for general comments of the “Oh hey, I dig your blog.” variety.

Then there’s Facebook. I have a feed of my blog going to my Facebook profile, so there’s also the ability to comment there. But you know what mainly happens? Yeah, Like. Like, Like, Like, Like, Like and Like.

It’s so much easier to click Like than to actually write something. But that’s ok. Clicking Like can say, “I have read the thing you wrote, I appreciate it but I don’t really have anything else to add .” And I’d much rather get a Like than those empty cliches such as “Wow. Just wow.”, “This.” or “Genius”.

Facebook private messages are similar to email, but for someone who doesn’t know me, it’s not as easy to message me on Facebook as it is (was?) to send an email.

So I’m slightly reluctantly accepting that the days of magic email are over. Email has changed into a different thing from what it was 10 years ago. I miss the specialness of getting spontaneous email from either from friends or strangers, but I’m not about to form a “I miss email!!!!” Facebook group. Instead I put my trust in the awesomeness of people in general to keep the magic alive in other forms of online communication.

Horseboy revisited

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Regular readers may remember my post about when, in 1995, I emailed TV2′s late-night news programme Newsnight with a poem about Horseboy, the show’s mascot hobby horse. Marcus Lush read it out on air, making it one of the first viewer emails to be shown on New Zealand television. Or something like that.

Well, recently I had a chance to view that episode. It was pretty much how I remembered it (I’m sure I had video-recorded it and watched it a few times back in the day), and now I’ve taken a few screen shots and added it to the post.

Actually, let’s just pause for some lolz. Here’s a screen shot from that same episode of the Absolut CHOGM map – when Newsnight realised that route of the motorcade security loop in Auckland for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting looked like a wonky Absolut vodka bottle:

absolutechogm

But anyway, watching that old episode of Newsnight – and a few others from late 1995 – it was really interesting to see how they treated that crazy new “internet” thing.

In another episode, Newsnight looked at Auckland art dealers Fox Gallery who had built a website to showcase their art. The interview was filmed at the physical gallery and much of the footage was of actual art on the walls, not online. (Though there were a few crappy shots of the gallery’s website, shown on crusty old Netscape.)

At the end of the story, the URL was shown on screen for interested parties to jot down. It was – steady yourself – http://www.ecentral.co.nz/fox.gallery/fox.welcome.html

Srsly. Remember when URLs used to be like that?

I just googled Fox Gallery to see if it still existed. It doesn’t seem to, but the search results brought up heaps of other Auckland galleries. These days it’s completely unremarkable for a gallery to have a website.

Now, when Fox’s 54-character URL was up on screen, Marcus Lush realised the graphic would actually need to stay up there for a while to give people a decent chance to write it down. So he ad-libbed, saying, “They say the trouble with the internet is that no one’s ever found a use for it. There’s nothing to do.”

And, yeah, that’s almost what it was like back then. There was no Trade Me, no Facebook, no Google. I’d only been online for a few months and while I was thrilled by the obvious potential of the internet, my first website will still about 8 months away and I was still trying to figure out what to do with the internet.

So now maybe the general internet has got to the stage where it’s a bit ordinary and boring; and now if you buy a handbag on Trade Me or watch an old Flaming Lips video on YouTube, people don’t think you’re a “computer whizz” and expect you to be able to fix their PC.

Though there are still corners of the internet that haven’t wiggled into the mainstream yet. For example, as ubiquitous as Twitter may seem, it’s still really hard to explain it to people who haven’t used it; who don’t get why you’d use it, just as 15 years ago they wouldn’t have understood why an art gallery would have a webpage.

But eventually they figure it out.

Not so live any more, is it just?

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It’s been over 18 months since I stopped writing stuff on my LiveJournal account, and switched back to my personal website, upgraded to the superdeluxxxe 2.0 version running WordPress.

I had imported all my LiveJournal entries into WordPress, but I kept the originals up on LJ because I hadn’t been able to import the comments. I had always planned on coming back and grabbing the comments somehow, even if that meant a manual copy and paste.

Well, I finally got around to doing it and I discovered that LJ would only let me see the 10 most recent comments made on my posts. If I paid to upgrade, I could see the 100 most recent comments. But there were far more than 100 comments in there.

This left me a bit annoyed, because I remember some really cool discussions happening. My favourite was the fiery discussion between Joe and Thomas about engagement rings, that originally followed this post.

Comments on posts are partly what makes writing online worthwhile. It’s the difference between talking in an empty room to talking to a room full of people.

I decided to sever another connection with LJ – I delete all the posts there, but I’m going to keep using LJ to stay in touch with my friends who are still using LJ to post, particularly those tantalising friends-only posts.

LiveJournal seems to be slowly dying out in some regards – Facebook provides a lot of social and community features now and WordPress is a much more flexible blogging platform. LJ is still really popular with fan fiction communities, and also for people who want a quieter corner of the interweb to do their thing.

I kind of miss the old days of LJ. The NZ Idol community in 2004 and 2005 was so much fun. But what’s happening is what seems to happen with the internet – new websites pop up and people move on to other things that suit their needs better.

Black, gold

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I have a new cellphone. It is one of those newfangled cellphones that has an extra piece of string or a special carrier pigeon that connects it to the interwebs (I do not understand modern technology). Vodafone now has some decent pricing plans for cellphone interwebs, so I have no excuse not to use it. But this has been both a bonus and a burden.

For example, if I’m walking down Courtenay Place and I think, “Wot was that line from Clue that Mrs White says about the flames?”, I can just whip out my phone and google it and quickly find the answer.

However, it also means that having the net at my fingertips sucks me out of the now and focuses my attention on the little black rectangle in my hand. It’s like the monolith from “2001″, but instead of evolving me to a new plane of enlightenment, it tells me trivia facts about Romania (Romania’s parliament building is the largest building in Europe!)

I was thinking about how cellphones are used these days. I rarely use mine for voice calls any more. In fact, my cellphone rang for a first time a few days ago and I didn’t know which button to press to answer it so I missed the call. Oh, such a modern dilemma!

But I would like to note that when my cellphone rings,it rings.

BONUS FEATURE: The Rugby

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Isn’t it awesome that the Wellington Lions won the Ranfurly Shield after a 26-year dry spell, mate!” Well, um, prior to a couple of days ago, I didn’t even know that there was a sports team called the Wellington Lions.

So with this in mind, I have wisely left the commentary on this topic to my mum, who filed this report from Wellington airport, the day after the win:

We got to the airport quite early and had just settled down to wait for the plane when there was an announcement, “I am proud to announce that the Air New Zealand flight from Auckland will be arriving shortly.” (Proud, I thought, that’s a bit odd)

Then there was a lot of yahoo-ing and yelling from a group of middle-aged Koru Club ladies up the other end of the room who were watching the plane come in. Of course the plane had the victorious Lions on board.

On the tarmac there were two fire trucks in position and when the plane taxied to the terminal it was generously sprayed with water, most of which was blown the other way anyway. Also there were a lot of workers in yellow vests on the tarmac waving flags and yellow and black scarves. Oh, how I wished I’d kept my old school scarf!

We didn’t go down to join in the rabble. We heard some kids doing a haka and there was a lot of cheering and clapping. The Koro Club ladies (and their cellphone cameras) had disappeared to join in the fun. It was all on the TV news last night, anyway.

Oh, No

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For over a month, the top search term that’s showing up in my website stats has been “No Magazine”, which was the name of a theoretical magazine I made way back in 1994.

But it’s also the name of a new New Zealand magazine edited by Delaney Tabron and Fraser McGregor. I’ve had a flick through it and it looks good, and I was interested by Mikey Havoc’s interview with Tabron and McGregor on bFM last week.

It’s obviously generated a lot of excitement and people are googling it, looking for more information. But here’s the terrible thing: No Magazine doesn’t appear to have a website!

I’m not expecting a full-on webstravaganza like Metro magazine’s [old] website; just a basic website with information about what the magazine is, who’s behind it, what’s in the latest issue, how much it costs and where you can buy it - information that will let me blog about it. And that doesn’t take much effort or expense to set up or maintain.

But yet they haven’t done it and so all these interested, potential readers are instead finding their way to my 14-year-old ezine and probably feeling a bit annoyed.

If a magazine doesn’t have a web presence, does it even exist online?