shopiere.net

NYT photogallery on NYC coffeehouses. Play spot-the-hipster.

When a person disappears the objects they leave behind can be almost unbearable in their muteness.

Hari Kunzru, Transmission

Pen.io has gotten some attention lately as it has added new features and flexibilities. Here’s an example of a good-looking blog done with the platform; it probably took all of 5 minutes to set up. With the first step

Rammellzee, Palladium Protractor, Chase to Assassination, (Gothic Futurism) , 1984

I thought of myself as a somewhat arty photographer, but I never
exhibited and never showed my black and white work to many friends.

I liked b&w and color slides.

I didn’t take pictures of people, and so my work wasn’t emotionally
engaged. I walked around taking pictures of buildings and trees
and things like that. For a long time I took pictures of flowers.

Color slides were little jewel-like artifacts that you could hold
between two fingers, or else you could stack and fan them, flipping
through a series. The colors were always richer and the cardboard cases protected them and made it easy to manipulate the slides.

B&W photography was a lot of solitary work, a fairly complex process. It
took some time to set up your equipment and procedure in the your own
home, and it took a while to become efficient (though perhaps not
proficient) at it. There was always something to worry about or think
about, and there were always ways to improve your work flow.

John Battelle went to a Wilco show where a strict cell-phone ban was enforced, and nobody danced.

There are essentially two main reasons to hold a phone up at a show. First, to capture a memory for yourself, a reminder of the moment you’re enjoying. And second, to share that moment with someone – to express your emotions socially. Both seem perfectly legitimate to me. (I’m not down with doing email or taking a call during a show, I’ll admit).

He finishes up with some speculation on how this sort of thing will be impossible to enforce in the future, because we’ll all have Instagram installed in our pants, or something.

Rex Hammock has a rambling but useful post on FB and the “Open Web”:

I could understand the debate if it were focused on the nuances of whether or not an individual or corporate entity should anchor their web residence in something they can own and control, like RexHammock.com or be a share-cropper on some real estate like Facebook.com/rexhammock.

I think my use of the term “share-cropper” reveals my prejudice.

Dave Winer has been making the same point for years.

Related, CyberSkeptic Evgeny Morozov wrote an excellent and more substantive piece in the NYT on the “Death of the Cyberflaneur; like Paris in the era of Baudelaire, the 90s net was a place for strolling. The flaneur could wander aimlessly and save the rich experience of the stores and shopping arcades. Casual urban exploration was almost an artform. As urban and economic life became rationalized, the space for casual and pointless exploration shrank.

The net has become rationalized as well. Quirky hobby sites on Tripod and Geocities have been replaced by FaceBook walls, where people share. The net is social now and the flanerie of the 19th century can’t live on the social net. Social sharing trumps aesthetic experience, especially since sharing can be monetized much more easily.

For the contrarian view, Robert Scoble thinks its just too damn late for the open net. Everybody’s on FaceBook or Google Plus, and Scoble is there along with them, because that’s where he gets the followers. That’s a self-centered reason for given up on the net, to be sure, but then again the man has a business to run (the business of being Robert Scoble, which seems to be a 24/7/366 occupation).

Recovering after a day and a half of illness, you slowly begin to reorganize your thoughts, trying to determine just where you left off and what needs to be done. You’re also too tired to start any thing in an organized way. Illness is all about the future, that time coming when you think you’ll have the energy for all your half-baked sickbed schemes.

- Mobile post

A hosted weblog application that renders Markdown files stored in a Dropbox directory. Any progressive blogging tool should render Markdown or Textile.