meish dot org: life, unfolding

Almost forgot to do my Mayfly project summary for 2010.

Househunting. Negotiation. Fucked over by two vendors then landlady. House! Finally! Goodbye SW14, hello Surrey. Painting. Nesting. Happier, poorer, more in love than ever.

Remember: 24 words summing up the last 365 days.

Over to you, in the comments below this time (because I haven’t got time to set up a separate page before going out for dinner).

And happy new year. Hope 2011 is a good one.

I sometimes play a game when I’m reading stuff on the internet. It’s called Commentogeddon – or, if you prefer, Crystal Ballocks. Do you want to join in?

Here’s how you play:

1. Read an article which has comments open. Since most things have comments these days – wisely or otherwise, YMMV – this can mean anything on a blog, news site, content portal or whatever. It helps if the comment count is greater than 0, but don’t read the comments just yet.

2. As you are reading the piece “above the line” (i.e the blog post, article, original content), try to predict the nature of the comments which will follow. Your prediction may concern form, tone or content of comments. For example, you might keep a mental tally (NB this is not the same as a mentalist tally) as follows:
– there will be a comment consisting of just one word
– someone will complain about the topic, insisting that this has already been discussed and concluded
– people will mention (and take issue with) the third paragraph

3. Now read the comments.

4. Award yourself a point for each comment type or form you correctly predicted would occur “below the line” as a result of the piece above it.

Over the years, you will hone your instincts to such an intuitive level that you’ll be able to accurately predict the content of any thread without needing to read it.

Whether you then decide to do so is entirely up to you.

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My lovely little sister Anna spent much of September circumnavigating the lower United States by train. Being the brilliant, webby, writery person she is, she conceived an intriguing participatory project to help while away the miles as well as atomising the memories, jotting moments onto a hundred and fifty custom-made and decorated postcards which were flung around the world to friends and strangers who had signed up to be on the receiving end.

You can read more about the snailr project, here and the original idea, here.

I received my postcard last week, but entirely failed to capture it digitally until today. But it’s fun seeing the other postcards find their way onto the web – from mental, to analogue, to digital memories – so I finally got my act together and here it is…

Front:

It reads: This is the snailr project, crossing the border n.b. please to customise this card. and i love you.

Back:

It reads: #63 I remember our mum loving reading The Night Train to us as children. As a poem, it had precisely the same tempered metre of a slow, careful train. And she sounded it out just like that, coming down heavily on enough syllables to suggest clacking tracks. I now wonder what it would have been like if she’d had access to an American version of the same poem, reflecting the Amtrak policy of blowing the horn, constantly, all through the night. I like to think she would have brought a hawk to bedtime stories. Or a stuck pig.

She’s right – our mum did read Auden’s The Night Mail to us at bedtime. A wonderful, evocative out-loud poem – and one which becomes even more vivid at the thought of a train whistle piercing the rhythmic clacking, all night long.

My sister’s ace.

I know the first rule of blogging is “never apologise” but I’m sure one of the other rules is something like “keep it up” which I have been woeful at doing recently – the terrible timing, so soon after my celebratory tenth blogiversary postings, was noted and probably deeply significant.

Lots of travel, lots of stuff happening at work, lots of really lousy things happening with regard to our housing situation (synopsis: After seven months dangling at the end of a property chain last year, we finally gave up on the place we were buying and found somewhere else with no chain. All progressed well until the owner of the house we were just about to exchange contracts on suddenly changed her mind about the sale which meant we, having given in our notice on current (rented) flat, were very nearly about to be homeless within weeks. We’ve sorted it out now, thankfully, and the hunt continues, though we are surrounded by boxes which I can’t bring myself to unpack just yet.)

So here’s something approaching content: I’ve been quietly making galleries on Flickr for a while. Here are some of my favourites…

(What big eyes you have)

(Lone tree in winter)

(Migraine-inducing carpet)

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I missed the actual tenth birthday of this blog/me blogging but I can’t let a milestone like that go unmarked, can I?

Originally started as a place to store and share links, this blog gradually became a place to playfully interact with the world, and over time that turned from introspection to exploration of the world, media, experiences and ideas. I don’t think I’m alone in that kind of journey with blogs.

I am immensely (unreasonably, perhaps even pathetically) proud of having been blogging for so long. I can say confidently that I was in at the beginning, when all this were fields. I was here before many of you young whippersnappers who have gone on to eclipse me, and blogging, and the web entirely in their success and influence. I don’t put my early involvement down to canny prescience about the way the web was turning so much as an inevitability given my proclivity for tinkering with web things, my early academic and personal interest in communicating online and my inability to shut up. Blogging and me; it was only a matter of time and technology before we found each other.

I was there. I remember the start, and the hype, popularisation, commercialisation and ubiquitisation which followed. I couldn’t possibly have known it at the time, but my blogging was to introduce me to dozens of interesting people, influence others to start doing it too, cause interesting opportunities (and worrying situations) to develop. Blogging has become part of what I am, what I do. I blog now for the same reasons I did in early 2000: because I can’t not tinker with and publish to the web.

Ten years ago, I was embarrassed to mention having a blog in polite company, because it was so difficult to understand – not just what but why. These days, even both my parents have blogs. It’s not a weird niche oddball geek thing anymore. It’s so normal it’s almost passé. Good.

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….just another day.

This year, like every year since 2001, show you care about people (not profits) by sending an anti-valentine.

Added bonus: it makes people smile, not throw up in their mouths.

(Now even easier to share via [social media experience of your choice])

Because I’ve been asking people to sum up their year in just a few words via The Mayfly Project since December 2000, I’ve been able to look back at the last decade of Mayfly entries (via the Internet archive as well as prodding old sql tables until they regurgitate their goodies) to see how things have changed, and what’s been notable or characteristic in each year.

Some observations:

I talk a lot about love. That’s good. You can tell when I met the lovely P, because everything changed.

I talk a lot about work. That’s partly because whatever I do for a job ends up being somewhat all-consuming. That’s both good and bad (in a stressy unhealthy way).

I travel more than I thought. Or rather, the moments of travel are significant when remembering a year. You can see the unfolding of years on a map.

I used to worry more than I do these days. That can only be good.

My 2000:

Started blogging. Found a groove. Found friends. Much laughter with flatmate. Secret squirrel at work. Living a London life. Good.

My 2001:

working, moving, flirting, lightning, loving, loving, windows painted shut, frustration, illness, love, islands, work, worry, enormous stress, but love throughout.

My 2002:

New beginnings – excited yet anxious. Irrational worries. Learning about control. Usual work stress: need something more. Changing, growing. Home = Love.

My 2003:

Stress, moving, noise, mistake, moving again, hotness, swimming in a warm sea (twice), confronting illness, lifestyle revolution, promotion, onwards, together.

My 2004:

Chilly walks, wedding, work, sea swimming, view of Africa, anxiety, old/new job, driving lessons, cat, more love than ever.

My 2005:

Adopted cat. Passed. Conquered London, England, Scotland, Wales. Took many pictures. Drew on many whiteboards. Became increasingly creative/neurotic. These attributes not necessarily connected.

My 2006:

Frustration, uncertainty, idiots, “just a bit longer…” Meanwhile, focused on photography, windswept places, friends, cat, love, decluttering. Resolved not to wait. Bollocks to them.

My 2007:

Goodbye old, hello new job. Commuting underground, overground, mind wandering free. California dreaming. A series of hospital waiting rooms. Profile building. Camera shutter clicks.

My 2008:

Lots of killing time in hotel rooms in interesting places, as well as meeting nice people. Had operation. Worked hard. Created things. Pondering move.

My 2009:

Didn’t buy a house, but tried (repeatedly). Still trying. Travelled a lot (mainly for work). Embarked on a significant journey. Enjoying it.

This blog, as I’ve always said, is a record of life, unfolding. And nowhere more-so than in the flight of each year’s mayfly.

The reminder a couple of weeks ago that pioneering blog publishing engine Blogger was launched ten years ago got me thinking.

I’ve been blogging for nearly ten years now – since it began with a W – and being involved with something from the beginning, plus passionate (and sometimes despondent) about its potential and usage in the years since means I’ve had a lot of time to watch and think about how it has matured and been used. There are certain things which we can now look back on and consider milestones in the development and maturing of blogging – like how the media responded to it, how people embraced and used it and how it penetrated mainstream web usage over time.

Likewise, Twitter.

Like blogging (which I started doing in January 2000, and used Blogger to publish my blog from April of that year), I’ve been using Twitter since relatively early on – my earliest update via Twitter was in November 2005. I’d link to it, but
a) it’s in my private/personal account (@megp) and
b) all my archived tweets (pre July 31 2009) have disappeared, as experienced by many others in this thread on the Twitter help forum.

It’s actually that help forum – and the appalling petulant and rude manner in which some users are addressing Twitter staff – which got me thinking more specifically about how, in so many ways, the timeline of the Twitter story mirrors that of Blogger and early blogging. Both have seen similar patterns of early usage and behaviour and adoption by certain functional and social groups, and both have learnt – the hard way, sometimes – about technical and social scaling issues as well as being a playground for emergent behaviours and activities, and all the fun and challenge that comes with that.

This isn’t an attempt to demonstrate that startups and new technologies are subject to many of the same pressures and reception issues – that’s been clearly documented and brilliantly expressed in Gartner’s Hype Curve. Rather, I wanted to explore some of the striking similarities in specific situations, movements and experiences in the early days of both micropublishing and blogging, from the perspective of an early settler and long-term resident of both of these strange and wonderful new(ish) countries.

So here’s something I’ve been working on for a little while: it’s a very approximate timeline of the activities, patterns, behaviours and reactions experienced by both Twitter (/micropublishing) and Blogger (/early blogging) during their first few years.
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A friend shared a link to the Freaking News celebrity photoshop contest with me the other day, and in case you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a look. Basically, people have taken images of celebrities and then rotated their bodies while leaving their faces in place. It’s a little difficult to explain, but have a look at the examples in that link and you’ll get the idea.

Of course, everyone looks a bit weird, but the truly worrying thing is that some celebrities – Dennis Rodman, Elton John – actually look pretty good (or at least naturalish) with their faces on upside-down, if you can cast aside any lingering questions about what freakish accident might have caused them to end up thus afflicted.

So of course I had to have a go myself.

Aside from realising that it makes many of my male friends look like crazed Amish (above), or have heads that eerily work both ways up (below), I also discovered that even for a photoshop doofus like me, it only takes 5-10 minutes to do a passable version, and another 10 or so to polish it if you really must have it completely realistic (well, as realistic as a person with their face on upside-down can do, at least).

And here’s how you do it…
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I needed a new table in my study for crafty projects (sewing machine, somewhere to use cutting board, dedicated place for framing etc) but I quite fancied something a little bit different.

Coincidentally, our old road atlas was falling apart (and out of date), and I cannot bear to throw away a map, even one as pedestrian as that, so I thought I could combine the two creatively….

So yesterday while the football was on I nipped to Ikea and bought a plain boring 100X60 tabletop, and today I took advantage of the sunshine today and decamped to the back garden with a few bits and pieces and got to work.

And in case anyone wanted to do the same, here’s what I did and what I learnt.

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