random: a small moment of argh
Warren Ellis » The Patchwork Years:The years 2001-2007, approximately, on the web were the crazy years. The patchwork years. The years the web was massively and chaotically pumped full of Stuff....
[...] One of the few sane responses to this explosion of production was to assume the role of curator. (Other sane responses include moving to the woods and considering a completion of the work Ted Kaczynski started.) The two most famous examples of same are Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom (est. 1997) - Barger is said to have coined the term "weblog" - and Mark Frauenfelder’s Boing Boing (est. 2000 as a weblog, previously a print magazine est. 1988), co-produced for much of its life by Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, and Xeni Jardin. The latter, in particular, has spawned countless imitators, all deeply involved in doing the web-work of 2001-2007 - sorting out all the weird crap that’s out there and re-presenting it in some kind of ordered and aesthetically or politically filtered manner for our consideration....
[...] And, frankly, no-one’s going to do a better job of being the internet’s copy/paste editors than the BB crew anyway. They have the time, they have the money, they have the setup, they have the audience and they have the momentum of nearly a decade in the job. Nobody needs another linkblog like that. There are already thousands of them. The job of curation is being taken care of. Look ahead.
Argh.
AAARRRRGH.
OK, look: a links weblog is not in any reasonable sense of the term "curation". Curation implies not only selection -- and sometimes comprehensive selection, depending on the subject and the people/organization doing the work -- but also preservation. Links weblogs preserve nothing, almost by design; they're meant to be topical. They not only have a hard time preserving themselves, if they want to -- I lost nearly four years of Grim Amusements archives when something hit the database and I didn't realize it until I moved the site to another host and couldn't regenerate it -- weblogs also can't preserve what they link to, which means that if/when the content at the other end goes away, the links themselves lose both context and actual information. That is, or was, a very big problem with political and news-type weblogs, because newspaper and editorial sites tend to keep information online the shortest amount of time. It's one of the reasons that when Grim Amusements was a much more active joint, I stared putting so much quoted text into entries; so that at a later date when the link staled, anyone who ran across the thing would know what the hell I was talking about. Curation also implies giving people enough context to understand the information presented. I don't do it here with the webcomics link entries, because I really can't; I'd have to copy the strip, get permission to post it, deal with uploading the file, deal with the sharp difference in traffic that the graphics would bring and ... no. Just ... no. I am not the Comics Curmudgeon. (...No, I said I'm not THE Comics Curmudgeon, not that I'm not A comics curmudgeon.) So those webcomics entries in this here weblog are likely to provoke serious confusion, even in me, at a later date. "Yes. Yes it IS." Yes it is what? Yes what is what? I have no freakin' idea what I was talking about!
web.archive.org is curation; boing-boing.net is commentary and sometimes analysis.
The closest museum/library analog I can think of is that links weblogs are selectors. For example, I used to pick out government statistical information and publications for the library, back when the government actually published such pesky information. But ... I did not preserve any of it. Once the next year's information or new edition came out, the old version frequently got discarded. We didn't have the space or the need for old publications of those sorts. That's pretty much the way links weblogs work: Hey, here's something bright, shiny and interesting for today! ...OK, we're done with it now. On to the next bright, shiny, interesting thing!
Weird thing is, I mostly kinda sorta agree with him on the rest of the stuff he talks about in that entry. (Kind of. Sort of. A little. Maybe.) We don't necessarily need another boing-boing. (We certainly don't need the comment threads.) The stuff he's doing for himself is a type of curation. (Very very highly selective, and depending on where he puts that stuff and how accessible it is for others later on, later generations may be really happy with him.) But that section there got right up my nose, for some reason.
Yes, I am a librarian; why do you ask?
...Well, yes, I have worked with museums and special collections departments extensively. What's that got to do with anything?
...Yes, I have been known to be just a touch pedantic at times. Your point being ...?
...What? What?
(And in a moment of pure huh?, the only form of the word available in the online Cambridge dictionary is "Curator". No "curate" (v. trans.: "To act as curator of (a museum, exhibits, etc.); to look after and preserve." OED.), no "curating", no "curation", not even "curatorship". Just "Curator". Curious, that.)
[...] One of the few sane responses to this explosion of production was to assume the role of curator. (Other sane responses include moving to the woods and considering a completion of the work Ted Kaczynski started.) The two most famous examples of same are Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom (est. 1997) - Barger is said to have coined the term "weblog" - and Mark Frauenfelder’s Boing Boing (est. 2000 as a weblog, previously a print magazine est. 1988), co-produced for much of its life by Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, and Xeni Jardin. The latter, in particular, has spawned countless imitators, all deeply involved in doing the web-work of 2001-2007 - sorting out all the weird crap that’s out there and re-presenting it in some kind of ordered and aesthetically or politically filtered manner for our consideration....
[...] And, frankly, no-one’s going to do a better job of being the internet’s copy/paste editors than the BB crew anyway. They have the time, they have the money, they have the setup, they have the audience and they have the momentum of nearly a decade in the job. Nobody needs another linkblog like that. There are already thousands of them. The job of curation is being taken care of. Look ahead.
Argh.
AAARRRRGH.
OK, look: a links weblog is not in any reasonable sense of the term "curation". Curation implies not only selection -- and sometimes comprehensive selection, depending on the subject and the people/organization doing the work -- but also preservation. Links weblogs preserve nothing, almost by design; they're meant to be topical. They not only have a hard time preserving themselves, if they want to -- I lost nearly four years of Grim Amusements archives when something hit the database and I didn't realize it until I moved the site to another host and couldn't regenerate it -- weblogs also can't preserve what they link to, which means that if/when the content at the other end goes away, the links themselves lose both context and actual information. That is, or was, a very big problem with political and news-type weblogs, because newspaper and editorial sites tend to keep information online the shortest amount of time. It's one of the reasons that when Grim Amusements was a much more active joint, I stared putting so much quoted text into entries; so that at a later date when the link staled, anyone who ran across the thing would know what the hell I was talking about. Curation also implies giving people enough context to understand the information presented. I don't do it here with the webcomics link entries, because I really can't; I'd have to copy the strip, get permission to post it, deal with uploading the file, deal with the sharp difference in traffic that the graphics would bring and ... no. Just ... no. I am not the Comics Curmudgeon. (...No, I said I'm not THE Comics Curmudgeon, not that I'm not A comics curmudgeon.) So those webcomics entries in this here weblog are likely to provoke serious confusion, even in me, at a later date. "Yes. Yes it IS." Yes it is what? Yes what is what? I have no freakin' idea what I was talking about!
web.archive.org is curation; boing-boing.net is commentary and sometimes analysis.
The closest museum/library analog I can think of is that links weblogs are selectors. For example, I used to pick out government statistical information and publications for the library, back when the government actually published such pesky information. But ... I did not preserve any of it. Once the next year's information or new edition came out, the old version frequently got discarded. We didn't have the space or the need for old publications of those sorts. That's pretty much the way links weblogs work: Hey, here's something bright, shiny and interesting for today! ...OK, we're done with it now. On to the next bright, shiny, interesting thing!
Weird thing is, I mostly kinda sorta agree with him on the rest of the stuff he talks about in that entry. (Kind of. Sort of. A little. Maybe.) We don't necessarily need another boing-boing. (We certainly don't need the comment threads.) The stuff he's doing for himself is a type of curation. (Very very highly selective, and depending on where he puts that stuff and how accessible it is for others later on, later generations may be really happy with him.) But that section there got right up my nose, for some reason.
Yes, I am a librarian; why do you ask?
...Well, yes, I have worked with museums and special collections departments extensively. What's that got to do with anything?
...Yes, I have been known to be just a touch pedantic at times. Your point being ...?
...What? What?
(And in a moment of pure huh?, the only form of the word available in the online Cambridge dictionary is "Curator". No "curate" (v. trans.: "To act as curator of (a museum, exhibits, etc.); to look after and preserve." OED.), no "curating", no "curation", not even "curatorship". Just "Curator". Curious, that.)