Nominated

ignatz the mouse
image from andertoons

It’s been quiet around here for a few weeks. The good thing about job 2.0 is that, unlike job 1.0, you can blow it off without much consequences. Oh sure, your search engine rankings are going to start tanking, people who read your blow start dropping off slowly, cobwebs start forming on your home page… (do people still say ‘home page’?) but really what other consequences are there?

I’ll try to catch up and post of some recent news. First up, a few weeks ago I got nominated for an Ignatz Award in the Outstanding Mini-Comic category. I probably should have mounted a campaign to try to win the award, but I never got around to it. I didn’t go to SPX either. It looked like a good show from afar. Congratulations to the Ignatz Winners!

A Post

web 2.0 is job 2.0

Activity on this blog had ceased almost entirely during December, January February. I should’ve posted a warning or something. Instead this blog appeared to succumb to the fate of so many others. First a trickle of activity, then a flood of posts and eventually, tumbleweeds. How long has it been since the last substantial post? What!? 3 months?

Web 2.0 is a harsh mistress. She rewards daily posting discipline, but taking a break is akin to doomsday. The blog acquires layers of dust… Your Technorati ranking falls, rss subscribers start to unsubscribe… are those cobwebs in the corner of the page? Why does anyone bother coming back here at all?

But, a few things did happen during those information dark ages. The blog converted from a creaky Movable Type installation on an old server to a shiny new Word Press engine on a new host. Is this the equivalent of a religious conversion in the world of blogs? I now have more megabytes, more bandwidth and more features than I know what to do with.

The slick new skin (K2) and the new guts look impressive, but a degenerative disease has seized the old posts imported from the previous install. Strange character artifacts have sprouted up. Images have gone mysteriously missing. Should I leave them alone? Leave them as a reminder of the relentless pace of Web 2.0? Should I let a patina of data rot slowly devour the old posts… Or should I fix them? Clean up the artifacts, re-link the misplaces images, add missing keywords to build up an impressive Tag Cloud?

I can’t help it. When I review the old posts it’s hard to resist hitting the ‘edit’ button and fix the problem. The old (expired?) posts are getting burnished, spit-shined and prepared for new data search paradigms. At the same time this kind of activity is self-reflective. Why did I ever post this? Or that? Should I practice a little revisionist history and delete those unwanted posts? But can they ever be completely deleted? Or will they keep leading a ghostly existence in search engine caches, or in some Wayback Machine?

The super-malleability makes this medium fragile. It screams for constant editing, constant updating and constant feedback. Perpetual flux. Swim or sink. But, the flux is it’s power. That’s how we keep coming back, to read, to post, to update, to comment… if we don’t do it now, it maybe too late. No one may notice or care a few days from now. Web 2.0 really is Job 2.0.