Brian Kerr

What should local media cover? What’s local, and which media?

Here’s an answer:

Little League (text messages), church carnivals (database), downtown characters (multimedia), car washes (video), profiles of people who cook my food and wash my vegetables (multimedia), neighborhood business owners (podcast), garage sales (map), changes in local and state laws (database), local school activities (calendar), local politics (blog), local natural beauty (slideshow), school lunch menus (database), localization of national issues (enterprise stories, databases, multimedia).

Reading this list — and thinking about what else you’d like to append to it — makes you realize how many projects there are, waiting for somebody to be present, able, and excited. Arbor Update, ArborWiki, MiTechNews podcasts, Teeter Talk, Downtown Ypsi, the Mangy East Quad Blog, the Frieze Building Blog, etc. and so forth right down the list(s) — these projects are all essential, but even in our little rust belt reality-distortion-field map blip there’s room for so much more.

(Now back to your regularly scheduled term-paper addled radio silence.)

(tags: annarbor media narratives web weblogs writing)

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(tags: narratives writing)

• IMDB: Towers Open Fire (1963)

From Those crazy “cut-ups” Burroughs, Gysin, and Balch restored to their rightful place in avant-garde film history in Bright Lights:

Towers Open Fire is a collage of the main themes and situations or “routines” that appear in Burroughs cut-up novels of the period. The soundtrack accompaniment is a mixture of recordings made by Burroughs on a cheap Grundig tape recorder and resembles many of the cut-up tape experiments achieved in collaboration with Ian Somerville. The rest was done in a studio, with some Arab music used. The film depicts society as crumbling in the form of a stock exchange crash, shots of which were purchased from Pathé news. Members of “a board” are dematerialized, and Burroughs plays an omnipresent role in the film (not least as the victim of an “orgasm attack” in which he leaps through a window and shoots family photos with a ping-pong gun).

(tags: collective movies narratives politics process writing)

Eugenio kindly sends a couple projects in response to How to be a poet.

• Computer Aided Poetry. Be sure to make a poem, so you can see the cool picture of Rimbaud’s CAP.
• J B Wock: “I am a PHP script, and (almost) every night I write a short phrase about whatever comes to my mind.”
• about machine poetry. a manifesto for the destruction of poets:

machine poetry is imperfect from many linguistic viewpoints, but it is precisely in this imperfection where its richness lies. the suppression of grammar leads to the suppression of god, someone said. machine poetry, dismantled and fragmented, seeks to be built within the mind and the soul of each reader. if the world is now unintelligible, machine poetry is, at first, a user’s manual for re-reading the world. however, machine poetry aspires to be read exclusively by machines in an urgently near future. liberation will come also for the human reader.

Thanks, Eugenio!

(tags: media narratives process web writing)

Here is a poem that you and I and whomever else wrote together by writing and reading this weblog, so why don’t you read it, out loud:

Photos of tulips in snow
by you and me and whomever else

quicksilver cube
ftff
anakin skywalker “you can try”
“paul ford” sitekit
quicksilver cube
frieze building
slicehost
    slicehost
        slicehost
animal crossing keep trees alive
ann arbor aerial photos
left behind at the fishbowl
brian
the possibility love is not enough

Certainly I’m being disingenuous — or at least strategic — with this poem. I made the poem from the most recent search queries that brought people to this weblog, in chronological order as reported by 103bees. But when I did this, I made some poetic decisions. For example, since my poem is a sonnet, I couldn’t include the evocative fifteenth query, which was “photos of tulips in snow.” That’s how it became the poem’s title.

How to be a poet

1. Write things
2. Let others find those things while you go live your life for a bit
3. Decide how long your poem should be — if you are brave, try a sestina, six six-line stanzas and one little three-line appendage at the end
4. Open your whatever analytics software
5. Copy out the right number of lines
6. Punctuate and line-break your poem as needed
7. Title, if desired

Objections

Objection my poem doesn’t rhyme. So what? You wrote, or hinted at, the word lines of your poem in whatever you wrote about in the first place. And the merry brigade of googlers or jeeves-inquirers or what have you related the word lines to each other.

Objection intentionality. :P (alternate: intentionality is a cargo cult.)

Objection there is no demand for my poem. Your poem is a creative + generative activity. By imposing an order and sequence to the word lines in your poem, you can see new relationships between the things you have written about and others have searched for.

(tags: analytics feedback-loop media narratives process web weblogs writing)

I’ve been taking notes on paper, making plans on paper, even doodling on paper. Paper has wiki nature. Computing metaphors are comfortable on paper: tabbed browsing ([via](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/december#mon-04-rotary_desk )), calendar lists, YouTube vs. Revver, etc. Of course, one size doesn’t fit all, so there’s no risk of me turning in the laptop anytime soon.

(tags: web writing)

The U-M Chapter of the Human Factors & Ergonomics Society is hosting a Bad Designs on Campus contest for National Ergonomics Month (October):

Following the principles of Human Factors and Ergonomics, a bad design can be anything that humans have problems interacting with. This may be a tool or device that one physically manipulates, such as a hammer or door, which results in unnecessary physical discomfort or fatigue, or that is confusing to operate. It may also be a virtual interface, such as a website, with confusing layouts, navigation schemes, or even one that is difficult to read because of poor text font/size/color/contrast. Several good examples of bad designs can be found at

Want a free bad design idea? The contest requires entries to be submitted as — get this — Microsoft Word documents. The relationship between proprietary / convicted-monopolist-boosting text formats and human factors in design is not too hard to tease out — but, giving the hosts the benefit of the doubt, I’ll assume that plain text and RTF could be considered Word documents in the sense that they are able to be accessed by the program. But still, that’s one hell of a bad design right there.

(tags: annarbor design umich umsi writing)