The End Of Privacy
So, a few months ago, I decided to move my blogging into a more public forum. Tribe.net was a safe haven for my ideas, but their inherent slowness and unreliability had me seek other things. But to get my blog out to the most friends, I had to use Facebook, which is tied to my real name. Now this is a problem if in your head, you are this underground freedom fighter. Because the evil forces of evilness are always going to want to link back to you and your loved ones. I read Spiderman, you gotta have a secret identity.
And then there is the possibility of really making a difference. That is going to come from transparency and acceptance of who you are. That kind of power is going to come from taking full responsibility, radical accountability for your actions and your words. There is standing for something. I’m not saying that this is the most important blog on the internets or something. I’m just saying that it’s me.
We are living at the end of the industrial age. The internet has given us a voice. It is millions of voices, talking right back to mainstream media. In the last age, communication was a top down, lord to serf kind of relationship. TV, News, Magazines, Books… they all came to us and we did nothing but listen. It had been that way for as long as these technologies have existed. Media has always been the world of elites. It has also been the most effective way for agents of change and intelligence to get their word to the masses, at various rare points in history. The Internet made it possible for all. Anyone with a internet cafe can now change the world. Now, they joystick and the keyboard have given us a way to have a conversation back. Blogs and videogames, they are our access to taking control of the stories.
But, we must tell the stories to make the networked system work. By decentralizing the communication sources, by making every man woman and child becomes an editor, newscaster, videographer, humorist, eroticist, priest, magician, political pundit, distributor… and we become the voice. Honestly, if you have even thought about it, you MUST start putting your stuff on the web. get a wordpress.com blog. Open a facebook account, and link it to your videos on youtube. Twitter your whereabouts. Post photos of yourself from your phone. Find me and network yourself to me!
We cannot stop them from watching. The Genie is out of the bottle on surveillance. They can watch and read everything. They can link whatever we write to almost any email or IP address. But by the same token, we can’t stop them from masturbating while watching us either. As we flood the system with chaff, we become more invisible. In an age of reality TV, the only thing more cameras is going to achieve is to make me think I am even more a rockstar than I already know I am.
Networks communicate from every node. The radical thing I am suggesting is to tell everything. Be wholly yourself without reservation. Of course, that is easy for me, I work in Hollywood, and don’t have to answer to corporate masters. But ultimately, your corporate masters or the various tentacles of the American Law Enforcement Community will be able to find anything about you anyway. Wait until the tagging facial recognition software comes out for the public. Be smart out there, but express yourself fully and don’t hold back.
The system is in a state of upheaval right now, and everything is changing. It’s painful for the system too. Change is coming, and we are on the fast first wave. Be free.
edit: this just in: naked pics of yourself can be trouble.
Tribe is Dead, Long Live Tribe.
I love Tribe.net. I started Blogging on tribe a few years back. I have found whole communities through Tribe. I have found the people I meet at parties. I have organized theme camps and planned whole events through it. It was a great site, really.
But, DAMNIT! It just ate another event I tried to post when it decided to periodically go out on me. It hasn’t been reliable in months. I think someone over there keeps forgetting to switch the power on or something. it is more than a little maddening. And now, as a result of tribe’s downess, there are fewer blog posts from my friends, which nowadays is the whole reason I even go on tribe.
I want them to win, I really do. I want tribe to stay awesome and replace facebook as my default social networking site. I want it’s service to keep up with the rapidly advancing technology. I don’t know what the answer is. But maybe it looks like one of our genius programmer friends designing a site that operates in almost the same way. Maybe Tribe needs to give the code to the community. Maybe someone needs to invest that money we all paid for “premium” memberships into some infrastructure that works.
Until then, find me on facebook,myspace or subscribe to my blog www.spaceman23.com in an RSS reader (google reader changed my life), or find spaceman on twitter. I don’t see myself trying desperately to post things on Tribe until they work their shit out. Right now it’s all on my site.
Long Live Tribe!
Working on the Blog
How Meta is this. I am blogging on how I have been working on my blog. Neat.
Last night I did a little time travel, I went back into my old tribe blog and started archiving all my old posts. I saved them all into a web archive format so that I could access them online. The pictures aren’t gonna be perfect, and the links might not all work, but at least the content will be there. I now need to post date all the posts and paste them into my WordPress system.
Art has been doing some amazing work on the new skin for the View From Space site. Brian Shaw has been programming and setting up my web hosting. I feel like I have this amazing team. I am looking to roll things out very soon. It will bring together my writing, my carton projects that are developing, pictures, and video from my mad adventures, social networks I am a part of, my twitter feed, and my google reader feeds. It should be really cool. Art has also been helping me with tags and categories for my blog. I am so excited about finally having a good website for myself.
I am also experimenting with a program for Macs called Blogo. It has a cute bunny icon. It is an offline text editor that automatically posts your blog. It can’t post to multiple blogs at once, which would be nice. But it can handle tags and categories. It likes drag and drop pictures and video, which is key for me. The web interface of wordpress can be a little wonky from time to time. So far, first post, I like it. When I hit send, a twitter should be automatically generated. Neat.
I am also going to have google ad-words and an Amazon associates account attached to the blog. If anything I mention sounds interesting to you, please go ahead and check it out. I get pennies, but if I make a cent on this, I’ll be happy. Hand over fist cash would be nice, too. My next step is to expand an audience. How on earth am I going to get more people to read my blog? I keep hearing the words aggregator and pings… I should probably figure out what those mean.
Going back in the history of my blog was really interesting. My blog goes back years. There are like 250 entries in there. What’s kind of cool is that I get to see all the spaces I have gone through in the last few years. I get to see who was regularly in my world. I got to see who I was.
I like who I have become.
How to Subscribe to RSS
I have been confounded of late by the complete unreliability of tribe.net. I really love the site, and have for years, but I miss being able to get my regular blogs. I love reading blogs, but I hate having to open them all over the place. So I decided to look into this RSS thing.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndicating. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)) Basically, it goes to sites you designate (they are the ones you check for new content daily on) and puts them all into one site.
I am using Google Reader. It’s free and web based. I am just now learning it, but it seems pretty simple. It gives all the blogs and stuff you read a unified look. You can also subscribe to flickr photo streams (find KT’s, Josh’s and Angel Adam’s feeds, even video. You can get non blog feeds, like fedex and ups tracking,weather alerts, and automated ebay auction searches. Like I said, I am just learning it. But I see this whole new world.
google.com/reader and apparently, they just released a version for the iphone.
others I have not used. shrook for the mac (free and offline, so it storse on your hardrive utsire.com/shrook), FeedDemon for windows and netnewswire for macs available at newsgator.com
so to subscribe, your reader needs a site’s rss feed site. This will look like a regular website. For example, my blog here has a feed site( feed://spaceman23.wordpress.com/feed/) just paste that into google reader, and viola! anytime I post here, you will be able to see it in your reader program.
Most sites where you blog will automatically create a RSS feed for you (even myspace!). Although, I am not sure if tribe does it, mainly because tribe no worky anymore. Now that you are looking for it, keep you eye out for the little orange icon at the top of this page. Then paste those feeds into your reader!
My friend Ali turned me onto a really cool internet hack, using youtube to learn how to do anything. Basically, type in “how to…” and there will be videos from hundreds of sources around the net. I learned how to use automater in mac the other day, and how to import video from my flip to imovie. check out this video.
click this if the video no worky: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ihbh1HguIUk
It’s a little dry, but i love that my friend the internet can show me everything I need to know. I loves the internets.
spaceman23
