warren ellis

Silos and the Open Web

Aside | | Paul Greer

On Blogs, RSS and Social Media:

The Open Web movement asserts a special role for public, cooperative, and standard World Wide Web communications; it opposes private, exclusive, proprietary Web solutions.

Computer scientist Tantek Çelik gives three aspects of the Open Web:

  1. publish content and applications on the web in open standards
  2. code and implement the web standards depend on
  3. access and use content / code / web-apps / implementations

— Wiki

 

An information silo, or a group of such silos, is an insular management system in which one information system or subsystem is incapable of reciprocal operation with others that are, or should be, related. Thus information is not adequately shared but rather remains sequestered within each system or subsystem, figuratively trapped within a container like grain is trapped within a silo: there may be a lot of it, and it may be stacked quite high and freely available within those limits, but it has no effect outside those limits.

— Wiki

Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to go full-bore blog again, like in the old days. Twitter’s only real use is as a notification system, after all, so you’d just pump out post links to it from your blog. You know, the way people used to, when having a place for your own voice and your own thoughts was a good thing.

When I was in the swing of it, way back when, it was like the world’s most minimalist radio station. A Station Ident post to start the day, a Night Music or Closedown post at the end of the day, littered with whatever strangeness and wonder passed my screen in between.

I miss that long moment when the web seemed full of people doing the same thing, or thinking in public. It happens in the Republic Of Newsletters, now. But it was nice to have all those little radio stations broadcasting in the night.

— Warren Ellis

The above tweeter, RSS pioneer, David Winer has made an RSS feed for journalists. Eliot Landrum has followed suit with an RSS feed for Open Architects.  These are in the form of OPML files that can be read in your RSS reader of choice.

Comics and Structure

Quote | | Paul Greer

Trees

“Traditional storytelling structures aren’t especially necessary in comics – it’s what’s kept people with genuinely avant garde leanings working in commercial comics for so long….Even in what we call the ‘mainstream’ end of the field, where the superheroes live, the medium remains remarkably plastic.”

– Warren Ellis

On What Comics Can Do

Quote | | Paul Greer

“If Art Spiegelman’s MAUS had been filmed first, it would have had an audience of maybe three people at Sundance. Because the moment everyone trooped on wearing their mouse masks, any larger audience would have lost it and left giggling. Only in the space of cartooning could that conceit work. Not least because we’re already aware, when we come to cartooning, that we’re looking at someone’s processed and hermetic perception of the world. The great success of MAUS is that the mouse faces make us let our guard down, and so we’re hit by the horrible truth of that book from an unprotected angle.”

“..a curling, snarling Peter Kuper piece can sear the page with its anger in a way that no photorealistic artist will ever be able to communicate. A room drawn by Eddie Campbell will be more real than any snapshot, because his line is almost like handwriting, and has human breath upon it. Dash Shaw’s work may look rough on first look, but stay with it, look at how he conveys the essence of an idea in every panel, and you’ll realise how hard he sometimes works to evoke an entire world with so few elements.”

“This is a field that combines, on the one hand, the novel and the poem and the slogan and the news story, and on the other hand every stop from pointillism to cave painting. Understand comics as the marriage of word and picture, as simple as that, and you’ll get a sense of how broad the medium’s reach really is.”

— Warren Ellis

Glastonphant

Aside | | Paul Greer

Had excellent time watching Glastonbury footage over the weekend, although the beeb were a bit stingey with new acts on freeview.

Cried about 5 times.

Would like to post some YouTubes, but they’ve all been taken down. The Curious can go and check out the online stuff here. Its very incomplete, but better than nothing.

Highlights were Bruce singing “The River” (he was actually visibley steaming like a horse, ffs (47:30)), The Specials, Yeah Yeah Yeahs (obviously), La Roux, Metronomy, Blurs comeback (very emotional), Neil Young showing everyone how to play guitar, watching Madness with the kiddies (eldest made everyone flags (including important toys) to wave, Bon Iver, Bat for Lashes (she is from outerspace), Lady Gaga (two words: firework tits), Nick Cave and more other stuff than I care to mention.

And one day I will manage to go again, ideally in the form of provider rather than punter, so maybe see you there.

Warren Ellis on the above mentioned Springsteen MOMENT:

“And he’s just blown the authenticity
thing and gone into supermystification, because it
looks like he’s got an electromagnetic halo, curls of
glowing, pearly white light rising up from and playing
around his head and shoulders while he stands there
in near-silhouette…. He looks like he’s The Last Rock Star, the Ascended
Master who glows in the dark.”