hat tip CPB, who has a link back to the original site. I'm gathering this is about how idealistic groups of newsgroup users coped with the rising tide of email spam from 1995-2004. Rules, codes, and such. Am thinking more about usenet these days (and other forms of low bandwidth communication) as the WWW gradually succumbs to Telco spam in the form of webcast sports events, bad movies, AOL-like social media sites, etc.
(TFS stands for True Free Speech--just imagine)
Commented in Paddy's discussion of vanished reblog archives: it's not just "preserving the database" but tracking changes to post URLs & CSS.
...Rhizome has changed several times the way posts are organized and named --when you go from, say, a numbered post to having the word "reblog" in the url to removing the word "reblog" and assigning a content tag "reblog" to those old posts, links break and commands to "redirect" to the old links have to be written. You could go post by post and do this but usually programmers try to find a way to automate the process, so inevitably content gets lost. It's still in the database, but invisible to anyone using the site. Also, sites change their CSS design and information specific to the original post is lost that way, too. (E.g., removing a date stamp or a comment link by making it invisible in the CSS script.) Eventually you end up needing massive detective work to find posts (using Google's cache, other blogs, etc) and can never fully reconstruct a site as readers originally saw it.
Made belated response to commenter's "formalist net art about itself" in Paddy's "clubs to affinity" discussion.
...the surf club activities described in the Marcin Ramocki essay linked to above don't really constitute "formalist net art about itself," anymore than the science of linguistics is only concerned with the interplay of signs. There is always a connection to, and a concern about, the world these signs represent. When a web 2.0 artist talks, jokes, or makes art about art (or politiics or science) expressed in internet terms--i.e., reduced to jpegs and YouTubes--a comparison to the underlying "signifieds" of physical reality and history--their original meanings--is usually part of the equation. Not always, but with the better work.
Matt Stoller, former Open Left blogger and assistant to the recently (sadly) deposed Rep. Alan Grayson, has been writing for Yves Smith's blog Naked Capitalism. He ties together Egypt and Wisconsin through the connecting thread of organized labor resistance to neoliberal "tough love" scenarios (not the Facebook revolution, sorry).
Beneath the smiley face of the neolibs lurks this scary quote about "liquidation" from Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary.
Update: The case against neoliberalism, from an Egyptian writer.
Convo we're having about Rhizome.org Relaunch Bugs. A commenter says it's "a tad mean spirited" to publicly point out broken links. It's been a month now and it was supposed to be a week; some people care.
tommoody | Sat, Jan 22nd, 2011 2:12 p.m.
Hi, Nick,
[...] Some bugs:
The reblog posts are now tagged as "reblog archive" but archived as "editorial"--this breaks incoming links.
Here are a handful of links from my site and elsewhere that no longer work:
http://rhizome.org/editorial/fp/reblog.php/1853/ (announcing Marisa Olson's "The GIF Show")*
http://rhizome.org/editorial/fp/reblog.php/2299/* (Marisa reblogged my Time Lapse Molecule 2 .gif - the post still exists but the URL to my site is gone from the post so it appears Marisa made the GIF. Here is the current location: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2006/jul/19/time-lapse-molecule-2/)
http://www.rhizome.org/events/gifshow/*
I will look on my blogs and see what else may be broken.
Best, Tomroot | Tue, Jan 25th, 2011 1:48 p.m.
Hey Tom,
I'm working on fixing old linkbacks, and other bugs as well. Hopefully we'll have all the kinks work out in a week or so.
Thanks for your patience everyone!
Nicktommoody | Wed, Feb 23rd, 2011 10:14 a.m.
Hi, Nick,
It's been almost a month and the above links still aren't working. Paddy Johnson noticed some other errors and mentioned them on her twitter, specifically that the "Rhizome exhibition archives now almost all lead to dead links": http://rhizome.org/exhibitions/?page=3
The page above includes the "Professional Surfer" exhibit, which Brad Troemel and others have claimed as an example of the institutionalization of surf clubs. Right now that exhibit can't be found anywhere on Rhizome:
http://rhizome.org/events/timeshares/professionalsurfer.php*
So it's impossible to prove Troemel correct or incorrect unless someone made a screenshot or probes the haze of collective memory via interviews with people who might have witnessed the page.
We went through this a couple of years ago and you did get the redirects fixed fairly promptly. I will continue to note broken links here.
Best, Tommichaelszpakowski | Wed, Feb 23rd, 2011 11:08 a.m.
Why do this in public? - I'm sure it's all in good faith but it comes over as a tad mean sprited [sic].
michaeltommoody | Wed, Feb 23rd, 2011 11:33 a.m.
Michael, it's a public website and a public record, and these links aren't being fixed. If someone follows a link from my blog and it doesn't work, it's easier to "get the word out" via blog posts than email everyone who might have ever read my blog and been annoyed by link rot.
Also, this is the second round of broken links we've had to deal with in a couple of years. See http://www.tommoody.us/archives/2009/12/19/fundraisers-afc-and-rhizome/ Sorry if my peevishness about that comes off to you as mean-spirited.
Correction to above: Troemel's claim of museum support for surf clubs was based on certain of their members being included in the "Unmonumental" show in 2008. (See http://fourninetyone.com/2011/01/06/fromclubstoaffinity/ - but beware that [the essay] has many inaccuracies, as Michael Manning and others have noted.) Troemel may not have been aware of the "Professional Surfer" exhibit in January 2007, since he is claiming the clubs had "underdog" status at that time. In any case, it would be good to have the record of what actually happened restored as soon as possible. (This stuff is still being argued about.)
Here's just a sampling of other broken links to Rhizome content, from my Digital Media Tree blog (I searched "Rhizome" to generate this list and will continue to add to it from my current blog and other sources):
http://www.rhizome.org/fp.rhiz?id=3860*
http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=26212*
http://www.rhizome.org/fp.rhiz?id=3616*
http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz/?thread=24996&page=1#47095*
http://rhizome.org/fp.rhiz/?id=2463*
http://www.rhizome.org/fp.rhiz?id=1853*
http://rhizome.org/events/net_aesthetics_2_0/*
http://www.rhizome.com/fp.rhiz?id=1416*
http://rhizome.org/fp.rhiz/?id=898*
http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=19080&page=1#36375* (changed at some point to http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/19080, which works, but please note HTML formatting errors are breaking almost every link on the page now)
http://www.rhizome.com/fp.rhiz?id=666*
http://www.newmuseum.org/now_cur_RhizomeArtBase101.htm
http://rhizome.org/netartnews/story.rhiz/?×tamp=20050518*
http://www.rhizome.org/rsg/*
Eventually my own links will break--although so far ten years of blogging has managed to be preserved with no redirects, thanks to Jim, Barry, and Ed--but I'm not a public institution.
*Update, March 10, 2011: Am using this post to test links - some of them are working now, and this Archive Page restores some missing content. Links mentioned in the post above that have been fixed (am adding to this - work in progress):
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2006/apr/29/gifs-galore-and-more/
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2006/jul/19/time-lapse-molecule-2/ (but my reblogged GIF still appears to be Marisa's)
http://archive.rhizome.org:8080/exhibition/gifshow/
http://rhizome.org/events/net_aesthetics_2_0/
http://rhizome.org/events/timeshares/professionalsurfer.php has been semi-fixed - it takes you to the Time Shares page and from there you click on a link to the Professional Surfer exhibit page
http://www.rhizome.org/rsg/ now redirects to the RSG (Radical Software Group) homepage
The links above without asterisks are still broken.
Update, March 24, 2011: Post announcing the Rhizome Archive (with my feedback)
Update, July 2011: The links listed above have all been fixed by Rhizome (thanks!) with the exception of one New Museum link. I added asterisks to all the posts listed above where the links were fixed.
“Thus the studio is a place of multiple activities: production, storage and finally, if all goes well, distribution.”
Buren, Daniel, “The Function of the Studio,” trans. Thomas Repensek, October 10 (Fall 1979): 53 (emphasis added)
The above quote (minus the cheeky emphasis) hails from Caitlin Jones' recent discussion of the internet as post-studio environment. Some good thoughts with mostly terrible examples. (Nasty Nets and Petra Cortright, fine; Oliver Laric and Aleksandra Domanovic, long-winded/didactic; Ryan Trecartin fashion model dress-up page, insufferable/incoherent.)
Jones gets a bit carried away with the supposed openness of the post-studio laptop studio. Plenty happens on the Net that's beyond the artist's reckoning, but that doesn't mean the artist isn't controlling and shaping a persona and how much of an idea "gets out there." Also, how open is a piece of artwork that absolutely "requires Intel-based Mac, OS X v10.5 or later" to be experienced? Many of Jones' examples predate the "login required" social media sites that are fragmenting rather than opening up the Web.
"Open to friends" is not really the same as "open."
"If a tree falls in a walled garden..."
Hat tip Nicholas for the Jones link
