Pete Ashton’s Blog

When I’m blathering on about Internet bobbins I often use the term “stuff” as a shorthand for words, pictures, videos and online content in general. “Conversations take place about and around stuff” I say “and it’s in your interest as a [insert audience here] to provide that stuff or a venue in which that stuff can be talked about.”

The thing about “stuff” is it’s quite a physical concept. “I have lots of stuff in my room” means there ain’t much space to move about. Stuff is tangible. Stuff has mass. Online stuff, on the other hand, doesn’t so much. And yet it can be quantified in terms on bytes, kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes. Your external hard drive is a tangible thing that runs out of space, and bandwidth, the speed by which you get stuff from the Internet, is analogous to forcing water through a pipe - bigger the pipe the faster the stuff can get through.

So while digital content is intangible we deal with it in a tangible way, filling up drives with music and videos and waiting for photos to upload. Maybe, when storage and bandwidth increases by such a degree, as it surely will, that nothing you want takes more than a nanosecond to download and storage is effectively infinite, will we treat digital stuff as intangible but right now we don’t.

Which, in a long winded and roundabout way, might explain why I occasionally look at the USB cable that delivers music to my laptop and imagine the mp3 moving along it. Or why I draw a line in my mind between the laptop and the wifi router and picture the file I’m downloading flittering through the air like swarms of tiny insects. I might even pass my hand through the space in the vain hope that I might feel something.

The funny thing is we all grew up with radio signals and electricity cables but it’s only now we have quantified visualizations of that data in on our computers that this thing that our elderly relatives’ parents found magical becomes magic again.

I mean, if I watch the network activity monitor on my Mac while I request an mp3 from a site I know, when it spikes, that that song has just passed through the air in front of me. Not just data but a specific song.

What do you think. Is thinking of digital stuff as tangible a simple category error or are we wrong to think of digital bits as intangible? Are they simply just very light indeed?

When I first started playing with Yahoo Pipes I did what I think everyone else did - I smurshed all my RSS feeds into one massive feed - blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Twitter updates, anything that was produced by me on the internet could be accessed from one single address. There’s one big problem with this sort of feed. It’s utterly useless.

Why, for the love of all that may or may not be holy, would anyone subscribe to this torrent of context-free nonsense? Nobody ever asks that question. But still they create these things because it’s a cool experiment, a useful process in understanding what Yahoo Pipes can and cannot do.

I’ve become a big fan of Pipes these last few months. RSS feeds are great but they’re often not quite right. The Twitter feed, for example, automatically prepends your tweets with the username and has identical content in the title and body. Wouldn’t it make more sense if this:

peteashton: I’m picking my belly button fluff
peteashton: I’m picking my belly button fluff

looked like this?

peteashton
I’m picking my belly button fluff

I think it would, and I can do that in Pipes. Here’s one for Twitter posts with “onthebus” in them. Nice.

What about removing all my tweets that have an @ symbol in them (since they’re conversations and only make sense within Twitter) creating a real status update feed? Easy.

So Pipes are great, but lifestreams, or whatever you want to call them, are just overload. I can’t imagine anyone being interested in everything I write on one of my blogs, let alone all of them. But there might be, and it’s kinda cool to have a big fat “anthology” feed. At the very least my parents might be interested even if it goes over their heads at times.

So from now on the Pete Pipe only has blogs posts. The main sources are this blog, ASH-10 and my Tumblr since they represent the basic range of my bloggery, and they’re prepended as such. Anything else has the prefix “Other:” and this includes my posts to Created in Birmingham, the Birmingham Post and the Custard Factory. If I join any other group blogs I’ll add them in there.

I supoose the thinking is these posts are curated whereas places like Flickr and Twitter are more like dumping groups, the raw materials from which curated stuff emerges. Or something.

Here’s the Pete Pipe which you’re welcome to clone and adapt for your own use. If you just want to subscribe to see if it’s less annoying than before click here.

I’m a big fan of buying t-shirts online from boutique operations that print them in limited numbers. In a way these sort of tees are like posters and prints except you don’t have to clutter up your walls with them - you just shove them in a cupboard and wear them until the armpits go all crusty and the smell won’t wash out. Threadless is the grandaddy of these services but I’m always looking out for new places to get my t-shirt fix.

Deplorable Tom pointed to Rumplo which gathers “artist t-shirts from around the world” in a blog/shop/gallery format and from there I came across T-post, a Swedish subscription service where you get sent a shirt every 6 weeks with a design inspired by a recent news story (which is printed on the inside).

The gallery looks to be to my liking - I doubt I’ll get sent a shirt I’ll really hate - and the price, at €26 a shirt, is pretty reasonable. They also only print as many shirts as there are subscribers so you know you’re getting something unique. I like that. Makes me feel all special. And given that I’m seeing more and more Threadless shirts at gigs that’s an important factor.

I also like how their models are relatively normal people photographed in their pants. Nice touch.

A while back I came across this guide on how to communicate with Tantek. It’s rather mindblowing in its comprehensiveness and while it’s not something I could hope to replicate, not being the slightest bit methodological in my activities, it did strike me as a darn good idea. I mean, I know I’m crap at replying to certain sorts of emails but someone sending me an email doesn’t know that and might just think I don’t like them. I know I use IM a lot more than I used to but unless I already IM with you you’ll have no idea it’s a good way to throw something past me quickly.

With that in mind I’ve added Contacting Pete to the tabs at the top of peteashton.com. It’ll be an ever changing document (or at least will go out of date pretty soon as my behaviour changes and I fail to update it) but right now it’s worth a skim if you wonder why I never get back to you.

I’d also be interested in some feedback on this. I think I know how I communicate but I probably have no idea. If you do intercourse of a textual / verbal type with me often have I missed anything out?

While the Rooum find was a lot of fun the best piece of work in Wakefield’s gallery, in my opinion anyway, is the print of Elizabeth Frink’s Head II. It looks a little like this:

Except it doesn’t. For a start I don’t remember that blue wash behind it being quite so insipid and the blacks are really black, but reducing it down from something like a metre high to a wee jpeg is never going to do it justice.

The gallery had put it together with a couple of other portraits which was a bad idea for the other paintings as Frink’s piece towered above them. Essentially a charcoal (?) sketch, possibly for a sculpture, she builds the sense of mass with simple swirls and a cartoonists eye for subtle caricature (which is probably why I was drawn to it). I could have stared at it for hours.

Wikipedia has a good entry on Frink.

After checking out John Welding’s Drawing The City exhibition at Wakefield Art Gallery Jez and myself decided we might as well check out the rest of the art while we were there. I mean, it wasn’t comics but it might be worth a gander. As we made our way upstairs Jez called me back. There, at the foot of the stairs, was an unassuming portrait of a man full of of the smug power of youth. It looked not unlike this:

The card was what had caught Jez’s eye. This is a 1952 portrait of Donald Rooum, a cartoonist of some minor legend within the British underground comics scenes. I never had any connection with him but his name kept cropping up whenever you delved into those parts of comics that crossed over with the radical politics brigades for Rooum is part of the tradition of anarchist cartoonists. I never met him, nor, if I’m honest, am a big fan of his work, but it holds an important place in the history of Brit comics, somewhere between the anarchic-yet-establishment work of Leo Baxendale in The Beano and the anarcho-punk sensibility of Simon Gane’s 90-s era Arnie.

Anyway, there’s a story about the gallery tracking down Rooum here and a whole load of his Wildcat strips here for your enjoyment.

I’m being all crap at my blogging again, or at least crap at recording what I’m up to and given how my life is moving rather quickly I’d like to record it, memory being crap and all that. Thankfully I stick everything in my diary these days so let’s have a quick look at what I did over the last fortnight and ramble about it a bit.

Last Monday 9th saw The Big Debate where chum Jo was talking along with other luminaries of this brave new digital age. The topic was on whether digital was a good or bad thing and I blogged my concerns about that beforehand. But my job there, as a favour to Jo, was to liveblog the thing, bashing away at my laptop for a couple of hours. You can read my transcript here.

Lessons were learned from the exercise. Firstly, if you’re planning on transcribing the event for an online audience and hoping to involve them in the debate you’re gonna need more than one person. Transcribing, especially if you’re not trained in that department, is pretty intense as you try and rephrase interesting comments on the fly. In fact the more interesting the harder it becomes. To then try and parse all the comments coming in through various channels is a chore indeed. So at least two people would be ideal - one for the output, one for the input.

Secondly, if you’re displaying the liveblog behind the panelists on a big screen, increase the size of the font. I didn’t do a test run and it was barely legible from the front row. Thirdly, make sure the chair of the panel is in on the game and ideally has a monitor in front of him. There’s probably a best practice for involving external comments into a live panel, letting the backchannel inform the flow of the debate without dominating it, and I’d like to see any work that’s been done on that.

The online community following the debate did feel like a novelty add-on at times, especially during the Q&A, but that’s probably because it is a novelty and the only real analogy is from broadcast television and radio so we think of it within that disempowering paradigm. I’d like to think a better balance can be found.

Still, it was well worth doing if only to learn lessons. As for the content of the debate itself I really can’t comment. I was so involved in transcribing it that nothing stayed in my head for more than a second so I wasn’t able to develop any thoughts. Considering I probably could have constructed some rather awkward questions I’m forced to conclude this was why Jo put me on transcribing duties, not to mention Mark on the video: to keep us out of trouble.

Tuesday was the 8th birthday of this blog, something I normally note but neglected to this year. I guess I’m over that these days though I do intend to make a bit of a fuss in 2010 (once everyone else who started a few months before me makes a bit of a fuss themselves. Bitter? Me? Nah.)

Thursday saw a meeting at the Moseley Community Development Trust about their plans to turn their building into a coworking space. I thought this was a big public meeting thing but it turned out to be a smaller affair bringing together a few interested parties to discuss how they might go forward. There’s a whole massive post I need to write about this but suffice to say I’m really enthusiastic about the project as it ties in with everything I’ve been thinking about coworking in Birmingham since coming back from SXSW, specifically about the community driving how the space is used. The CDT have got significant funds (£300k) to renovate and equip the space but do not want to dictate its use. If I do get involved with this, and it’ll be in a voluntary capacity, my task will be to develop the tools to get the home workers, creatives, freelancers and laptop monkeys to com together online and develop a community that can take over the place in one fell swoop come January when the building is complete. Inspiration comes from Alex Hillman’s work on Indy Hall in Philadelphia who I talked to at SXSW.

The main touchstones for the Moseley thing to work are the community making it an interesting place to be and the cost being worth investing in but not a waste if you don’t use it for a week. The very rough ballpark for fair to heavy use is currently £50 a month, which seems reasonable to me. I suspect this could become one of my major projects over the next year so you’ll no doubt hear more about it.

Friday and the Weekend saw me working through the night and barely leaving the house as I set up a the Universitas 21 Summer School blog, the first of hopefully many projects with Birmingham University. I was approached a few weeks back to see how they could use blogging instead of the more traditional “journaling” that students do on these intensive two week courses and whether this could add anything useful to the process. The big deal here is the commenting that students and staff can do on each others posts, creating an additional environment for discussion and sharing of ideas. Given the intensive nature of the course and that fact that the blog will only live for a fortnight it didn’t seem worth opening commenting to the wider internet but it will be public and archived there for at least a couple of years.

What’s been interesting for me has been writing quite specific documentation for 50-odd students from all over the world who will have wildly varying online experience and English skills. I’ll also be doing a session with them on their first day to back all this up and hope they’ll play about with the system in the week before the school starts but it’s slightly nerve-wracking. I think I’ve covered most of the bases but won’t know if it’s actually worked until it’s all over. All in all it’s an interesting experiment in using social internet tools in the opposite way they’re really intended - short term, closed off and inward looking. Should be fun.

A bit of much needed socialising occurred at the beginning of this week followed by one of the more surreal days I’ve had in a while, and that’s saying something.

Wednesday saw me on the judging panel of the Birmingham Post’s Power50. This involved sitting in a room with 10 or so other people working through a longlist of 200 and deciding which of them were the most powerful people in the city and in what order they should be put in. I had huge reservations about doing this, partly because it goes against all sorts of things I believe in but also because I really didn’t know what I could contribute to the process. I’m still not sure what I did contribute other than getting a couple of “wildcards” in there and since I’m sworn to secrecy under the Chatham House Rule there’s not much I can say about the process. As I Twittered it wasn’t as wank as I’d feared but certainly came out of a social environment I’m really not part of. But I guess that’s why I was there, to try and shake things up a bit.

As for what the Power50 is actually good for I’m not sure. It’s an easy one to dismiss as pointless noisemaking to sell papers but, while I was in the eye of the storm at least, it did dawn on me that at least one of the people I’d gotten in there could benefit significantly from being drawn to the city’s establishment eyes, just as I was put on their radar by that Guardian award. At the end of the day, though, I dislike the notion of power being celebrated. I’m all about the dissolution of power bases and the spawning of randomly morphing autonomous groups which cannot be subsumed into existing power bases. So there.

That’s not to say I won’t put “Judge of the Birmingham Post’s Power50 2008″ on the about page of ASH-10 though.

Thursday saw Jez and myself take a day trip to The North. Wakefield, specifically, to see John Welding’s Drawing The City exhibition in the art gallery there. Rich Bruton has already blogged about it at length so I don’t need to say much more other than to express how impressed I was with the work.

I’ve known John’s diary comics since I sold his Goathland series back in the late 90s and have always admired the calm and reflective way he records the mundane, making it universal and extraordinary. He also has an uncanny ability to communicate a sense of place and this really came out in the Drawing The City piece. The work was done on huge sheets of paper about 1.5m tall that covered the walls of the gallery like that big tapestry comic in France and told stories from John’s travels along a specific route from the art gallery to the new Hepworth.

Click for teh huge

Having been used to seeing John’s work all small in A5 booklets it was fascinating to see these at times life-sized drawings from him, especially when you realise it’s all original art and not scaled up. There was an amazing sense of space to his work and there was a danger he could have produced static illustrations were it not for his skill in turning it into a narrative.

Click for teh huge

I don’t like to say things like “it’s great to see comics in this sort of environment” as it evokes all manner of awful “Team Comix!” wank that I’ve left behind, but it really was good to see this sort of work on display in a public art space, not so much because it was comics but because of the way John uses the medium to really connect with people through his own personal experiences, something I’ve always loved in good autobio comics since I noticed it (iirc with Jez’s help) in Eddie Campbell’s work and something I don’t think you can do in that manner with other mediums. Upstairs there was a piece of sculpture which was pretty impressive, collecting peoples thoughts about the area and sewing them into a huge conical harp. It was good and certainly reflected the community but it didn’t resonate as effectively as the calm observations of one guy meandering around the city with his sketchpad taking the time to really see what’s there.

On the downside I don’t thing the Art Gallery was the right space to show this. It was spread over two rooms and into a third with the final panorama wrapped around a doorway. It’d be great to see it in a bigger space where you could take in the whole thing from a distance. I wonder if when the Hepworth opens for business they’ll be able to display it again. Hope so.

We then met up with John and, briefly, Helen for a few drinks and a meal before heading back to Brum slightly pissed and rather refreshed. I’d recommend a day trip to The North, especially if you’re meeting a lovely cartoonist. (John blogs about our visit here, Jez hasn’t done so yet.)

And that brings this blogging splurge to a close. Assuming I manage to make it out of bed Saturday is looking to be fairly busy with friends around doing stuff and Sunday sees Melt Banana in the Hare and Hounds for what promises to be one of the best gigs of the year and no mistake. There’s an informal bloggers meet on Monday evening at the Flapper and on Thursday I’m doing my pleasingly booked out Community Blogging workshops. Other than that it’s the usual mash of random things that make up my life these days and which I really should write about more often and not just blurt onto Twitter (which is always the best way to find out where I am and what I’m up to).

I just did a little bit of tidying up of this blog’s template to bring it in line with my manner of bloggery (though still avoided updating the darned About page) and thought it might be worth explaining how I go about publishing stuff on the internet these days.

Yer basic blog posts, that’s those that look like this one with a title and everything, are written straight into the WordPress system. Since it saves a draft every few seconds there’s no need to use an external text editor and I’ve come to rely on the buttons and keyboard shortcuts for linkage and emboldening (christ, that’s actually a word!) and such. I don’t use the Word-esque visual interface though - I like my HTML to be there in front of me and always will.

Any images are grabbed, cropped, resized, uploaded and the code created using Skitch which is quite possibly the most useful tool a blogger could ever ask for. If you have a Mac go get it now! If you don’t have a Mac pretend I haven’t written this paragraph because you will be so jealous if you ever see this bastard in action.

The links posts, which are a couple of lines long and don’t have titles, are now done entirely through my del.icio.us account. For a while there I was bringing them in in batches of five or more but I’ve never liked that link-dump thing people do with del.icio.us, especially when you have one comment box for the whole thing. But then I discovered the fantastic Postalicious WordPress plugin will do some groovy things, specifically put each del.icio.us link into its own post and exclude those with certain tags. So I get the best of both worlds - links-as-posts on my blog and the chance to build up a comprehensive link-bank on del.icio.us, something I’d been putting off for a long time. The tag exclusion thing means I can carry on using del.icio.us for personal bookmarking without polluting this blog with nonsense that you really don’t need to care about (as opposed to the usual nonsense you sort of might not need to care about). The only downside is I can’t easily do via links anymore but I’m looking to find a way around that.

And that’s peteashton.com pretty much dealt with. As is the way of the interwubs these days it all starts to get a little bit distributed.

Tumblr has been pretty consistent as my secondary blog these last few months. I like it because it can take pretty much anything and I don’t have to worry about it. On the whole it’s funny video heaven over there but I also stick images and the occasional quote. No website links though - My Tumblr is pretty self contained in that regard. Low-impact, lean back and enjoy sort of stuff.

ASH-10 should be my secondary blog and hopefully will be soon. Right now it’s still in the greenhouse being gently watered before it’s planted out in the garden proper, but it’s certainly open for business. This is where Serious Pete is Serious, or at least useful in some manner. I make part of my living talking about blogs and the social internet to people and organisations so this is essentially my business site but I also want to develop it into a resource that positions me as an expert in my field. Or something. So if you come here for the quirky links and stories about Pete (not that I do that so much these days…) and couldn’t give too hoots about my ponderings over the whys and wherefores of internet conversations then you’d be advised to stay away. But if you are interested (and I’d hope most people who use the internet in a constructive way would be) then please go check it out and help me nurture it to maturity. On the whole ASH-10 is run in the same way as the posts on peteashton.com - in Wordpress with Skitch on the side.

(God, it feels good to just ramble about something completely inconsequential. It’s like having a really good shit.)

Photos still go up on Flickr but I’m a lot less involved there than I used to be. This doesn’t worry me so much - I got a lot out of Flickr when I was a photo-but and I’m not such a photo nut these days. Still dabble and am keen to do more but I don’t need to engage quite so much. From what I can tell the Birmingham group is ticking along nicely without my admin input but then these things do tend to look after themselves really. And I do still have some very good friends I made through Flickr. I just don’t see them in Flickr these days. (Of course one of the reasons for not being so involved with Flickr is that it seems to have been swamped with a certain breed of idiot this last year or so, but that’s a subject for another post.)

Despite the frequent blue whale of death I use and rely on Twitter a hell of a lot these days. In fact its starting to take over from email and RSS as my primary source of stuff, both useful and frivolous. This is also a place where I blog in that I tend to put my thoughts on there and talk about things I’m doing. For the casual reader my Twitter page is a bit of a mess what with all the conversations so I’ve set up a feed that excludes anything that’s a reply to someone else. I might bring this into the peteashton.com blog at some point but I’m not sure how useful it’ll be. At any rate, the world of microblogging is always changing and evolving and I expect there to be some interesting developments over the next few months. Should be fun. Oh, and I use Twhirl for my tweetery.

When it comes to other social networks I’m not spending as much time in them as I used to. MySpace is dead to me now. I just keep an account open so I can download photos and read blog posts but the whole thing is just too painful to engage with at any meaningful level. Facebook I check into occasionally but less and less. You’d be advised not to message me within Facebook if it’s important, but I do try to keep my friends lists up to date as it’s a handy tool for me to remember people’s names (something I am bloody awful at). Which, if you think about it, is what a “facebook” is supposed to be for. I’m scrobbling into LastFM again but don’t tend to socialise there much. I’ll approve your friends requests but, again, best not to try and communicate with me in there. Any other social networks I may be a member of I’m probably not going to be using. I may check out LinkedIn at some point but suspect life is too short.

In summary, if you want to contact me then email and Twitter are the best ways. Bear in mind I tend to get swamped in email so please be patient and don’t take it personally if I don’t reply. Just write again. But that’s not about blogging. That’s about direct comms. I’m drifting off topic with my ramblings. Where was I?

Ah yes. The money blogs.

I’m now pretty much detached from Created in Birmingham. While I still have a login there and will very occasionally post something Chris Unitt has fully taken over and made it his own. A few people have asked how I feel about this, like it was some great wrench to let it go, but to be honest my time with that blog had passed and it was a bit of a relief. CiB was a journey for me and I came to the end my it around March. It was time to move on and let someone else do that thang in their own way which Chris seems to be doing rather well from where I’m sitting.

The Custard Factory site continues to be my primary source of income these days and although development of the site has been s-l-o-w there should be some nice developments in the next week or so. I’ll keep you posted on that one. As for how I do that blog it’s, again, a combination of Wordpress and Skitch with a lot of internet tracking through Google, Technorati, Flickr and YouTube.

But I’m about to get into business stuff and this is supposed to be about the mechanics of my bloggery, so I think I’ll stop now.

If you have the time and inclination it’d be interesting to hear what you think of how I’m communicating through my blogs. I know it’s changed a lot over the last couple of years and not necessarily for the better. My blogging has to fit in with how I’m living and working but I do value the fact that people read and respond to this stuff so I will listen and be grateful. No pressure though.