Straying off track: daydreaming, Belchite, then flickr.

Sometimes when my mind wanders off, it travels the long dusty roads of Aragón to the ruins of Old Belchite. Away from the once imperial city of Zaragoza, whose nightlights were gazed upon by a young Eric Blair and where an old slaughterhouse has been transformed into a public library, we travel past olive groves and along ancient roman roads tracing lonely straight lines through the expanse of the Aragonese countryside: "Polvo, niebla, viento, y sol/ Donde hay agua una huerta" (Dust, fog, wind, and sun/Where there is water, an orchard) so goes the song; "this land is Aragón".

"Resistencia" by SantiMB CC License: A NC ND

Belchite Viejo is a haunting, if not haunted, place. It was a key battle site in the twilight of the Spanish Civil War and was left in ruins after the eventual defeat of the Republican forces as a monument to the dead. A new Belchite was built next to it and the residents have looked onto the ruins of their old homes ever since.

Like much of the history from the Spanish Civil War, Belchite is left officially untouched, perhaps so that it can be slowly eroded from the landscape by the baking summer sun and the relentless North Wind el cierzo, that chills the bones throughout the winter, like memories gradually fading from the public consciousness. This pact of forgiving has silenced a generation whose stories could bring life to these unnameable skeletons in Spanish culture and I worry that it has cast a sense of guilt on those who have things that they can never forget. I think I am straying off topic.

If I were of a more poetic bent I would be able to conjure up the effect of walking around Belchite Viejo but I lack the skill to do so. Instead, thanks to flickr, you can get a flavour of the place, which was also used as a location for the films "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" and Guillermo Del Toro's beautiful "Pan's Labyrinth".

I was introduced to flickr by two locals from Belchite: Belinda and Isaac Baquero, both use flickr to share their photography (analogue SLR and digital SLR respectively) and be part of an online photographic community.

Pueblo viejo de Belchite by pocketmonster CC License: A NC ND

The inscription, written before CC and therefore cited often and without attribution was written by another Baquero, Natalio, whose brother Adolfo I was lucky enough to meet but passed away earlier this year.
[My translation]
Village of Old Belchite, no more are you walked (or haunted) by youth, no more do they hear the jotas (traditional songs) that were sung by our fathers.

Ruminating on common cud.

Sometimes I wonder whether everything in economics can be reduced to a sheep analogy. From the start, Ba-Ba Blacksheep teaches us about supply - three bags full - about demand - one for the boy- and about tax - one for the master. We also learn about the process of turning a sentient being with the apparent ability to respond to economic interrogation into a commodity - have you any wool? Perhaps this marxist-vegetarian critique of pre-school literature should be studied in greater depth although I dare say it already has.

It doesn't always have to be ovine often any ruminant would do the job. Goats were the ruminant of choice when I studied commons theory as an economist. The argument goes thus: If we were all goat farmers living in a pre-industrial village - probably one of those ones you see on biscuit boxes - and we all used the village common to graze our goats then we would exploit the common ownership and overpopulate with goats. However, if we all had our private piece of land there would be an individual cost from over population and so we would graze just the right number of goats for the society. This tragedy of commons is a nice illustration of the conflict between short-term private interest and social goods.

Self-interested profit-maximisers aren't fans of commons. Nor are [neoclassical] economists. We can take the reverse argument for looking at intellectual property. Suppose we all wanted to make money from our ideas. Why be creative when you get no money from another using your intellectual property? If creative commons really existed then no one would create.

(Found in flickr commons. Taken from The County Archives in Sogn og Fjordane and photographed by Paul Stang. Note the fence!)

Fortunately, I am a bad economist, and so are users of flickr. Yet I wonder what the incentives are for contributing to creative commons. The corollary would follow that the profit motive is missing. I would side with a social explanation: recognition of peers, participation in a collaborative process, and perhaps an altruistic one as well.

Twinset&Purl has written a great piece about the creativity potentials of commons and broadly I agree. However, I would like to propose two things to think about:

1. Creative use of found or commons material isn't new, has a long history, and was important in artistic circles in the last century despite the copyright law. Three examples that spring immediately to mind: Picasso's violins from 1912, the cut up period of William Burroughs, and the sample culture of electronic music. While these examples profited artistically, they also did monetarily. Whenever I think something is out dated, I always have to check to see whether I’m just being naive.
2. I wonder about the decline of the profit motive. Perhaps we have been captured by some form of sample bias. Let us not forget that one of the key requirements of Woolf's fictional sister of Shakespeare, along with a room of one's own, was an independent income. Use of and access to the internet is not evenly distributed by income - especially by world standards. It's easy to be creative when you have a job that gives you the income and time to do so. Perhaps we are already in the position where the use of creative commons is reserved for an elite. I also would like to know how many creative people want to contribute creative commons up to the point where they can start charging for it.

Certainly current legislation feels clumsy however, I think the discussion of it gets much more complicated when considering scientific information. Perhaps this is because the peer review system in science already gives a non-profit, social benefit and peer recognition that relies on private intellectual property rights. I think the six level CC is an interesting attempt at mitigating the threat to the nonrivalry and nonexcludability of intellectual property while protecting it from the tragedy of commons exploitation. I wonder whether it can be formally implemented. Anyone wanting to read a thought provoking manifesto on the use of cut and paste, found text, and commons in art might like Reality Hunger by David Sheilds, which I am currently reading.

Next: flickr.

RSS Revelations

Being an indiekid at university was hard. Frank Zappa once complained that while people in the USA go to gigs to watch the band, in the UK people go to gigs to watch each other*. To succeed in indie circles at university meant more than being into alternative music; it should be music that only you and a handful of people know and better if no one knows at all, especially if it's a demo tape, preferably before members of the band had met, or had even left the womb.

Imagine how hard it must be for an indiekid in this day and age, where anyone can go on line and search for early Belle and Sebastian EPs - even worse now that Spotify can allow people to listen for free and will also give them recommendations on top. Not that many people ever did - ability and incentive are different things - but I suspect it was this fear of depleted exclusivity rather than a social instinct that drove indiekids onto blogs. Keeping on top of lots of music blogs is hard work and thus the RSS feed was a godsend but an RSS feed stuck in your favourites doesn't let you know when new posts appear; for that you need a Reader.

I was slow to Readers and often leave mine unread so that when I log on again I have hundreds to browse. However I did not realise that they were such a powerful tool. For a while now I've had three folders: Español, following blogs on newspapers; Library, following some LIS blogs; and Music. I now have a 23things folder, which keeps an eye on all you folk.

I find it annoying that once you have hovered over a post it just vanishes from the feed meaning that I make liberal use of "keep as unread" and the star system to return to posts later. I also find it very hard to keep track of comments on posts. Finally I find that I don't read them very deeply, especially if I follow a prolific blogger. I wonder if it is just me.

I did not know about the cool extra thing and I have been playing with this over the last few days. I now have a few EBSCO feeds, google searches, and I am trying to sort out Zetoc feeds . One great thing I have discovered is how to get RSS feeds of pages that do not have RSS feeds. First you need to go to here and paste in your url, then you can put the output into your Reader. I have combined this with a site search; my, previously mentioned, favourite author Enrique Vila Matas writes occasionally in El País so I now have a feed of that search, which will also tell me when he is mentioned in articles.

All in all, a very instructive week.

*
I heard this on a recording of a talk he gave to some American music students, which I found on a Captain Beefheart internet archive years ago and unfortunately I cannot find the url to cite my reference.

My own web1.0 to web2.0 transition?

According to gmail, my first email on that account was received in mid September 2004. What halcyon days they were! Back then you had to be invited onto gmail, it was the month before I started university and it seems my most important concern was circulating my Vogon Poem from the BBC website's Vogon Poetry Generator.

I remember setting a google homepage (which later became iGoogle??) shortly after and it seems I have not touched it since. Three of the gadgets have now expired or are "unable to retrieve". I also had a daily chess puzzle, a BBC news feed, two feeds from the New Scientist, one from the London Review of Books, my gmail inbox, as well as google translate, a currency converter, and "word of the day". Today's word is sallow.

I have kept the word of the day, the translator (sallow in Spanish is 1.sallow 2.cetrino 3.sauce 4.poner cetrino), my inbox and the LRB.

I have added the guardian, a Spanish word (s) of the day (replantar = to replant, el mechero = lighter, la cañada = gully or cattle track), and a gadget that allows me to search the RAE if I want more information on the words, which has informed me that la cañada is also a payment made by ranchers to allow them to take cattle through a ravine. I bet you didn't think you'd finish the day with that piece of information as you sipped your tea this morning.

The most interesting part for me was playing about with the organisation on the screen. I understand that "in the trade" this is sometimes referred to as "information architecture". I enjoyed rearranging the gadgets on the screen in a way that felt "intuitive". Although this "intuition" is guided by how I expect to use the information; the structure of the information we present is more important than I thought.

Now that I have brought my iGoogle account back from the dead I am forced to reflect on why I stopped using it in the first place. When I open a browser, I often do so for a reason. I found that having a homepage just got in the way of what I wanted to do and soon the novelty wore off. Plus with browsers like Firefox and Opera, that save tabs once you close them down, I could leave these pages open on my browser to have access to the information I wanted. Now with the new tab "stacks" in Opera, I have a stack of "social media" tabs, "news" tabs, and "current reading" tabs without everything looking cluttered. It's strange to think that I haven't even had a "homepage" for ages. Back in 2004 I asserted my identity on the internet with my homepage choices, now I view my identity as how other people see me. Perhaps this is what they call web 2.0.

Next task: RSS

See below for my 2004 Vogon Poem

Twitter as my example of social media anxiety.

One of the unforgivable Twitter sins is the introduction of the verb "trending" into everyday language. You probably won't find Twitter on its own trending feed but if there is one thing trending more than the American appetite for turning nouns into verbs, it is Twitter itself. It has even generated a verb in Spanish: Tuitear - "to tweet" (to post a tweet on the microblogging site), and a noun: tuitero - one who tweets (posts a tweet on the microblogging site).

I will perhaps come on to this later but one of the difficulties I have had in starting a blog is that I am not a diarist and I think a lot my problems with social media are personal. I have tried twitter and occasionally have bursts of enthusiasm - you can find me @matthew_seddon - but I just don't get on with it. I'm not interested enough to check frequently and I have a short concentration span, which makes reading often unrelated lines of neologisms and hash tags hard. If I did keep a diary you would probably find the entry "try harder at Twitter". But I don't, so you won't. Yet I see so much enthusiasm for this medium that I worry I must be missing something. Hopefully this series of things will show me something that I've missed.

Some of you may be aware of Stephane Hessel, the French nonagenarian formerly in the French Resistance, who wrote a cute but powerful 30 page book telling all the young folk to get angry. His slogan has been taken up in a series of protests in Spain, the Indignados have used social media to organise themselves and even spread manifestoes. My favourite living Spanish writer, Enrique Vila Matas, recently wrote a commentary piece about the use of Twitter and political movements, quoting from the late Tony Judt, he worried that the use of Twitter had dumbed down the debate.

[Linguistic] Impoverishment is here. We checked into the economy, of course, but also in the stunted language of political and twitter speech, unable in many cases to move beyond reading 30 pages a year. It is demolishing the once awesome power of words to analyze the world. And, says Judt, more than suffering from the appearance of "Newspeak", we are threatened by the growth of "non-language."*

Vila Matas is far from your literary dinosaur and has been into blogs and social media since at least 2005 (I am reading his (published) diaries... yes, I really am a fan). I hope that this course will show me ways of using social media effectively and without falling into this "newspeak" trap.

*My translation.

el primero cacharro

This is a blog linked with the 23thingscity project and as such, this is my first post.

I have started other blogs on both wordpress and tumblr in the past so I thought I would try this with the blogspot platform.

My first blog was an attempt to write a library based blog but quickly came to a halt because of a lack of material and is now a repository of things I have written elsewhere, or to help with my Spanish. The second is meant to be an aggregator of things and is an attempt to move away from the omnipresent facebook.

Finally a note on the name: 23cacharricos. In Spanish, a cacharro is a pot, used colloquially in the North of Spain, it is a "thing". Specifically in Aragonés, where the familiar cacharrico, is often used. Hence 23cacharricos.