Okay, I admit it, I'm thinking about shutting down [metafeed]. And [metafeed], for those who don't know, was my first experiment with type-engine-based blogging, started around six months before switching this main website over to Movable Type, or about a year ago now altogether. (Don't be confused - I've been doing this main website for seven years now, just that for six and a half years of that I was coding each new page by hand, using my fingers and SimpleText. It's just been in the last six months that I've started reinputting it all into a type engine that will automate the process for me.) [metafeed] existed mostly for me to get my feet wet with it all - to understand how type-engine interfaces work, to play with the various mobile blogging (or moblogging) clients that exist, to understand the balance of benefits and liabilities that come with comments, trackbacks and the like. And since most of these types of blogs are "referral" style ones, where the author is hopping on five or ten times a day, filing short reports on other things they themselves have come across on the web, I thought I'd do the same with [metafeed] - and specifically concerning the arts, small business and viral marketing, which of course are subjects I'm reading up a lot on myself these days, because of the arts center I'm trying to open in Chicago right now.

And if I had a laptop with a WiFi card, of course, it'd be pretty easy for me to maintain both of these blogs I now have - because on a laptop I could take advantage of 'bookmarklets,' those "Blog This" buttons you can sometimes drag to your browser's bookmark section, and just click on it while at a web page for a pop-up blog-writing window, with that original page's URL brought over for you as a hyperlink automatically and everything. But maintaining such a blog on a mobile device, however, means writing your summaries on your offline desktop while reading the articles on the mobile-device screen, including handwriting all the linked URLs by eyeball alone; then syncing your device to your desktop when you're finished, to get all that text over to the device; then cutting and pasting that text one article at a time into your mobile blogging client, then posting the items one at a time through the client. Lordy!

So on the days I do a full edition of [metafeed] (that is, 10 to 15 items in 24 hours), on my mobile device it takes me about three hours from start to finish; and of course this personal journal takes me about three hours a day to write as well, simply because it's 2,000 words long. And God help me, I can't spend six hours a day hunched over my tiny little mobile screen, I just can't, so it's usually just one or the other in any given 24-hour period. And this was fine before June, when my personal journal was still at Geocities and I was only updating it once every two weeks; but since then, now that I have the ability to update both each day from home, it's usually been the personal journal winning out.

Anyway, so I'm thinking of turning the former [metafeed] content into a semi-regular feature here at the main journal, instead of trying to maintain it the way I had before, which I've been failing at doing for nearly six months now. It'd be basically the same thing as before - interesting stuff on the internet I've recently read, along with some smartass comments from me about those items - but in this case all the items bundled into one big blog entry, and only published once a week or so, whenever the mood strikes me. And I thought just to be snarky that I'd call such a thing "The Heterotopia Report," after learning earlier this year that some people use this Latin term to describe the internet.

So if I get serious about this, it means I'll be able to just shut down [metafeed] altogether - after all, I now have my [random audio] page, Flickr account and the Jason Pettus Instant Locator™ for posting photos and audio from my cellphone in real time, which was the only other benefit to holding onto my old Blogspot page. Plus, it looks like Odeo is finally getting their own 'mocasting' capabilities up and running, which would be great - I could simply shut down my Blogspot pages altogether, have one less external site to worry about, plus with Odeo sponsoring my podcast, would have much more powerful ways to you to interact with it all. (That is, when you maintain your podcast through Odeo, it's much easier for your listeners to subscribe through iTunes or iPodder than a Blogspot page is. Plus Odeo itself has a pretty kick-ass interface for desktop and laptop owners, which lets you both create and listen to audio posts directly through your desktop browser. Plus of course Odeo is quite popular, so naturally promotes your podcast in a way a more minor service cannot.)

Anyway, that's hopefully the place my online life is going to get to by six months or so from now - where I just have this one main website where all archived content and most new content can be found, with a series of satellite accounts at third-party companies for such tricky things as real-time photos, real-time audio, social networking and the like. And then I wouldn't have to keep track of three different fucking API type-engine specs (when you count my TypePad membership, which I still have occasion to use), and three different accounts at three different services, three different sets of proprietary markup tags and all the rest. And that would be a nice place to be, frankly, after a year now of maintaining a very complicated online life, and embracing every bleeding-edge blogging experiment available to embrace.

So hopefully The Heterotopia Report will be a nice little thing for all of you who miss [metafeed], and a nice little addition for all of you who are mostly familiar with my personal writing only. And this of course will also help with the challenge I face here every winter, of simply coming up with things even worth spending 2,000 words talking about each day of the week, especially during the cold weather here when my social life drops to nearly a hibernation state. And of course there's the main reason such a thing exists at all - that much like a place like Boing Boing does, you'll hopefully learn of some interesting stuff on the web that you might not have known about before, and I'll get a chance to more regularly plug the online projects of my readers. (Although it's important to note, of course, that The Heterotopia Report will follow the same ethical guidelines as [metafeed] did and my main journal still does - that I will not accept compensation in return for writing favorably about a product or company, and in fact will most likely make fun of you in public for even attempting such a thing.)

Oh, but look at that - I spent so much time today simply telling you what The Heterotopia Report is going to be, I've run out of space to actually write the first one. So, okay - tomorrow, dear reader, tomorrow.

And some random notes as well, as long as I'm here...

--Okay, the rumor is true, I did indeed finally have sex again recently, after a long and cold year of unwanted celibacy. And the point of bringing this up is not to actually talk about that, which is why I'm not going to go into who she is or how we met or any of those details. No, my point is that I've unfortunately remembered the side effect of having sex for the first time in a year - that it wakes up your sex drive again, duh, and suddenly you find yourself just horny again all the damn time. Fuck, does it never goddamn end with all this sex stuff, I'm asking you? And this woman I recently met is an academe and is all wrapped up in finals right now, which means we can't meet again for at least another week and a half or so at the very least (assuming I'll ever see her again in the first place - you never really know, I guess). So now I'm back to where I was before - not having sex, that is - but now with my body having a vivid recollection of what exactly I'm missing. I'm telling you, sometimes it's enough for me to just say "fuck it" and become a Catholic, you know, so I could just guilt myself out of having any sex at all.

--If I were rich right now, you know what industry I would be heavily investing in? Big-ticket personal computers, handmade out of precious materials - laptops made out of mahogany, torquiose keyboards, leather MP3 players. Dude, I'm serious, I think this is an industry that's poised to start making some serious scratch soon, that not a lot of people even realize. The concept, in fact, can be traced all the way back to the 'cyberpunk' style of science fiction that got so briefly popular there in the 1990s; I can't remember which book or author it was, of course, but one of them featured this hippie commune that paid its bills by retrofitting personal computers with precious materials, then reselling them to dot-commers and other high-profile executives. (My friend Ginger and I were just laughing about this the other day, in fact, how in just ten years all those cyberpunk novels seem to have blended in our minds into one giant storyline. "Okay, now which one again featured the tough, skateboarding 14-year-old girl who accidentally saves the world? Oh, wait, they all did!")

Anyway, as some of you may have been noticing yourselves already, this idea actually is starting to pop up in the consumerist world these days - there really is a mahogany case for your iPod on the market right now, there really is a suede-covered laptop. And let's face facts - that we have entered the final days already when you can keep status-chasers happy simply by releasing a new computer every year, one with twice the amount of memory and processing power as before. Much like touch-tone phones in the '60s, we're rapidly reaching a day when desktop computers will literally not be able to be improved anymore over what currently exists, when they will in effect become stable commodities that rarely change in makeup or tech specs anymore.

And much like what happened in the phone industry when this occurred, the way you'll continue moving desktops and laptops in the future will shift much more to the design side of things than the tech side - of selling PCs that match your house's decor, or are made of high-quality materials, or are simply so unique that all your friends will go, "Wow, look at that thing, can I touch it?" I mean, you're already seeing this among the gaming community, and especially those who drag their tricked-out systems to LAN parties and the like; just look how successful Alienware has been at the exact retrofitting we're talking about, although in their case it's more about painting PCs to look like hot rods, adding plastic alien heads with blinking eyeballs and whatnot. Such a thing is going to do nothing but get more and more popular, as the other reasons to buy a new computer become less and less relevant; and come on, how sweet a deal exactly is this that I'm talking about, where you replace a keyboard with twenty bucks' worth of shiny stones, then sell it to some ridiculously wealthy business executive for $5,000? It's guilt-free money just waiting to be thrown at someone who has the ability to cough up a good $50,000 or so right now, to invest in such a company when so few others want to themselves.

Plus, admit it - how much exactly would you like to own a black leather laptop, one that looks just like your beat-up hipster motorcycle jacket, with the studs and the beltloops and the whole thing? It's giving you a hard-on right now just thinking about it, isn't it? I got your number, you sick little high-tech pervos!