Well, hi ho, everyone, and greetings from the first day of my new full and detailed implementation of the "Getting Things Done" time-management system (whew). I have a bunch of random notes stacked up on my Treo now from the last week, so I thought today I'd simply sit and get them all posted and out to you at once. Enjoy, and I'll speak with you again tomorrow.

--2005: The year blogs broke? Er, "reached their tipping point," that is? There seems to be a lot of evidence that this year we just went through will mark a milestone in the realm of the Information Age - the year such citizen-produced media like blogs and podcasts were not only technically easy to use (which had already happened five years previous), but were also embraced by mainstream audiences. And this is big news not only for blogs, but also because the "blogging attitude" started creeping for the first time into all kinds of subjects from mainstream society. See: citizen journalism; the public-relations industry; the software industry; the arts, and especially arts administration; small business; academia; literary criticism; I mean, I could just go on and on if I wanted, although I don't want to, and show just how profoundly the idea of citizen-generated content affected all of these industries in 2005.

So what's next? That's the interesting question, I guess, to see if the "Web 2.0" will become the "Bubble 2.0," as some doomsayers are already predicting, or if it's actually the first iteration of the Internet as such a brand-new technology is supposed to work, leading to its long-term success. (The idea being of course that Industrial-Age thinking was applied to the Internet during the Dot Com years, which is why that failed so spectacularly; that it's been this new Information-Age thinking from places like Google and Flickr that is how the Internet was supposed to work all along, which is why they're getting so insanely popular.) It's always an interesting guessing game at the beginning of the year, I think, especially for us intellectuals - will this be the year that mobile technology finally breaks into the mainstream? RSS? Integrated home media centers? Video blogging? I don't know the answers any more than you, of course; but I always think it's interesting to follow along, and to try to take guesses along the way.

--Oh, and speaking of the Dot Com era, how fast would you have been laughed out of a room in Silicon Valley in 1996 if you had said the following? "Advertising should be a whisper, not an airhorn; that much like an eastern religion, it should hang only in the very tips of your consciousness, and be pulled to the forefront only by choice by the individual person, when they themselves are interested in knowing more." But sure enough, Google has made zillions and zillions of dollars following just such an attitude themselves, which I've been thinking about a little bit recently after finally clicking on my first contextual text ad myself.

And this all gets into this thing that certain cutting-edge business writers talk about, that I had a really hard time wrapping my head around when first reading about it, so maybe some of you are having the same problem as well. But what these certain writers say is that the age we're moving into is one where consumers will expect advertising to enhance and enrich their lives, instead of simply existing in its random form like right now, spat out at you from random locations 24 hours a day, as often as that industry can get away with. And to understand this, you have to understand that in the Industrial Age, when advertising was first invented, it was an unusual and daresay even magical thing even to have the opportunity to buy all these nice things at low prices to begin with. So that's what advertising was mainly about back then, was simply informing the public when a new thing was available. But now, see, that we live in an age where pretty much everything is available to all of us, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day, what we want from advertising is help with navigating all this raw information, to point us to products and services it recommends and to simply explain why we should care. Advertising should work in conjunction with our lives, as a smooth complement to the massive amounts of information we all are now receiving in the other 24 hours of the day otherwise; it should be anticipating our buying habits, our interests, our special criteria for buying (like charities we support, companies we boycott, etc), and tailoring the sponsored information we receive in our lives to just the stuff absolutely most relevant to what we're seeking in our lives that particular moment.

Before the technology existed to do such a thing, the advertising industry was like I said primarily based on the idea of announcing new products and services to the entire public at once, so that at least those who would be interested in it would hear about it (along with everyone else). But as we've moved into this mature Information Age more and more, ever since the 1950s when it started, by sticking with this old model the advertising industry has had to start intensifying things more and more to keep getting the same results - ads have to pretty much scream all the time now, and we have to be bombarded with a lot more of them now for any of them to stick in our heads in any way, and bombarded from unusual locations, at unusual times, with unusual imagery or technology, or unusual methods, or sometimes just so utterly pervasively that it simply becomes a background to our day-to-day lives. One could argue, on the other hand, that Google is the first advertiser to understand the Information Age as it really exists, and to really embrace what these cutting-edge writers have been saying, to use technology really to make their ads as individually relevant to that person as possible. And when it suddenly becomes something the person is seeking on their own anyway, you no longer have to scream its existence like before; why, it can just be an unassuming little text ad, in fact, where most of it frankly is light gray text on a white background, about as subtle as you get before you're dead. And the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that I'm right about all this, that this is why those barely noticable Google ads are selling like fuckin' hotcakes so much these days - because technology and smart thinking are allowing these ads to be not an intrusion into people's lives, but actually a supplement to what they were trying to do in the first place. Hmm, it's given me a lot to think about with this arts center of mine, I'm telling you; but more on that later, I suppose.

--And yet another recent thought about the Information Age: that we never will see another art movement in history, at least not in the way that we used to define them, because that was a product of the outdated Industrial Age and is no longer relevant to our society. What 'movements' were about, after all, were small groups of artists banding together, acting as their own mini-corporation to get the word out about their own work, in the face of large entities (companies, churches, members of royalty) who didn't want that work out. In the Information Age, though, the key term will be networking - when large entities no longer hold the same kind of power they once did, what will be more important is the collective voice of the entire society, gathered and analyzed by technology into one very powerful message. You won't need movements in the Information Age to change the world; you simply present your own thoughts individually, through a blog or your Flickr account or whatever, and if a million people all have the same thoughts as you, it gathers to the forefront and changes the world that way. And maybe this is why the term 'postmodernism' has been so troublesome and confusing over the decades, and has stuck with us for so long; because like I've said here before, the Information Age actually started about 50 years ago, and the arts have actually moved faster than the art critics, and they've been trying to apply the old "movement" categorization to what's been going on in the '70s, '80s and '90s, when such categorization was no longer relevant. So they just called the whole thing 'postmodernism' instead, and that's why no one ever has a good definition of what postmodernism is, and why things have been getting called 'postmodernist' for, what, 40 years now, and still doesn't seem to have lost its relevancy, because the term is essentially bullshit and even the concept is no longer relevant to the way artists achieve things in the Information Age.

Anyway, just some food for thought. And I wonder if the Pop artists in the early 1960s had any idea that they'd be the last legitimate 'art movement' in history? Oh, they all thought they were such hot shit anyway, I'm sure they did, actually.

--Okay, it's official: I created a total of 24 audio posts in 2005, using my Blogspot account, my cellphone, and the free service Audioblogger.com; everything from interviews with local scenesters and porn stars, to drunken conversations with my friends at parties and literary events. So, that's the first part of one of the projects I'm tackling during this first period of the year, from now until Memorial Day; to collect these 24 files from 2005, as well as the other 20 or so files of slam-poetry recordings I've made over the years, and get them all imported into this Movable Type database now fueling this website. And that won't be very hard, to tell you the truth, because all each needs in its actual blog entry is the metadata (date recorded, location, description, etc) and a link to the MP3 file, which of course will sit on my server like it always has. So, what, a couple of afternoons hopefully to get these 50 or so archived entries typed up; then upload the files to my server, and import the posts into my database, all in one afternoon as well.

After that, then, I'm going to tackle the candid photos from the various digital cameras I've owned over the years, which for one reason or another I'm not using anymore - my old Quickcam, for example, and the photos I took in 1998 and '99 with it (before kicking it out of its port accidentally one day, frying all its connectors); and my old Handspring, which I used to take some photos in 2000; and my old Casio wristwatch camera, which I used to take a ton of black-and-white photos in 2001. And again, these are getting tackled early in the process for logistical reasons - because there's only a certain amount of them, to be frank, and it'll be easier to get them all ready and posted and finished for good, never to return to.

And jeez, after that, the few other media files I have from over the years - a couple of video files, a couple of PDF poster versions of my old slam work. And then comes the other 500 or so photos from 2004 and '05 that are now at my Flickr account, which is going to be a pain, frankly. And I'm going to leave them at the Flickr account as well, don't worry, because I want them to be a searchable part of that very popular database; but then I want them to be a searchable part of this database as well, something more fully integrated with the text at this site, and of course a good backup in case anything happens with my Flickr account.

And then, and then, finally, the 1,000 or so journal entries from October 1999 (when I started this journal) to June 2005 (when I switched over to the Movable Type database for the first time), which is going to be such a pain in the ass, I'm not even sure where to begin. And then after that, the 1,000 to 2,000 other pages of old original content from the website, that also need to be reinserted into the new Movable Type database - all my old slam poems, essays, interviews, hyperfiction pages and the like, all of it imported in a special way so that it too will be a searchable part of the overall database.

But then I'll be finished. Finally. Well, with most of it, anyway, except for the pages for my basement press. But that's a whole project unto itself, and not scheduled to be finished until a couple of months after the rest of the website. So...um, we'll ignore that for now. Once all the rest of this is done, the website will finally be finished! Hooray!

--Got a letter recently from reader and friend Bryan Ott, laughing at the recent reference I made here to the Mercury Marquis. (I was talking about how my brother and I have actually been making goofy audio recordings together since we were little kids, in the backseat of the old family car with a giant-ass Bell & Howell magnetic cassette recorder.) Bryan was telling me how his family had a white Mercury Marquis in the '70s, and how it ignobly became his car in high school, long after the car had ceased to have any cache at all. Hey, same with me, actually, except our Marquis was brown instead of white; but like Bryan, once the thing was old and decrepit and full of dings and scratches, it finally became my day-to-day car in 1985 or so, for trips to school and work and hanging out with my friends and the like.

Dude, what a glorious monster that thing was for a teen to have access to - a veritable boat, that would easily hold nine of your shitfaced friends as you all made your way back from some atrocious redneck party in the middle of the woods, listening to Journey on a boombox as you pumped Bud Lite out of a keg in the back of someone's truck. Dude! I drove that thing right off the highway...three times, I think, in high school? Once airborn! You've never been terrified until you've been behind the wheel of an airborn 1978 Mercury Marquis, let me tell you. Oh, and I spun it around on ice more times than I can count, and I'm sure had sex in the backseat at least a couple of times. Oh, how I sometimes miss that bitching Marquis, man!