So of course I have a background rosy feeling about the guy. But, while I found his recent books Life Inc. and Program or Be Programmed to be well-written, sound advice, none of it comes close to this closing keynote talk he gave at a social media conference. He says:

I got really tired of listening to brand managers talk about their “Twitter strategies,” and by the time my closing keynote came around, it felt like I had watched the corporatization the net recapitulated over the course of the afternoon.

Please watch this if you’ve not come across Douglas’ recent ideas.

Top of my current list of things that warrant me doing a Moses on the Red Sea of busyness bearing down on me, to bring my dear readers’ attention to it, is Dorian Cope’s new blog, On This Deity: Commemorating Culture Heroes & Excavating World Events.

Billing it as “an alternative ‘On This Day’”, for a good few weeks now Dorian’s been posting every few days on some birth, death, or other significant event that took place on that date. The focus is on visionaries and radicals from everywhere on that riotous spectrum: from the death of Maud Gonne (muse to W.B. Yeats and bold revolutionary in her own right) to the release of ‘God Save The Queen’; from Oscar Wilde’s release from Reading Gaol to the straw that broke the back of the camel in the way of me writing this, a remembrance of Helen Keller’s death, and a reminder of her radical political views.

Dorian and her indefatigable husband Julian have been staunch and forthright supporters of my writing and publishing since we met in 1996. What makes this much more than an obligatory reciprocation is the pleasure of seeing Dorian’s razor-sharp perceptions and infectious energy, which have inspired me endlessly in conversations over the years, transfer so well to writing. Her posts popping up several times a week in my feed aggregator have the habit of quickly creating a bubble of attentiveness, within which she paints a vivid picture of a moment in radical history. It’s a steady stream of historical nourishment—feast away!

Last year me and a few others quietly put together an online discussion community whose aim was (in the words of the official blurb) “to promote a visible and intelligent discourse around the theory and practice of magic, spirituality and experiential religion”. We wanted a high signal-to-noise ratio, writing that could work as reasonable quality for readers as well as participants, and a respectful, good-natured, slowly-growing membership. Thus, Liminal Nation.

I, true to my preference for either a book or a pub to online discussion, have remained a shadowy background figure. However, by all accounts it’s gently thriving, and Dreamflesh readers who feel they might want to join in are encouraged to head over and apply.

Yeah, the application process was one of the moves to keep the whole thing troll- and bore-free. Sometimes not a popular idea for people who advocate a very simple “openness” on the net (are there many of those left in these days of 85% spam?), not to mention trolls and bores. To me it’s a no-brainer for the kind of site we’re looking to nurture. Freedom on the net includes the freedom to create your own space with its own rules, as long as they don’t infringe on others.

Anyway, you can read the discussions for yourself, read more about the site’s ethos, and apply if it looks like your cup of tea.

Sometimes things move fast.

In March I attended the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland, and was glad to discover there Dale Pendell, a Renaissance anarchist: poet, botanist, psychonaut, Buddhist, scientist, magician. I recorded a small group discussion with him there, and immediately plunged into his unique books on my return: Pharmako/Poeia, Pharmako/Dynamis, Pharmako/Gnosis and Walking With Nobby..

Recently, Dale contracted me to build him a website, which was—as you’d imagine—a deal more pleasurable to work on than much of the rent-paying work I end up doing.

When I first delved into web design, I had an idea for a site called Palaeogenesis, which I thought of as: “the study of archaic creativity”, “the creative study of the archaic” and “the creation of the archaic”. I got as far as a basic look and feel, but other directions took over.

Anyway, when Dale said he wanted a “palaeo-alchemical” feel for his site, I immediately found myself, with relish, reconnecting to that abandoned current of design in me. I quite like the result. To check it out, and read more about this splendid writer, visit dalependell.com. (Note that users of Internet Explorer 6 and—goddess forbid—below won’t get the full translucent design loveliness. Upgrade!)

It’s a while since I published my essay and booklet on Verbeia, the Romano-Celtic goddess from Ilkley. I did a revised edition of the booklet in 2000 or so, to include new information; but now that more information has come to my attention, I decided to try and create an easily referenced consolidation of Verbeia research that I can keep up-to-date.

I’ve added some bits to the Wikipedia page, but I suspect some of the speculation there (pretty tame by my standards) may, strictly speaking, have overstepped the boundaries of Wikipedia’s style guidelines.

Well, I’d recently heard of one of Google’s latest ventures, knol. “A unit of knowledge” that say—which seems a little forced to me. It’s still in beta, but it’s got some interesting differences from the Wiki. There’s the usual Google attention to usability and neat detail. You create your own pages on anything. You can collaborate with others if you want, but that’s on a strictly voluntary basis. Obviously it has different strengths and weaknesses to the Wiki, but it seemed ideal as a place to collate my Verbeia research.

So, here’s my Verbeia knol.

It’s set to “moderated collaboration”, so anyone logged in can suggest additions or corrections that I then vet.

A small lesson from publicizing this came from posting a link on the Modern Antiquarian’s Swastika Stone page. I thought I’d found some new info about Verbeia and the Swastika Stone’s relationship. Just after I posted my new link, I noticed the venerable Kozmik Ken had posted the same info four years ago. Ah well, I’m only just getting back into this research lark…

Reading what seems to be a key text in this “what the fuck are we going to do about this shit we’re in?!” debate, ‘The Death of Environmentalism’, I was struck with the burning need for something that would help me keep track of choice quotes from the essay. So I searched around the Firefox Extensions library, and found just the thing: ScrapBook.

It’s got a bunch of options, but if you use Firefox and regularly do research on the web, even its most basic functions should prove very useful. From the menu on the toolbar or the context menu, just select ‘Capture Page As…’ to set options for saving the page you’re on in ScrapBook. Once it’s saved, you can open the ScrapBook version and use a highlighter tool to pick out quotes.

There are extensions that let you highlight text on original web pages, but the ones I found don’t seem to be able to persist them, so they’re still there when you get back. There’s a bunch of “annotation” tools that do just this, but the highlighters don’t seem to.

In any case, ScrapBook fulfils the same function, only on a local copy of the page. Plus, you can add annotations, undo stuff, capture selections, and organise everything in folders. Just the ticket.

It seems web service outsourcing is the way forward. When you work all day (OK, most of the afternoon and the odd night or two) designing and coding websites, you tend to lose a little enthusiasm for constructing your own site. Further, web apps are getting good, with less leeway for those “I could do this better” annoyances. Flickr is a current favourite, home to the photo to the right here (I find these rain-laden, sun-touched clouds unutterably beautiful). And in any case, I’m trying to get this thing going as quickly as possible, ready for my imminent travels; thus, my blog’s here on Blogger. And you can talk back!

This blog resurrection may end up being a travel journal, and then sink back into obscurity; if so, so be it. I just thought blogging would be a good way to digest my own journey, save mass emails back to friends, and generally document the process. Because I’m not off to some remote rural spot for wordless introspection, as is my wont (thought I’m hoping to catch some of that, too); no, I’m off to America. A mere 7 months after seriously toying with the idea of a personal US cultural boycott in the wake of the last American election.

Sure, I’m repelled as well as fascinated by the place as much as anyone. But I’m probably going to be interacting with the fascinating end of things more, visiting New York for just short of a week, and then San Francisco and the Bay Area for the rest of my four weeks. There’s the 2005 Conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams to check out, interesting people aplenty to say hello to, and a country with much of the world in its brash, nervous hands to absorb and fathom.

Before all that, next weekend I’ve been invited by Jeff Gormly to attend Framemakers, a fascinating-sounding event hosted by a dance company in Limerick, Ireland. Subtitled “A symposium that explores a world understood in terms of relations, order and ecologies”, it resonates with, and promises to resolve more clearly, my recently hatched plans to start up a new print-based journal – Dreamflesh, of course. More on that later…

I’ll leave you with a little plug for the new Strange Attractor Journal (cover left), a finely eclectic occultural tome, and yet another thread of inspiration weaving into my ideas for Dreamflesh. Check it out.

a review by Gyrus

• Published: City Lights Books, 1997
• ISBN: 0872863328

I bought this book on the strength of the title—mentioned in Wired News’ coverage of a conference Ullman was speaking at—and general praise from readers at Amazon. The title’s style is ultimately, I think, misleading—for me it evoked a thoroughly engrossing survey of human-machine relations, perhaps journalistic, definitely non-personal. However, ‘non-personal’ is far from the book’s reality. Sure, it’s partly about the non-personal world you sink into when hooked on the abstracted rush of software coding. But in the end it’s a brave and successful attempt to reveal this world’s inevitable link back to the messy, human world of personal relationships.

A radical feminist and communist in the early 70′s, Ullman moved swiftly into the burgeoning world of computer programming later that decade. We join her, 20 years down the line, as she plies her trade—now advanced to ‘software engineer’—as an independent contractor in San Francisco’s booming tech-obsessed Bay Area. She vividly (and hilariously) describes that odd realm where people lose all sense of time, not due to dreamy mind-expansion, but because of hyper-focused mind-contraction. No daylight, humming machines, frantic colleagues who reach the pits of despair when their code crashes, the body’s energy thrown around by caffeine and sleep deprivation, unnaturally compressed into one’s cerebrum, eyes and fingers.

Her account of this world quickly mingles with her personal life, something one reader at Amazon found disconcerting:

Working as a technical writer within the technology industry, I related to a great deal of the story. That being said, a great deal of the story had nothing to do with what I thought the theme was to be. The book is marketed as a liberal arts major’s mis-adventures in techno-land. I was not interested in the author’s personal, sexual life. I wasn’t offended by it, just bored.

Boring it’s not, if you’re interested in both techno-land and the human heart. I quote the above reader to make it clear to anyone thinking of buying a copy that in the end you do need an interest in the human heart as well to fully get behind this unique tale. I mentioned the obsessive programmer’s world’s "inevitable link back" to the personal world because however much this link is ignored, missed, blanked out, neglected or not believed in, it persists. I’m worried by the extent to which this bond, which can’t be erased or deleted or archived, is neglected by the people who are moulding the culture of tomorrow. Which is why I find Ullman’s account, for all the perversity of the human-machine tangles it describes, courageous and encouraging in its honesty.

"In the end, this is a book about Ellen Ullman, not about technoculture." So says yet another disillusioned Amazon customer. Are they disillusioned just because they felt the book was marketed in a deceptive way? I thought the title implied an in-depth critique of technoculture—but was pleasantly surprised that it was in-depth in a different way, delving into someone’s actual experience of this culture’s massively complex innards. And yet there are still people out there blind enough to dimiss the book because of this, serving only to highlight Ullman’s still-timely cautionary tale.

But in designing web pages, my tolerance for the (relatively few) shortcomings of the Internet Explorer browser has been running thin of late. IE 5 is still widely used, and has some very annoying faults in its application of web standards. You get used to working around it. IE 6—which, by all accounts, is here for a while as the dominant browser—is more subtly annoying to the designer. But it’s been pissing me off enough lately for me to do a bit of non-MS browser advocacy here.

As a web user, I switched to Mozilla Firebird last year, and haven’t looked back (except back when Firebird’s Java was a bit shaky). Well, just recently Mozilla released a new version (0.8) of this great browser, and changed its name to Firefox. Crucial to this new release is an installer for Windows, so most people will find it easier to get running. I’m here, mostly as a frustrated designer, to ask you to give it a try (it’s available for Windows 98, ME, 2000 & XP, Mac OS X, and Linux).

A couple of caveats:

• That 0.8 version number means it’s not yet considered shiny enough to be an official "full release". There are various bugs in it, but they’re pretty minor. I’ve been using it as my main browser since 0.6, and have had no more problems than I had with IE 6.
• Er… that’s it, actually.

Now for the goodies:

• By far and away Firefox’s big one-up over IE (apart from making designers happy :-) is tabbed browsing. Makes flipping back and forth between different pages much more manageable, and generally becomes indispensible once you’ve got used to it (a bit like top-notch smack).
• Pop-up blocking comes as standard.
• "Find As You Type" simply rocks. No need to bring up a "Find" dialogue box: just hit /, and start typing. Firefox crunches through the page as you type, finding stuff that matches what you’ve typed so far. Then keeping F3‘ing to find more instances.
• Firefox is designed as a "bare-bones" browser—without the news and email stuff that makes the full Mozilla suite a little cumbersome. However, there’s a host of extensions that you can easily install to add more powerful functionality as you desire. My current essentials are:
  • Googlebar – Like Google’s toolbar for IE. A little rougher at the edges, but much more powerful.
  • Tabbrowser Extensions – About as much configurability as you’ll need for tabbed browsing.
  • Web Developer – Hugely useful bits for web design geeks.
• It’s not evil! ;-)

Ironic postscript: In uploading this post, I discovered what seems to be a minor Firefox problem with JavaScript that prevented me from activating it! What’s more, when I went to check the post in IE6—my target audience—I re-discovered a bug I’ve never managed to solve that prevents right-aligned images here from displaying in IE 6. So that cute Firefox button doesn’t show up where it’s most needed.