Futurismic

Bruce Sterling has assembled some interesting thoughts on the future of blogging, from Thomas Purves:

There’s a flavourshift in the blogosphere. The olde flavour of blogging is leaving us.

When you think of it, (personal) blogs never really caught on anyway.

Compare this one data point, my blogroll: 21 my FB Friendlist: 249

Blogs as dead media. At least as we once (hardly) knew ye.

Blogs are for pros, facebook is for friends

blogs dead. long live blogs.

I’m not sure about this. I’d bet that people will be still be indulging in blog-like behaviour (publicly available text with more than 140 characters per post, in a diary format) in 50 years time.

There will also be private “friends-only” blogs, but I doubt one will displace the other. People blog for different reasons, and there will always be a sufficient supply of people narcissistic enough to imagine that complete strangers are interested in what they have to say, even if they’re not doing it professionally (irony!).

Then there is the idea of Lifestreaming, from Sarah Perez on Read Write Web:

Lifestreaming is a new way of documenting the activities surrounding your life using a chronologically-ordered collection of information.

…

The simplicity of a lifestream is ideal for our information overloaded age. Lifestreams are short and sweet, yet still provide the same insight into a person’s life as yesterday’s casual personal blog did. A video here, a photo there, and today’s web citizens can voyeuristically peer into anyone’s life and get a sense of who they are. Long-form bloggers, on the other hand (myself included) require time and attention to read, but with so many publishers out there, people just aren’t reading content like they used to - they’re just scanning text and moving on. For new bloggers, this means getting readers is harder than ever - your words are getting lost in a sea of noise.

Hence what Sterling means by blogging being “inherently unstable” as a medium - it exists for a few years before technological change mutates it into something else.

I still feel that old-fashioned blogs have a long way to go, particularly if you want to put a point across, or have an agenda, or want to inspire people to think deeply - rather than spray the intimate details of your everyday life over eyeballs in exchange for ad-revenues.

[story-coagulation from Bruce Sterling on Beyond the Beyond, specific stories from Sarah Perez on Read, Write Web and Thomas Purves on ThomasPurves.com]

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My name is Thomas James, I am 19 years old and as such have the rest of my life ahead of me.

I love science fiction. I love it for it’s escapism and sense of wonder. I love it for the quirks and eccentricities of the characters and storylines. I love the marching Martian war machines, the stellar sweep of the Vault of Heaven, the dead-channel sky, the nine billion names, Source Victoria, the crushed-coral sands of new beaches and the mysterious pools and endless horizons of this most bountiful of genres.

You get the idea.

What I don’t like is pedestrian plots, cardboard characters, and glaring implausibility. This is why I read Futurismic, and why I’m honoured to be allowed to blog here.

As I mentioned, my biographical details are scant: I was born 19 years ago. I went to school. I dropped out of university (chemical engineering is an extremely difficult subject - plus I was bored).

Now I am trying to decide if I want to go back to university, get a proper job (at the moment I’m working in a call centre - everything you’ve heard about those places is true, a rich seam of science fictional material methinks…) or become a penniless hippy.

My blog is TJ’s Place. It mostly consists of rants about this and that.

Um. Peace out ya’ll!

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So, you may have noticed Justin joining the ranks here at Futurismic this week - and a fine addition I’m sure he’ll be. But we need more - there’s too much interesting stuff for us to cover!

So, are you interested in blogging for Futurismic? See if you fit our criteria:

• enthusiastic consumer of science fiction literature and cutting edge news
• some blogging experience (preferably Wordpress-based; personal sites and LJs count, MySpace and Facebook don’t)
• some very basic HTML skills
• good language skills
• an eye for a news story with a science fictional angle
• the time and resources to post approximately once per weekday (though if you can only post at weekends, we’re still interested)

Does that sound like you? Does the idea of blogging for Futurismic appeal?

I’ll be totally upfront - there’s no money involved. The only people who get paid at Futurismic are our fiction contributors. But it’s a lot of fun, and there’s kudos and glory to be gained! Plus the thrill of writing for an audience of 2,000 people every day.

Still keen? Great! Head on over to the Futurismic Contact page and follow these instructions precisely:

In the subject field type “Blogging Application”.

Then in the message field provide:

• your full name (and nom de blog, if relevant)
• links to sites where you’ve blogged/are blogging
• a few sentences explaining why you think you’d make a great blogger for Futurismic
• any specialist subjects and focused interests that you think make you stand out from the pack

Then attach and upload a file IN RICH TEXT (.RTF) FORMAT ONLY that contains two sample posts that you’d consider appropriate to Futurismic’s house style. It’s the content we’re looking for, but do show what links you’d use and where you’d put them. Extra points for posts fully coded in HTML.

Pretty easy, right? Please follow those instructions carefully, though - the wrong subject field might mean your application gets eaten by the spam-trap, and the form won’t let you upload the wrong sort of file.

The rest is down to you - the deadline for applications is this Sunday, 25th May. Enquiries from previous applicants welcome. Get to it!

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Following on from Stephen’s post on Friday about satellite images of the crisis in Burma, I thought I’d talk about another thing that this incident is telling us about our future. As the troubles in Myanmar are continuing, Burmese have been uploading pictures, video and text relating the violence and atrocities to the web. Those outside the country are then spreading these documents to world news and blogs.

Last week, to combat this documentation of their transgressions, the Burmese government shut down many of their internet servers, closing off the pipeline for information to escape the country’s borders. Phones and cameras were smashed on the streets by the military. Although some internet functionality has returned, it’s becoming harder for people to get information out to us looking in, with most journalists refused entry to Burma. One enterprising ABC reporter snuck in to use his mobile phone for reports.

This for me is one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century. The internet has made information and news freer than ever before. For some governments, companies and services this trends towards too much free information, presenting us with a classic conflict of interest between the user that wants content and those that do not. This week for example, AT&T changed its policy to allow users who criticise the company to be banned. The debate over Network Neutrality is a vital one to keep channels of communication open and help prevent future internet users having less functionality than we do today.

[ photo by Film Colourist ]

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OK, ladies and gents - Futurismic is looking for a few good bloggers.

What we need from you is enthusiasm for the sort of topics we cover here (science fictional near-future phenomena and technogeekery with a slant toward the plausible), a commitment to doing at least one post per weekday (or more if you like), and some sort of writing experience, be it as a blogger or anything else.

What can we offer you in return? The chance for your writing to reach a wider audience, and to share your enthusiasm for science fiction literature and the ideas it deals with. What we can’t offer you is money - the only people who have ever made money from Futurismic are the authors of the short stories we publish, because that’s what the site is all about. The Futurismic team do it for the love - no matter how much our families and loved ones may rue us for it sometimes!

Still interested? Good! Drop me (Paul Raven) an email to the address hyperlinked in my name on the staff page. Put ‘Futurismic blogger enquiry’ in the title so as not to get caught in my spam traps, and send me the following:

• A short paragraph about yourself and your relationship to science fiction
• Links to your own blog, or other writing of yours available online
• A couple of samples of the sort of post you’d contribute to Futurismic - we’re happy for you to have your own voice, indeed we’d prefer you to, but we like to keep things fairly short and snappy. If you follow the site regularly, you should know what I mean.

I’ll read them through, and get back to you as soon as I possibly can. Looking forward to hearing from you! [Awesome Futuristic City image borrowed from P1X3L]

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For me, the most interesting thing to come out of the so-called cyberwar DDoS attack on Estonia back in May this year is the different ways that different media have approached the story. Nowhere is this more obvious than with Wired; the magazine ran a long and beautifully written piece that completely overstates the issues for the sake of sensationalist warnings about potential risks to the US, while blogger Kevin Poulson cheerfully dissects and deflates all the hyperbole while sitting in an office at the same company headquarters.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that bloggers are inherently less prone to sensationalising a subject … but I’m increasingly finding the web is a better news source, precisely because I can get a broad selection of angles on a story with ease. How about you?

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If you’re keen to ride the bleeding edge of digital culture and become a lifelogger, you may want to pre-order one of these stylish and comfortable neck-worn camera/microphone combos, designed to transmit sound and images to your mobile device for storage without any interaction on your part.

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