Just a Gwai Lo awkward flow, to some it's even unorthodox [?]

Boris points me to The Fever who is seeking a definition of the phrase "the Dark Web". There is at least one article on my weblog where I discuss the term (which surely could have used a paragraph break or two). Even better, though, is Suw Charman's amazing interview at Supernova, talking about personal weblogs, that is, the ones with people talking about their personal lives as distinct from what they do for a living or as distinct from a strictly subject-based weblog. That would include weblogs that are intended for friends to read and maybe discuss later "offline"—I know that I've learned about as much about my friends from when they started blogging (i.e. this year) than the period before that, which for some is almost 9 years now. They're expressing what they are doing and how they feel as if it were a private weblog yet knowing full well that anybody who wanted to read the site could.

I saw Julie Leung's excellent presentation for the second time, this time at Gnomedex (the first time was at Northern Voice), and even though I knew what to expect from it, I still had to wipe tears from my eyes as she talked about the struggle to find the balance between reaching out to her community and keeping important things private. In the presentation she talked about trying to figure out how to write about her brother's passing. What she didn't talk about this time around—possibly due to time constraints—was the response to her article on her daughter's surgery, and how she helped other parents by writing some tips for when their child is about to have surgery. In the presentation at Gnomedex, just as the presentation at Northern Voice, she quoted from an article I wrote in January about my so-called personal life and whether or not people are obligated to write about it. She documented the links to the resources she cited in her presentation on del.icio.us.

Since I had seen it before, the most interesting part of the presentation was the audience's reaction towards it. The applause afterwards was hearty, but there seemed be a slightly stunned silence when Gnomedex conference organizer Chris Pirillo said Julie's presentation was his favourite presentation of the two days, and I think that was because the audience were people the majority of which read exclusively technical material. That would be my way of saying that those who exclusively read and/or write technical weblogs don't really understand what "the Dark Web" is about, but that's more an assumption based on the silence than anything.

Suw Charman links to Nothing Travels Faster Than Bad News, a movie in which she briefly stars: “We know the sound is a bit pants in places, and we know that some of the acting is a bit pants in places, so all we can do is beg your indulgence and point out that we made this on a budget of precisely no quid whatsoever with a cast and crew of friends who happened to be kicking around at the time.”

It was pretty low-budget, but I liked the editing, the thief—you'll see what I mean when you watch the movie—was an unexpected plot twist, and Tim Jones (playing Kevin) had a sort of Simon Pegg thing going on. If you're wise to the ways of the BitTorrent, you can download the movie, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivative Works license.

Suw Charman is only audioblogging for the next few days, and as sound is not the most search-engine-accessible medium on the Internet, her words will need to be transcribed. Luckily everything on her weblog is governed by a Creative Commons license, which means that anyone can remix her audioblog so long as they "share-alike" (that is one of the terms of her license). The following, then, is a transcript of her audioblog on August 6th, 2004. Ums, ahs, stumbles and mistakes not transcribed (errors in transcription are entirely my own, I do not discount the possibility that they may be a result of Suw's wonderful accent):

Well here we are again, after my post earlier this evening, I decided that I would try a little experiment and attempt to only audioblog for the next seven days. You're probably rolling your eyes and wondering why I would bother, but it's really to see whether audioblogging gets easier, because at the moment I feel terribly self-conscious and awkward recording this message, and also to see whether I can keep the momentum going and actually end up audioblogging something meaningful and worthwhile.

One of the key problems is that there's no real edit function. I usually pour over my posts--even the shorts ones I will check and read through and spellcheck and preview and re-edit and preview again before they ever get published. But with an audioblog there's a lot more spontaneity about it. You get to hear all my ums and ahs, you get to hear my stumbles and my mistakes. And unless I sit here for hours re-recording it until I'm blue the face, it has to be a bit of a warts-and-all experience, which is kind of interesting. Interesting that it makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable to be so exposed, I guess.

But anyway, I'm going to resist the urge to type anything for a week and just see what happens. The only exception will be if I need to blog something with a hyperlink, frankly, I'm not spelling it out. I shall just type the link into the post and we'll go with that. That to me would be the one disadvantage with audioblogging: it may save my fingertips, but it's very difficult to to actually discuss something and provide a link to it. So again it's a matter of seeing how that goes. It's not something that I've done before, and it's just really a matter of seeing what happens. So, yes, welcome to a week's worth of me wittering on.

I hope you enjoy it. Speak to you tomorrow.

The other disadvantage of Audioblog (the service, not the idea) is that the audio itself is streaming, meaning rewinding in order to transcribe is, at the moment, impossible. That means that one has to start from the beginning, wait until the audio comes to the blank in the transcript, and then type like mad to fill in that blank, rather than simply rewind to the point at which there is a blank. I understand that feature has been requested by Audioblog members, but that it is not high on the feature request priority list.

The entire text of this weblog entry is governed by the same Creative Commons license as Suw's, which is Attribution, Non-Commercial, and Share-Alike.