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What if bits and bytes smelled? And what if they smelled bad? And what if they had the capacity to carry viruses – no, not the email kind but biological n’er-do-wells?

Somewhere out in that vast and ill-defined world we call “digital space,” there’s a lot – and I mean a lot – of refuse. Imagine it having a physical nature, something that took up physical space like old toasters or meat that has gone bad. What if it had rats?

I don’t think I’d care for it.

I call it “The Great Digital Landfill” because that is really what much of the Internet is, just as it is much of what we keep on our computers – used and effectively worthless docs, pics, emails, programs and who knows what all else. There is no pressing need to clear any of it up because there is so much capacity (or so we suppose, if and when we think of it).

But what if it smelled bad? What if digital material had “best before” dates and, once the a date was passed, whatever that item might be it would begin to stink out the joint? I think we would likely put our minds to “cleaning up” with a bit more alacrity.

A very quick Google search reveals that “digital landfill” is not an uncommon term. Some of the material found is about the electronic trash we create and some is … well, a little odd (not unusual on the web). There are actually two aspects to this:

• The trashed hardware (cell phones, laptops etc.)
• The trashed content (emails, docs, pics etc.)

The first of those, hardware, is the serious one because it actually is physical and it is a very real problem. I believe I’ve seen documentaries or news reports of entire islands in Southeast Asia completely buried under technological trash, but hopefully that is just a nightmare I had due to spicy food prior to bed.

The second one, the digital content that has expired and is no longer useful, is just clutter. I sometimes wonder how search engines plough through it all. On our personal computers, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has done a search and been discouraged to find page after page of results.

I’ve even found documents on my laptop that I couldn’t remember if I had written them or someone else had.

Imagine, however, this scene. Arnold, a student, has just been called to a meeting with Professor Axel. It goes like this:

“I’ve been going over your work, Arnold, and I have a question. Did you write this?”

“Umm … yes! Yes, I did.”

“When?”

Arnold’s eyes dart side to side. “The weekend. Saturday night! Yes. And I finished it up Sunday morning.”

Professor Axel frowns. “That’s strange. Your submission has a very distinctive odor. An unpleasant one.”

“I … I … I hadn’t noticed.”

“Really? That’s strange too … since it’s stinking to high heaven! This damn thing is at least three years old!”

Poor Arnold. Caught cheating because digital material goes bad and stinks.

Yes, I think our attitudes toward all those emails in our Gmail accounts, all our stored documents, abandoned blogs, not to mention all that discarded hardware, would definitely alter if technology and the content we produced with it would just smell bad after a certain period of time.

Maybe that’s the challenge? Maybe we need to make technology that stinks.

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I’ve completed my Saturday morning project which was to go through my posts from 2004 and find the ones I most liked. They aren’t necessarily written as well as they should but such are the hazards of blogs.

It was fascinating for a few reasons. First of all, I was interested to see how much more I was focused on writing, presumeably the reason for a blog called Writelife. I think that is why I have fifteen posts there even though I want to try to keep each year to ten or less.

The second thing I noticed is how focused I was on blogging whereas now my focus is social media (blogging being a subset of). But that was six years ago when blogging was really taking off and there was so much discussion about blogs and what they were, as well as the criticisms — more or less the same as now with social media.

Two posts were of particular interest to me. One of them was 12 rules for Web writing which was actually a repost of something I’d written around ten years ago, about 2000 or so. Back then I was a bit anal about the word web and capitalizing it. Now, I don’t care. The rules, by the way, are more or less obvious ones — there are no great insights, I think. What I find interesting, however, is that by and large I think they’re still valid. (Now that I think of it, maybe some of them weren’t so obvious back in 2000.)

The other post is Language as a communication barrier. For a very long time it was my most visited post. What is of interest in that is where that traffic was coming from — outside of North America to a great extent. Africa, Pacific Rim etc.

Finally, many of the posts from back then have character set problems due to the many Wordpress updates and the importing of the blog from another location. (That importing business is also why some of the internal links go nowhere. It is simply too time consuming to go through and fix the URLs.) Although I tried to clean up the fifteen posts here, my posts from back then often show code rather than an apostrophe, quotation mark and so on.

If you’re at all interested, you’ll find the fifteen posts on my Highlights page, just below 2009. Other years will hopefully be coming soon.

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I tracked down what appears to be my first blog post. It’s dated December 24, 2001, 8:08pm. I’ve posted it below, for whatever that’s worth. It won’t make much sense to anyone other than me. It refers to what the blog was formerly called, Piddleville, which if you visit that site you’ll see doesn’t resemble what I’m talking about here at all. (It was later, and only for a time, called The Burble.)

The old blog was on Blogspot with the Piddleville domain forwarded to it. Prior to the blog, Piddleville was fictional — a kind of local news site for a made-up town. It was populated by numerous characters about whom stories were written and who occasionally ran ads. (For example, I had a local election where some characters ran ads.) One day I’ll post some of that material. I think some of it was pretty funny — at least, I thought so.

But as to that first post, here it is:

December 24, 2001 – 8:08pm

With a few minutes to spare on a Christmas Eve, it seemed a good time to start with an initial entry – the one that says, Merry Christmas!

Have a Murray Christmas and a Snappy New Year!

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I’ve been going through my posts from 2009 trying to identify the ones I think are the better ones. I suppose was making a kind of Top Ten list, despite my recurring griping about lists. It is not a “best of” list, however. It is a list of the ones I liked, though some may not have been all they could or should have been. It’s a favourites list, I suppose. It goes like this:

1. What Star Trek did to me
2. The class system is alive and well and now online
3. Readers have responsibilities too
4. I wonder what she’ll say today
5. Generations, transitions, moving pictures
6. Literacy is a prerequisite for independence
7. Monetizing meaning: what is content anyway?
8. Is usability kaput?
9. Who are we not hearing from?
10. The first draft is the outline

It has been an intriguing exercise. As I go through the posts I see the themes that have preoccupied me. I’ve been aware that there was some redundancy to my posts as I keep returning to certain subjects but I think this is likely true of anyone with a blog.

Here are some of the themes, observations and comments I see popping up over and over:

• What I perceive as a belief among many that social media, and the Internet generally, is ubiquitous and of a democratic nature and how that is a false belief.
• Sometimes the act of communication is more important than what is communicated.
• Social media is not tactile. We’re all in touch with each other online but we never touch each other – there is no physical contact to technological connections.

Those are the three big ones I keep seeing myself writing about. As far as the topic of writing went, my focus was a bit generic. I seemed to write more about that vague thing we call content – what is happening to traditional news, how blogs have evolved, managing social media content and so on. I was all over the map which is not unusual for me.

As an aside … I rarely make lists like the one above. I decided to do so this time as a first step in a process of going through all my posts, back to 2004, and identifying the better material. In my inept fashion, I’m trying to do a bit of online housekeeping.

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I wrote this, on another of my blogs, about two years ago (which is why it refers to snow). I decided to repost it here because I came across it and it made me laugh.

From the radio I’m hearing, Jingle Bells. I’m hearing White Christmas. Oh and there are Carnie and Wendy Wilson singing Hey Santa.

Outside, everything is white. Snow is everywhere and houses are decorated with lights, doors with wreaths.

And there is the radio again. What’s that they’re saying? Great stocking stuffers: lottery tickets. Nothing says Christmas like a lottery ticket, but why stop there? If you’re part of the well-to-do crowd, why not give a VLT? It would look great in the living room.

And at the same time, as we’re running commercials about getting lottery tickets for Christmas, we’re also running public service announcements saying, “Don’t give a lottery ticket to a child! That sends the wrong message.”

Good grief. Maybe the right message would be to actually put some imagination into it and give someone something other than a freaking lottery ticket? When did giving lottery tickets become such a Christmas staple? Probably since it was so easy to do and can be done from the corner store.

You know what’s going to happen now … Someone will give me a lottery ticket for Christmas. And then they’ll probably read this post and there will be fences to mend.

Oh well, it’ll give us something to do in the New Year.

And if the ticket is a winner, we can mend those fences in Aruba.

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Not long ago I came across the flash fiction blog, The Rose City Sisters. I’ve always liked the idea of flash fiction so I looked at the guidelines and started writing. Included in the parameters was, “a Pasadena connection.” (This makes sense given that the blog is out of Pasadena.)

The problem with this was that I knew precious little about Pasadena, except for a few random cultural things like a parade and a football game. This became what interested me. What do you write when you don’t know what you’re writing about? The answer was in my dictionary’s definition of fiction: “… literature in the form of prose, esp. short stories and novels, that describes imaginary events and people.”

In other words, make it up. So I did. It’s called, I’ve never been to Pasadena.

By the way, with regards to the question of moose in Pasadena, Answers.com says there are no moose in California. On the other hand, thebackpacker.com suggests otherwise.

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(This was originally posted October 23rd, 2005 on another one of my blogs, one that is on hiatus. I’ve edited slightly to make the terminology more current.)

I came across a post about blogging and social media and know exactly what it’s talking about when the blogger asks, “Why do some write about every, little, single, humdrum, minute aspect of the everyday?” It can be annoying and irksome at the best of times. I feel like she does. On the other hand, I do the very thing that bugs me.

It got me thinking about blogging again and, surprisingly, I came across a song by Emmylou Harris that I think of now as the social media song. It’s called Can You Hear Me Now?

And I’m reminded of two quotes. The first is Eduardo Galeano in his Book of Embraces. I’ve lost the exact wording, but it was along the lines of, “Everyone has a voice, something to say that needs to be heard by the others.” (I’ve pretty much butchered it, but that’s roughly what he said.)

The other quote is possibly from Martin Luther King, though I may be wrong. But it goes something like, “Violence is the speech of those who have no voice.”

And my point with both of these is the business of a voice. Technology aside, social media and most things on the Internet are about communication and communication is about people and voices and having someone on this silly rock just listen to you.

I send out my S.O.S.
A message in a bottle set out to sea
It just reads “Soul in distress”
And nobody ever got back to me

Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?

Not that everyone online is in distress. Most aren’t. But the point is people need to chatter and they need to feel someone, anyone, is listening to them chatter. I’ve always thought this was one of the biggest mistakes people make in relationships – not understanding that part of your job when you’re in one is to be a sounding board.

And sometimes not understanding that you really only need to appear to be listening because, often, when people sound off they don’t necessarily want a discussion. Shit builds up during the day and they need to let it go, like steam. Part of the art of listening is knowing when you’re supposed to listen and interact and when you’re really just supposed to sit there and nod.

I guess my point is that people need an outlet and this is one of the things social media provides – outlets. But people also need a sense that there is someone listening, even if what they are saying is nothing worth saying. The act of communication is often more important than the content of the communication. And this is why we see things online like – I changed my pants, I brushed my teeth, I petted the dog and so on.

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

People are looking for an ear.

Not long ago, I came across one of the saddest blogs I’ve encountered. It was from a year or two ago, a woman in Toronto, and it was a blog with single post. Her husband of a certain number of years had been having an affair she had been unaware of. Now he had left saying he not only didn’t love her, he never had and now he had finally found someone he did love. She was blind-sided and alone and … well, you know the story.

One post. Who do you talk to when the house is empty, you’re alone and this is what you’re dealing with?

How did the load get to be so heavy?
I used to wear my trouble like a crown
A bad flood’s pounding on the levee
And I’m gonna need some help to hold my ground.

Anyway … blogs aren’t all sad – the exact opposite. I read a lot of blogs because they’re so damn funny.

But I think I mainly read them because I find people who feel about things the way I do – and sometimes very trivial things. But you get a sense that you’re not alone. You realize how freakin’ big the world is, how many people are out there, and that someone, somewhere is listening.

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

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I’ve recently started a project that requires a certain amount of reclamation work. By that I mean my memory is pretty awful so I’m doing some work to reclaim my memory by going through my various blog archives. It’s been something of a revelation.

I have three blogs: this one, another devoted to movies and a personal blog that is currently on an extended hiatus as I decide what to do with it. Writelife (ostensibly about writing, social media and so on) and the movie blog both have a specific focus (and sometimes not so specific). To some degree, they are self-censored in that career-related people, companies and whoever else can see them and I don’t want to come across as too much of a raving blog lunatic. (I’m not always successful in that regard.)

The third, the personal one, is pretty much me uncensored. In fact, it’s on hiatus right now as I consider the wisdom of this, consider the wisdom of trying to manage three blogs and I try to figure out what to do with the blog name, which is a stupid one I dreamed up at the spur of the moment a few years ago. But all that’s an aside …

Here’s the thing: Of the three, the most interesting is hands-down the personal one. It is the one where, when I’m on my game, I have the best writing. It’s easily the funniest. And when I use the word “censor” in connection with it I’m not suggesting there is anything that needs censoring. I use the f-word more frequently there, in the older posts, more so than I would now. But other than that, it’s largely tame stuff. The censor business was simply considering how I appeared to others online, at least in the first impressions sense. From a career perspective, was it a good idea?

Going through the archives (and those of the other blogs) I see certain themes recurring. (That is my diplomatic way of saying I’m repetitive.) And I see that there is one thing in particular I’m interested in above anything else: people.

Why is the personal one more interesting than the other two? Because it is specifically about people: me as a people (obviously) and others as people. That’s also why it’s funny, at least to me.

The other two blogs come at the subject of people sideways. Here, on this blog, by discussing marketing, social media, marketing, communication and so on. On the other blog, via movies which, when they are good movies, are always good because they are good stories and good stories are always about people.

I found it interesting that among the posts in the personal blog archive there were a few that sounded very similar to recent ones posted here. The critiques of social media today are very similar to the critiques of blogs from several years ago, prior to the proliferation of social media tools and when personal blogs were either at their height or beginning to fall from that height.

What is most interesting to me, however, is the writing (to me) is so much better. I don’t think it relates to the writing as writing but to what the writing was about and how it went about it. Posts about events and topics that, on the surface, were utterly trivial, were actually the most engaging.

So once again, as often happens for me, I’m rethinking what I rethought a while ago.

As for the project I referred to above, my fingers are crossed that I have the tenacity to complete it. That is always the hardest part.

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For me, the key to blogging is simply this: you have to like writing. You need to be the sort of person who would be writing what you blog whether blogs existed or not. A blog, for me, is simply a place to put what I write with the added advantage of thinking of it as “published,” even if for all practical purposes few, if any, people will actually see and read it. Put another way, a blog is not an end, though it has the illusion of being that. The writing is the end.

I don’t know when I started blogging. I have no remembered date so I can’t really do anniversary posts. Even if I did have the date I started I wouldn’t do anniversary posts simply because I would never remember to do them. According to my archives, my first post here, on Writelife, was May 16, 2004. It’s a boring post, that first one, a redirect of sorts and refers vaguely to my interest in movies. Yawn.

Writelife was not my first blog. My first, and still alive and well blog, was Piddleville. Today it’s about movies, that interest I alluded to in my first Writelife post. Here’s the thing: according to the Piddleville archives my first post was in December, 2001 – and it’s actually pretty funny. You’ll notice that it is on Blogger and is called The Burble. That was an earlier manifestation of my blogging. My blogging from the past is quite a muddle because I was trying new things – blogs, types of blogs, domains and so on, learning as I went along. I’m more coherent now, though still a bit muddled.

Here’s how all my muddle came about: the truth is, I was blogging before there were blogs. Those posts, however, are not archived on any blog, largely because there were no blogs around when they were created. So when they were written and put online is unknown.

Back then, I would write something, turn it into a page with very basic HTML coding and upload it to my site, which was Piddleville (piddleville.com). The site was a site, not a blog (as we think of them now), and it was a pretty basic site – a good deal of text, some images and simple HTML.

When blogs came about, or at least when Blogger came about and gained some traction, I kept my site but began using Blogger for posts. And I think I linked them back and forth. (Things began to get muddled around this time.)

It doesn’t really matter. The point is simply that I don’t know when I started blogging, in the sense that I think of blogging. Blogging, as I define it, is simply writing something and putting it online. To be more specific, you could say “putting it online using self-publishing tools.” Or something like that. But to me the writing is the important part of the definition, not the tool.

One day, I should really go over my own online history. It would certainly be of interest to me. For one thing, Piddleville has had a number of manifestations over the years. I feel a bit sentimental about the first one, the original Piddleville. It was not a site or blog as we think of them today.

It was fiction. It was a kind of local news site for a town (Piddleville) that existed only in my head. And if I may be a little self-inflated, it was damned funny! There was a very proper, schoolmarm like character named Henta McKlosky who was running for town council. And there was a somewhat sleazy, Rodney Dangerfield like guy named Dick Whizzy – “The Whizzer!” He was running for the same spot on town council. Henta wanted to advance the interests of public schools in Piddleville; Dick wanted to play fast-and-loose with funding to pay for a brothel he wanted to open, the Havana Hubba-Hubba Hotel.

There was Barclay, the self-important movie and social critic. And there was Billy Smalls, a little kid who seemed to live only for getting into trouble by creating embarrassing situations for people in the town. And on and on. Believe me, I had fun doing it.

Eventually it evolved and had various other manifestations until I reached a point where the unfocused nature of what I was doing online was getting out of hand. So Piddleville became my blog/site for my interest in movies and I created Writelife for my interest in writing, technology, social media and so on. I imposed some focus.

All the above tangent is really just to reinforce what I wrote initially – you need to be the sort of person who would be writing what you blog whether blogs existed or not.

So I blog because I write. It doesn’t work the other way around, at least not for me.

(This post was prompted after reading Mark Dykeman’s post, Things I’ve learned after two years of blogging.)

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