:: planetoïd ::

FIIIRRRSSSSST :
i just wanna say CONGRATS !!! to my pal Fred, to Delphine, and to their sweat little Odessa, recently landed around Lyon, for their parents' pleasure. i'm glad for you, guys ! 8)


COMBAT MEDIA HUB. AND OTHER SHIT, TOO

it's been a pretty long time since i haven't done any Warren Ellis related post. talking about the guy with some net friends reminds me it. so, let's go.

sometimes in june, somewhere in one of this +50 mails that he send on a monthly regular basis (under the Bad Signal mailing list moniker), the always highly pertinent Warren Ellis (who also run some brilliant kind of blog) had another of his usual smart mind gigs ; this one was called "[BAD SIGNAL]Combat Media Hubs", and it goes like this :

"This is something I was talking about with a friend on a private forum last night. It's been in my head for a couple of weeks. I'm going to road test the notion here.
Combat big media. Use the web.

Every day, people release new creative work on to the web. Prose, essays (often in blog form), art, photography, music, animation, video, spoken word, whatever. The web, and a bunch of free or cheap tools, gives the creator access to the full spectrum of media for web broadcast.
Live Journal gives you the ability to subscribe to other LJs, which you read on a dynamically updating page - your own channel of selected content.
Expand that up a bit.

Take Dr Joshua Ellis' notion of "taste tribes," small communities connected by a shared aesthetic.
Now, you and your tribe -- and if you're all on Tribe.net, you can grab a bit of code from the site that displays you all on a sidebar on your website -- select out the content streams on the web you like. Your favourite online comics, the internet radio stations you like, the artists who put new mp3s and art and photography on their sites, etc.
You grab some webspace. Your Hub, if you like.
And you cause to be created a system whereby the Hub is informed when one of your selected sites updates. The way a blog puts a new entry at the top. The way a new piece by a favoured LJ appears at the top of your Friends page.
You've just built a multimedia channel in webspace.

If you feel like it, you can nail some community software onto it, like Beehive. And you've got the place on the web where your tribe is, in real time. At the very least, you could set up to launch IMs off the site. Make your friends' information invisible to the public, set up an account with Ipipi, and you can SMS your friends' mobile phones from off the site (I set up a system like that for a private community earlier this year).
Hell, there's not even any need to make the Hub public, if you don't want to -- put the whole thing behind a password gate. But if you do make it public, you can construct a powerful evangelism tool for the content you like. Use it to create awareness of your favourite artists, even set up PayPal donation points.

It's your full-spectrum multimedia channel. It's the TV-killer.
It's the advertising-killer. It's all free original material selected by you and the friends you share tastes with.
Your Combat Media Hub.

I'm on the Treo at the pub, so I don't have the link to Josh's original "taste tribes" article, but a quick Google should
bring it up.
There could be great big holes in this, but I figure the idea's worth road-testing in any case."

i like this guy, i tell you.

as you see (and probably know by now), Ellis is very attentive to today-is-tomorrow technologies ; he spend months on the web and here's a few selection of the Alternative Comics published stuff he offers recently through this same Bad Signal mailing-list

"Quick Alternative Comics thoughts :
- Dean Haspiel's always good ; the Billy Dogma stuff is just mental.
- The Hanuka twins are brilliant.
- I know nothing about Rebecca Dart's work, but I love the shit out of that cover.
- Derek Kirk Kim is the guy whom everyone will be pretending they independently discovered next year. Alternative are distributing one of his books. Get it now, be ahead of the curve.
- Colleen Coover and Laurenn McCubbin were in True Porn. You don't need another reason.
- I haven't read Perverso, but Rich Tommaso is very good."

oh, and while around the Ellis topic, here's an interview of his "crazy southern belle", Colleen Doran, who works with him quite often, and a few Ocean pages available as PDF on DC website.


many things to do these last weeks doesn't help to update this blog that much ; next weeks seems pretty busy too, but i think i'll be able to blog a little bit more in the upcoming weeks. well. we'll see.