Where are people talking about what?

These are old-fashioned email mailing lists — still the best way to communicate with other people online.

Lsoft’s lists [search]

The Mail Archive

Yahoo Groups

US census bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics

NIST Standard Reference Data (SRD)

categorized link lists

University deparments of statistics, arranged by country

How to use statitstics: stats for journalists

Blogs aren’t newspapers and they can’t replace newspapers. But blogs sort the content of many newspapers and other media outlets, like an editor, giving an edited view (with commentary) on the news (which itself is reported and published elsewhere). Unless a blog is reporting news, it’s just linking to another news media outlet.

You can start a blog on any topic and as long as you have the dedication to keep up with the news on that topic and keep linking it, working at it constantly, obsessively, which is not the same as reporting on a topic (Matt Drudge edits the news, by linking to stories he likes with titles he writes, but for the most part he isn’t a reporter himself), you can eventually attract enough insider info and tips to begin breaking news stories (rarely, Drudge), and certainly being among the first to link to a particular story that is reported and broken elsewhere.

Brian Stelter made a name for himself while a 20-year-old college kid by running the TVNewser blog at Mediabistro.com, covering the network and cable news biz. His story as reported in USA Today (Jul 10 2006). He eventually broke more news instead of linking to others and today the TVNewser blog is mostly original Mediabistro content, or links to other parts of their site.

For further reference

“Writing Electronically: The Effects of Computers on Traditional Writing” by Sharmila Pixy Ferris

A technique for finding videos, images, and sound files that are on the Web but aren’t “public.” But when you’re searching, what you’re searching for is being recorded. So another hands-on tutorial shows a set of techniques for keeping those searches secret. [more]

Learn more from Googletutor.com.

Paper, “NOTES ON FREE TEXT INFORMATION RETRIEVAL” by Mark Zimmermann (March 1990)

Sites with good and notable web design, great HTML examples, good coding, etc.

Personal sites

John M. Lynch’s Web Site is an excellent example of a professional home page done well.

More graceful simplicity: Don Klipstein’s Web Site.

Ian Jackson’s lynx-friendly pages.

How minimalist can it get? Ask John Cowan.

Databases, Magazines and Web Resources

Michael E. Grost’s A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection is one of the best examples of good plain design for an online guide or resource site.

Cardigan Industries have out-McSweeneyed McSweeney’s. Seriously, it’s fantastic design. No wonder, they’re using Textism.

Grunnen Rocks is a web db from the Netherlands of indie rock, 90s to now. They’ve “updated” but the ancient old site design from way back when was simply righteous. [have a peek]

arxiv.org

The gopher-directory style of the etext.org archive (defunct) [archive]

the old wikiwikiweb had and has a simple, straightforward design

Online books

TeX Font Guide is simple and readable and elegant.

WordPress Elegance

Cynthia Harrison’s A Writer’s Diary.

For further reference

A good, well-designed online guide, Building Accessible Websites.

The Easy-2-Read Standard: Five smart rules for on-screen text design (“Don’t tell us scrolling is bad!”)

The Webless Initiative is against CSS, style sheets, “interactivity” and so on. It might not have much of an effect but the ideas are interesting and very often the “webless” design turns out great.

(Browsers should be able to control and present an infinite array of local styles; styles should be controllable not only by the publisher but by the reader.)

Back in the 90s there was an online indie “scene” — here records the lost traces and remaining links to key mid-90s indie rock hangouts and places, with a slight historic detour to early-90s grunge

Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch: “I want to bring people weeping to their knees” [pdf]

The key were the mailing lists. There was twee.net, home of classic and current Indie Pop music and the reference-site for the ‘Indiepop mailing list,’ still going strong (indiepop outlasted most, I guess). The indie-list was run on the (defunct) bloofga.org [archive] and one of the best was the sick-n-tired-l. There were dedicated lists as well: sebadoh-l, rave-l, 4ad-l, and the early early lists (circa 1990) called “punk” and “jane’s addiction”; of course there was the secret chugchanga list, and Doug Orleans was a key scenester and mailing-list contributor who conducted the annual Chugchanga-l music polls. Some online zines distributed via ftp. There were countless IRC channels: #subpop #rave #shoegaze #punk #indie …

Before there was eBay [search], Lazlo Nibble’s internet music wantlists was how we traded our records. Previous to that there was Usenet, and rec.music.collecting.vinyl …

Through it all, Web sites were minimal. Aaron Renn’s list of Chicago concerts circa 1997 mirrors the experience of many of us (the online aesthetic, too). A thousand home pages like Tastykakeman (gone) [archive] and mp3s [more] and labels [example]

Review Addict was a prototypal music-review blog by Michael Stutz, “a collection of spontaneous (automatic-writing) impressions of recorded music,” running in the mid-to-late 90s, chronicling nearly a thousand reviews of unknown underground and obscure music before the site was rm’ed. Eventually there was pitchfork but by that time I thought it was all dead.

Grunge and the PNW

Triple cycle theory: inside the northwest music scene

Bombshelter Videos (1987-1994), a weekly show on Pacific NW TV, played and promoted what would be called the “Seattle Grunge Scene”

Google: “super fuzz big muff” “just gimme indie rock”

Photo of Ian at Sub Pop (and Earth).

Where are they now

I have no idea.

Bonnie Burton’s still at grrl.com.

Someone’s March 2008 blog entry looking back on 90s indie rock assesses it all pretty well.