The cut-up (or “cutup”) is a method of juxtaposition where a work (usually text) is cut into pieces and the pieces rearranged in a random order, similar to the montage or collage technique in painting. The traditional cut-ups of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs were done manually with scissors, razor blades, axes and other cutting devices. (Netmonkey.com has published an excellent summary of the theory behind the cut-up method, and another good one is in Brion Gysin’s own words.)

Scissors are no longer necessary for making cut-ups; they can be performed more efficiently using a digital computer. The following is a list of open source tools for cutting up etexts and other data using open-source software. The best of these tools improve on the process, generating Markov chains from text input and who knows what else.

Note that the cut-up does not free the artist from the duty of expression; cut-ups serve as a compositional aid and are not a substitute for the act of composition itself.

• Florian Cramer’s “Permutations” contains what he calls “the only technically ‘proper’ CGI-Adaption of Gysin’s/Burroughs’ cutup method.” (All of the site’s Perl source code is GPLed.)
• Lee Worden offers a similar cutup CGI which uses a different algorithm than Florian’s, but is also easy to use.
• cutup, part of the tinyutils package (deprecated), is a small shell script for cutting up an input text file into four sections and then reassembling the slices diagonally. (a Perl rewrite should feature the ability to choose the number of x- and y- slices on the text.)
• Luke Kelley’s Cut-Up Machine is a Web cgi that lets you insert up to 100 elements from Naked Lunch into the output text.
• English as She is Spoken is Jonathan Feinberg’s Python script which takes text and runs it through AltaVista’s Translations service, and then runs the output through again, multiple times until no further “linguistic mutations” occur.
• An earlier Translations tool is the Transmogrifier; this tool powers a multi-lingual chat room (within 10 years you will probably be able to select a default language in your net interface and see the entire Internet translated in such fashion.)
• chef is a lex scanner for outputting its input text in the dialogue of a Swedish chef; the Debian filters package contains a bunch of these little text dialogue filters.
• The Shannonizer takes text or URL input and outputs a translation by a number of famous writers, including Hunter S. Thompson and Lewis Carroll.
• BABLE is a Perl script that generates Markov chains. It works best on large texts.
• Dissociated Press is an Emacs function for “dissociating” the current buffer, combining words and characters to form newords and charcatures; in Emacs, type:
  

  M-x dissociated-press <RET>

• Jamie Zawinski’s dadadodo generates Markov chains of word frequencies. One of its best features is the ability to scan a given text and write a compiled object file which you can then use later to generate output based on the original text.
• JWZ’s latest is webcollage, which builds a collage of random images from the Web on the root window of your X session.

  Ideas for improvements/expansions to webcollage:

  • ability to specify a single host or localhost directory tree when searching for images;
  • ability to specify the number of random images to output (coupled with the above gives a random-image cgi that could be useful for Web sites).
  • ability to save the image from the root window to a file (with as many of the original file properties saved as possible)
  • ability to limit images from a site or sites (say, display random images from eBay auctions)
  • integrated with the window manager so that a double-click with the left mouse button (say) opens a default web browser window with the URL of the originating image; a triple-click (say) pastes the URL to the X selection.
  • option for outputting to an .html file, either with x number of <img src> lines or with an image map
  • including a text option so that random pages/paragraphs/sentences/words/chars of text can be added to the output

This last one leads to an idea for an avant-garde web-art project: you write a program that obtains random text from the Web and then outputs that text in HTML, with random links interspersed through the text (the link heuristics are configured by a filter file whose entries contain two lines: the pattern to match in the input text and the link to use in the output, either a specific URL or a text value, in which case it uses a random URL containing that text); the resultant page is then a hypertext cut-up. Will sites allow you to link to them in such a context? Will linking out of context be outlawed? Or will popular browsers eventually contain cut-up-mode toggles, enabling a network of enthusiasts to trade and morph their filters, even holding filter-contests for the most unique views of/traversals through the Web?

Free software cutup tools are described in The Linux Cookbook, 2nd edition.

Related to this subject is a page on computer-generated writing.

As is Fuse by Scott Draves. The algorithm is inspired by dissociated-press but works on images, not text.

Another related subject is generative art — art where devices such as computers are used to generate source material (which, as with cut-ups, may then be reinterpreted, modified and otherwise used by the artist). Like cut-ups, it poses interesting philosophical issues of authorship and the creation or invention process. The definitive site for generative art research and free software tools is www.generative.net.

Wikimapia: a community-driven geomapping project

A preview of Microsoft’s project

More…

A concise, no-nonsense guide to getting up and going with Google AdSense

Absolutely anyone can make a penny with AdSense. It’s not hard to make a dime, either. A few dollars are possible. But the big bucks? As Harry J. Misner says, it’s all about making dollars, not cents — see his explosive new book on strategizing, The Best Damn GOOGLE ADSENSE Book.

You want results? The first thing you have to do is keep up with Google AdSense developments. Do that through the official Adsense blog … and The Unofficial AdSense Blog. You’ll also want to study Eric Giguere’s site, which is loaded with AdSense tips and ideas. There’s also Problogger’s long tips for AdSense.

Does it really work? In 2005, USA Today describes how, for some DIY bloggers and webmasters, Adsense is a total bonanza. Of course, it’s not without work.

Quick, quick intros

There’s a lot to take in, so if you still need the “AdSense 101” introduction, see this short article on how to monetize your blog.

That tells you what it’s all about. When you’re ready to strategize, you need Joel Comm’s guide, The AdSense Code: What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense.

Go to the experts

You have to keep up and one of the best ways to do that is to participate in online forums. Google provides its own help forum for AdSense; go there first. Another good forum where plenty of hte “pros” hang out is the Google AdSense forum at Webmaster World.

When you’re up and going

The most important thing you can do, once the design is done and your site is up and going out of beta, is get more traffic. Here’s 21 tactics to do so. Also take time to study the many articles in this newsletter archive; while one article shows 77 free ways to get traffic, there are a lot many more in these archives.

You can also try to apply Sitepoint’s 12 killer ways to make extra income on the web.

Polaroid film

Also see Alternative Photography’s Polaroid page (image transfers).

Sites like YouTube don’t have an easy download option. But a lot of software and sites have come out to help download You Tube videos as well as video from other, similar sites. This guide to downloading YouTube is a survey of the techniques and methods in current use, although this is not an endorsement or recommendation of any of them. There’s also a compilation of various guides, including how-to videos.

A while back, CNET reviewed some of this software.

Web-based downloaders

With these, you enter the address of a youtube.com video, and you’ll be brought to a new page where you can save and even sometimes convert it.

downloadyoutubevideos.com (warning on all the ads and popups)

Here’s another one… and even Techcrunch had a clean-looking YouTube downloader, but it’s been apparently disabled by YT itself.

vixy.net is an online FLV convertor. Enter the URL and go. Converts to Divx+mp3, MPEG4, and audio only (mp3).

Stand-alone software

These are programs that you run on your computer (outside of a web browser) to download videos.

YouTube Downloader apparently works for Windows.

For Linux (and other unices, not doubt) there’s clive, which is billed as a “video extraction utility for YouTube” and other online video sites.
[homepage] [png screenshot] [debian package]

Peteris Krumins also has a few interesting methods, including one way to download online videos using GAWK and a Perl one-liner. Nice!

Video download tutorials and guides

There’s more info on this topic out there, from discussions to articles like
Chris Pirillo’s “How to Download You Tube Videos.”

Finally, you can watch videos to tell you how. Instructables has a video tutorial, and you can see many more out there including some on the youtubes themselves: 1, 2, 3, 4.

For further reference

Need more? Here’s hundreds.

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

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.)

Online writing of fictitious characters appearing in the guise of Web sites, Usenet and mailing-list authors, online avatars, and other virtual “personalities.” Also called Net Fiction.

A lot of younger netusers don’t even read fiction anymore; instead, they follow blogs because “the real world’s more interesting than made-up stories.” In other words they’ve never cultivated the ability to hold themselves through a prose narrative and have no ability to stay down inside the world of a work of prose art — but they could read the web fictions of artificial bloggers, avatars and other fictitious, manufactured “personalities.”

Pre-Web online netfictions

Any accounts from early usenet or BBSing?

The early Web and “Way New Journalism” era

There were several netfiction projects and popular online “characters” that existed before the peak of blogging.

alt.personalities

alt.personalities was the title for a collection of online characters and fictions active in the mid-1990s. The characters appeared in netnews threads, gopher files, early blogs, web sites, and even hardcopy chapbooks.

Walter Miller

Little is left of this Pathfinder-era character, who was quite possibly the first “electronic hillbilly.” There’s the original Geocities page: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Prairie/9179/walter.htm. At the turn of the millennium this was supposedly updated to www.waltermillerhomepage.com, but — like most sites from these “characters” of the 90s — it’s gone.

Walter’s mentioned in Levi Asher’s 2009 online memoir of the 90s Web era, and he’s also included in Asher’s 1997 hardcopy anthology, Coffeehouse: Writings from the Web.

Web-fictions in the 21st century

The age of blogging and other online messaging (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) makes net-fiction easy. There’s probably some out there.

Gary Benchley

Gary Benchley is the name of Paul Ford’s fake character, who turned up with a series of letters in The Morning News beginning in the autumn of 2003, and eventually turned into the lead protagonist of an eponymous novel, Gary Benchly, Rock Star. (Ford had previously experiemented with fictitious online web-characters on his Ftrain.com site.)

Related pranks, forgeries and fakes

Not all of what would be web-fictions are done with a literary intention. Several elaborate fake-jobs have been perpetrated. There’s probably a lot of that out there now.

BAD

Apeared in MIT Press. Instead of fictitious characters, this “prank” impersonated Timothy Druckery, Mark Amerika and others. [archive]

“Art prank” in Vice Magazine

This disappeared from the net but a reference exists in archive, sans images. (Vice Sept 1999?) (References original article)

Paul Maliszewski’s “Faking”

Paul Maliszewski began online “faking” in this period, but he apparently did not have a literary motive. An article called “I, Faker” (The Baffler #11, 1998) publicly revealed his work. [archive]

The Baffler also printed a directory of the “fakes,” including letters and other public writings by the following characters:

• Gary Pike
• Carl S. Grimm
• Pavel R. Liberman
• T. Michael Bodine
• Noah Warren-Mann
• Irv Fuller

[archive]

He then authored a book on the history of (offline) “faking”: Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders [brief interview] [more]

“Confessions of an Ebay Opium Addict”

In 2005, “Peter Thompson” of the Reno News & Review wrote an article entitled “Confessions of an eBay Opium Addict,” detailing his supposed addition with psychedelic drugs (including poppy pods he’d begin to purchase for the cheap on eBay, eventually selling everything to keep up with his addiction. The tagline: “Looking for drugs on the cheap, a writer found poppy pods available on the Web. He also found himself hooked.”).

The article was syndicated and appeared in many newspapers. The piece was a satire of Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism; however, many readers took it for face value when it was posted to AlterNet, and for over two years the comments thread was filled with concerned readers (as well as others who had figured out the prank). [google]

For further reading

The future’s online. The business of authorship is currently in flux between the old and new models. How can authors of fiction publish their work and gain an audience today, in the early 21st century?

The gist of the matter is described in “Online Publishing and Electronic Libraries” by Petri Wessman. (Abstract: “The emergence of the Internet (and other large-area networks) as a new publishing medium has opened up more than one can of worms with regards to traditional publishing. Since anyone who has access to the network can “publish” a document (which is not limited to text) at virtually no cost, the concept of “publishing” must be examined in a new light — as must the concepts “copyright” and “library”, among many others. This document examines the history of online and electronic publishing, some of the issues involved and possible future trends.”)

Web publishing technology

Web sites are more important than [hardcopy] books. Web publishing technology is constantly changing but the essentials remain: how to build a readable site, manage content, get readers, and make it profitable. Right now that last factor is usually though ad revenue, but sales of physical product (or memberships) are other options. The classic, Web 1.0 tome of building database-backed Web sites is by Philip Greenspun, who’d brought us photo.net, one of the first “community” sites on the net, and one of the best of its time. As of February 2009, his book on Web publishing, Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing, can be bought for about 16 cents with a one-click purchase.

Kindle Editions

Amazon’s portable handheld Kindle gives you free cellular Internet access, no matter where you go. For that alone, the new Kindle 2 is a steal. Free Web browsing from anywhere. It’s small. Plus you can read all manner of magazines and books on it, published in special, lower-priced Kindle Editions. Will that be a viable way for authors to have their short stories (and novels) published? Stephen King did well (five-figure downloads in three weeks). Are there publishers doing this now?

Reader-supported online serialization

I’ve thought about this method for a long time. You post the beginning of a work and accept donations from readers to continue publishing the work, portion by portion until done. If it’s a draft you can then get it edited and printed somehow and send all donors a copy of the book.

Sci-fi author Watt Evans has been doing it with success: third effort, circa Nov 2008.

Print-On-Demand

Wil Wheaton tried both POD and a traditional publisher, and now in 2009 he’s happily back with POD.

POD and epublishing (PDF files as “PDF books”) can be profitable. Interview with sci-fi author Rudy Rucker, dated Feb 19th, 2009, on the topic of self-publishing PDF and POD. While all POD outfits use Lightning Source (owned by the Ingram Book Group) for making hardcopy, there’s a big difference between Lulu, iUniverse, and the others. Rucker’s impressions, circa early 2008 (he prefers Lulu, but there are other options).

POD has certainly worked for non-fiction. 37signals have made hundreds of thousands at this.

(Repackaging plays a big part in the revenue formula, e.g. blogs with ads or conferences, as well as for reprints of old or classic works)

Open source books

“All Systems Go: The Newly Emerging Infrastructure to Support Free Books” by Ben Crowe

“Case for Free Books”

“Free is more complicated than you think”: Tim O’Reilly on Scott Adams on making Dilbert free

Online advertising

If you can get traffic to your online fiction, then online advertising is a potential model. With a popular site, an author can become part of a web-advertising network such as Federated Media. But you have to get traffic, and right now it only seems to be a proven method for writers of non-fiction. (Is there anyone online, posting fiction and getting significant traffic?)

For further reading