Dr. Dobb's Journal November 2006
For years, I maintained a blog at "Swaine's World" (www.swaine.com), my personal web site. I posted tech news more or less daily and put my spin on it and often threw in political commentary and personal details and all the silly things people put in blogs. But "Swaine's World" was primarily a research tool for me. Posting regularly to the blog forced me to read and analyze tech news every day.
But time and tech moved on, and as I got news from more diverse sources, including RSS feeds, and as I started posting to the Dr. Dobb's blog, the "Swaine's World" blog became less useful to me. In fact, it seemed of less and less value to anybody for me to be adding to the number of news aggregators. So "Swaine's World" languished for over a year.
But I missed the site and kept looking for something to do with it that made sense today. One clue kept nagging at me, but I wasn't sure, until now, that I was willing to follow it up.
But DDJ readers are smart and educated and more knowledgeable than me about things that I care about, and have experience in open-source collaboration, so why not hack a path into the uncharted territory of participatory writing?
This I have done. My old domain of www.swaine.com now points to a Wiki where I plan to host various experiments in participatory creative writing. Consider this your invitation to join in. Edit what you find there or post new stuff. There are no rules. Not yet, anyway.
My hope is that these experiments will in some way enrich what I do here in print, but I'm not prejudging what form that enriching might take. I fully expect most of the experiments to go exactly nowhere.
Speaking of projects destined to go nowhere...
One kind of creative writing that, for some reason, is popular among technically minded people is song parodies. So I thought I'd initiate a song parody project here and continue it on the Wiki in collaboration with anyone who cares to join in. The theme is genericide.
Inspired by Apple's aggressive attempt to protect the term "pod" and O'Reilly's notion that only it could have a "Web 2.0" conference, I started drafting the following bit of parody verse on the genericization of trademarks. I immediately thought of what seemed to me the ideal song to use as the ground for this bit of playfulness: Paul Simon's "A Simple Desultory Philippic." It's already a celebration of genericization, since it genericizes, or eponymizes, a lot of people's names. You remember:
"I've been Norman Mailered, Maxwell Taylored..."
As you can see, my version is not quite finished. That's where you come in.
You can find Paul Simon's lyrics online easily and if you Wikipedia "genericide" you'll find lots of trademarks that are now or could soon become genericized. Help me finish the song.
Note: I quickly abandoned any attempt to maintain Simon's rhymin', but I would like to follow his meter precisely if possible. I have bent it repeatedly in this draft, though, since Simon's names are often pairs of trochees, an accented syllable followed by an unaccented one (like Norman Mailer) and I found a lot of candidate words that were one unaccented syllable short of that pattern (like plexiglassed or slashdotted) and only a few that fit the double-trochee model (like powerpointed).
That's one problem. There are many others. By the time you see this, the version on the Wiki may be somewhat improved, but here's the first very rough draft:
A Sample Participatory Philippic
I been slashdotted, I been ipodded,
I been ethernetted, I been powerpointed,
I been photoshopped and tivo'd till I'm blind.
I been sheetrocked and nearly glocked,
Yadda yadda cause I'm something,
That's the something something never mind.
[I said it was rough.]
I been cellophaned and scotchgarded,
I been hi-lited and wite-outed,
Well I faxed all my rolodex could hold.
So I got tricky and built a wiki,
But all my hmm-hmm won't buy me whatsit,
So I drink the kool-aid every day.
I knew a man, bla bla bla,
And this verse is
Almost totally unwritten.
But its alright, ma,
Everybody must get...
Steved.
I been lorem ispum, dolor sit amet,
Consectetur won't you please come home?
I been xeroxed, touchtoned, spammed, and googled,
Been muzakked and hackysacked,
And I just discovered somebody's copped my ringtone...
Help!
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mike@swaine.com