Comments on: transquoting goes live

By: Janet Collins

Janet Collins — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 19:26:42 +0000

Another liberal book banned by the Bush Administration-
CRIMES OF THE RIGHT, the new explosive tell-all book by the best-selling author HOPE NEWMAN was nearly prohibited by the Administration. The author had to go to court to release it. The book unravels the truth behind the CIA, the BUSH/CHENEY, and Tony Blair cover ups. I think we should all buy a copy of the CRIMES OF THE RIGHT. This will send a message that they can rig our votes, but they can't silence us. CRIMES OF THE RIGHT, hard cover ISBN is: 0595665748. I bought my copy at barnesandnobel.com. You can also find it at amazon.com. Please help spread the word.

By: Rick Bradley

Rick Bradley — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 22:35:58 +0000

There's been a lot of work on what I suppose one would call generative poetry. Horn tooting, but a friend and I made an installation piece which does a bunch of noisemaking but includes a poetry generator (the bulk of the guts of the "blackbox" is a dot matrix printer which spits out the poetry). The principle behind the poetry generator is that it assembles fragments of text from Project Gutenberg.

That piece is here: http://www.rickbradley.com/blackbox/

I've also got an AIM version of this which you can find online sometimes with username "kempleton poet". The downside to the AIM version is that you lose all the cool spacing/formatting, and it's only a responsive writer (where the blackbox generates poems completely at random, the AIM version is a chatter -- it responds to what you say).

I'm far from the only one doing such things.

If anybody wants a tarball of the code (either version) I can post it to my website.

By: lukethelibrarian

lukethelibrarian — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 02:18:08 +0000

I'm fascinated with the idea of essentially "sampling" written works to create literary "mashups" -- "remixes" that re-appropriate and recombine "found words" into new creations. The other day I came across a remarkable paper by Raphael Rubenstein that was published in American Poetry Review five years ago, called "Gathered, Not Made: A Brief History of Appropriative Writing" that actually traces a long and rich history of such creations in literature. Nelson's brainchild could bring a whole new kind of flow and dialogue to that form of artistry.

By: The Lonewacko Blog

The Lonewacko Blog — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 01:42:18 +0000

The web certainly has been tremendously successful. It's also been a tremendously successful make-work program for script kiddies and similar others who've managed to make a lot of money and waste a lot of time working around the core design deficiencies of the web. See The "Semantic Web" could have happened last decade.

I took a brief look at the underlying technology and I didn't fully understand what the goal is or how this is supposed to work.

However, I'd strongly advise ditching python. Instead, write it using Java when possible and C++ when necessary. And, think in terms of objects. Push the text crap down to the communications layer and make sure as few people as possible need to see them.

By: William Loughborough

William Loughborough — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 23:01:04 +0000

Ted says:
"We came before the Web, and we mean to fix it."

It ain't really all that broke. One problem with being a cutting-edge visionary is that you are constantly presenting vapourware that feeds on its own press releases instead of providing something that changes the world rather than just talks about changing the world.

Doug Engelbart ground out a generation of innovators who actually got stuff done, Ted is a great inspiration but it took Tim to make something that, however maligned, actually works.

Love.