December 5, 2004

• NEWS and NOTES:

  
  

  Rainy days. I didn't go into work. I stayed home, in my heated media room, working the puter, transcribing some poetry from 1971, and answering email and visiting blogs. I also joined another "friendship group" on Yahoo. I feel even though I disdain those types of groups, which have a thousand members and LOTS of posts, some meaningful, most meaningless, at least to me, since it is the Holiday Season and I'm a bit depressive at times, I'll log on, post a few poems, and perhaps make a few new friends. Which leads me, WhenWordsCollidewise, into a recourse on internet people and email.

  
  

  When I got "online" in 1998, a year before I even created "the website: AllThingsMike", I began to get involved with "internet people" through a "community" which doesn't exist anymore called "The Globe". Before the portals like Yahoo, Google, and MSN copied AOL's model of "community" there were standalone websites which offered "community services" including posting messages, personal ads, and rudimentary website construction. This was way before broadband, and only a few people knew how to upload and post pictures. The main form of communication was through email.

  
  

  I became a "man of letters", something to which I had always aspired. I wrote long involved emails to my "correspondents", some of whom still exist, but most of whom have "disappeared" from cyberspace long ago. I hooked up with old girlfriends and classmates, had more "email correspondence" with my siblings than I had contact with them in the "real world" and actually developed some rather nice "relationships" some of which graduated to phone and human contact.

  
  

  When the first virus attacked my 1998 computer, I erased my complete email "history" including all these flowery emails I wrote to people, and their answers, which I had meticulously entered into "personal folders". At one point I had over 250 correspondents listed in my eamail client. Starting over again after the virus, I again began compiling lists of correspondents interested in poetry, photography, or movies, or ex classmates and girlfriends. Then there were the two lovesearches, which garnered even more email correspondents. I began creating websites with specific themes relating to these email lists after beginning AllThingsMike in 99. Virtual Pantherama was a rather ambitious undertaking in which I tried to connect the alumni of my old high school, and assign "virtual yearbooks" for which people could post pictures, reminiscences, whatever. Now all these kinds of activities can be done through Yahoo Groups or these blog programs like Xanga. I don't write a lot of code, just some simple HTML, so the early sites and email strings seem to be from a time long gone, and a lot of those 250 correspondents have simply disappeared.

  
  

  I had one correspondent with a website as large as mine, and first her email address disappeared, and then the complete website. I made a tenuous connection with an old schoolmate who is now a respected published writer. My email address and website stay the same, but she disappeared as well. When I tried to get back in touch by going through her "official website" as the writer. (Her pseudonymn is Tamara Thorne, and she writes horror novels in the V.C. Andrews mode, although she isn't as famous.) Her husband was one of my best friends in High Skool, and she was one of my "readers" to whom my poetry volumes and short stories were passed around. She was also on my staff of the high school newspaper. She disappeared as far as connection with her goes now, and she's the one who initiated the connection in the first place.

  
  

  You see, I keep my "real name" so anyone who might want to get ahold of me from the "real world" can just google my name, and any number of websites I created come up with links. There are even instances of my poetry being found on other's websites, even those who have never gotten in touch with me to tell me they are doing this. As long as my name is used, and hopefully a link back to AllThingsMike, I don't care.

  
  

  Well, those are some observations from this afternoon. I even kept my Yahoo Messenger, the infamous "IM Thingy" turned on in case one of my older or newer correspondents wanted to "call me" since I was online all day, but I didn't get any "calls". I don't really like rainy days, because I like to drive around with the top down on the convertible. When it rains, it pours inside the car! Oh, Well.

  
  

  EDIT: 5:01pm. I'm noticing a strange thing happening. I use the "comments" feature to find blogs on which people have posted comments to me, or the "my comments" feature to find  other's blogs on which I have posted comments. In this way, I don't need to "subscribe" to millions and millions of blogs. I only subscribe to those blogs I regularly read, and to those with whose members I seem to regularly correspond. Lately, I seem to find that a lot of folks who have been online with their blogs for a long time, have decided to "disable" the archive section, so only the past five posts show. I don't know if this is a common practice now, but part of the specialness of these blogs, or journals, is the fact that I don't (or didn't before this happened) think that I had to constantly go from blog to blog at any given time, but could browse back posts on anyone's blog at me liesure. Now I can't do that if somebody "expunges" their posts after a week. On the other hand, my posts, including photos, poems, rants, and collidingwords, are all here, in page after page, since Memorial Day 2004, when I began. What is the use of paying 25 bucks a year if nobody can read what I wrote? All my blogger blogs still exist, and there are links from AllthingsMike and the various offshoot websites to the "journal" or "diary" sites, as I called them. I still have the "original blog" online, which is my ElectricPoetry Diary, from 2000, created with Homestead's software.  Boy, I've spent entirely too much time on the computer today, but on rainy days as a kid I and my siblings would gather round the dinner table all day with paints and pencils creating art. My website is my "electronic expereiment in art" after all.

  • 7:49 pm
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