Rebecca D Reeve's Blog

School shootings in Montreal… cell phone videos appear on YouTube, photos on Flickr, blogs galore on LiveJournal, not to mention VampireFreaks.com

Globe&Mail
All links provided by the mainstream media who are eager to deliver first hand accounts of events. User-created content takes on a new meaning?

I sent the address of this blog out to some of my friends and family, including a journalist working in Guangzhou, China.  This is his response:

What on Earth did you put on your blog?  Declarations of love for the Dalai
Lama?  Your views on Taiwan independence?  The communists have blocked it!!!

Wow.  First-hand experience with the Chinese censors. The journalist says they often block anything with a blog address or name, so given my current fascination with blogs I guess I won’t be making it into his bookmarks any time soon.

I’m beginning to feel like a real Concordia student, contending with issues of censorship and all…  speaking of which….check out the below links to learn more about Concordia’s most recent incident in the world of risk assessment committees, race relations, and alleged censorship.  The timeliness of the story may have influenced the pickup it received from the Guardian. “North of 9/11” will be read tomorrow at the uni co-op bookstore.

http://thelink.concordia.ca/view.php?aid=38622 

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1867994,00.html 

Back to the Chinese censors….the Dali Lama was in Vancouver, B.C. this past Saturday.  Two friends from Victoria went over to see him and were duly inspired.  Apparently there were sound issues that made him a little difficult to hear, and during one of the lulls, 20,000 people in GM Place broke into a spontaneous round of “O’ Canada.” 

Who says Canadians aren’t patriotic?

Patriotism. 9/11. Censorship. Co-op bookstore.  Race relations.  My blog’s never going to make it big in China.  Sigh. 

“The ideal life: doing only things which are indispensable.”

Six pages of Susan Sontag’s journals were published in the NYTimes Magazine this weekend. Even an NYC intellectual had a soft spot for CA:

“In Calif., a stranger is a [potential] friend until he proves otherwise; in NY, a stranger is an enemy until he proves otherwise.”
Admittedly contemptuous:
“The only people who should interest themselves in an art (or several arts) are those who practice it — or have — or aspire to. The whole idea of an “audience” is wrong. The artist’s audience is his peers.”

What does this mean… about writing, blogging, peers, audiences, the blogosphere?

When asked how she felt about discovering 3/4s of the way through something that the writing was mediocre and inferior, she responds with, “I feel good and plow on to the end. I’m discharging the mediocre in myself. (My excremental image of my writing.) It’s there. I want to get rid of it. I can’t negate it by an act of will. (Or can I?) I can only allow it its voice, get it “out.” Then I can do something else.”

I must keep this in mind when writing the thesis. Moving on, so I can do something else.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/magazine/10sontag.html?pagewanted=1

If you’re updating an old resume, prepping for an interview with a tech firm, or a nerd in need of a laugh, check out:

http://www.emptybottle.org/bullshit/

My favorites - incentivize, mashups, folksonomies

It’s been an agonizing decision, whether to blog or not… more difficult than figuring out whether to stay in The City or return to school this fall. After much hemming and hawing, web-hosting consultations etc, I’ve finally created a blog. Le Blog, in honor of my host city and the ever popular Franlish.

The web-hosting consultations brings me to my first topic - Played Out Tech

(1) I was unsure about where to blog, so I had many conversations which turned up the following: Blogger, while easy to use, isn’t attractive bcs it’s just so ‘everywhere’, it’s practically as bad as…. MySpace, which is totally played out and smacks of amateur. While I’d love to support the folks at 6Apart, LiveJournal is for emo kids from 2 yrs ago, Typepad costs $, and Vox looks like it’s for 15 yr old girls. Google blogs and MSN LiveSpaces are so big they don’t even fit on the radar… and so it’s Wordpress for me. They admit they’re an underdog in the blogging space, and I like that.

(2) Lighters at concerts are so 2000. I haven’t been to a ton of concerts in the last few years, so I only first noticed cell phones as the new lighters at concert in the Greek Theater this summer, where there were maybe a hundred or so cell screens in the crowd. So last night at the free CSU Wyclef Jean concert, it was a little surreal to see 1000s of blue screens/keypads waving in time to “No Woman, No Cry.” The next music video hit is going to be filmed on a cell phone, and NOT released on YouTube.