ebogjonson.com: ebog housekeeping Archives

"The television screen has become the retina of the mind's eye. For that reason, I refuse to appear on television, except on television. O'Blivion is not the name I was born with.

It's my television name. Soon, all of us will have special names, names designed to cause the cathode-ray tube to resonate." I've been thinking a lot about what to do with this blog, or, more accurately, how to do this blog.

I'm not really getting the amount of value I feel like I should be getting from my current blogging habits, which, as currently constructed, mostly allow me to procrastinate from other stuff near endlessly without a commensurate uptick of posting on here. I also have a gut-level feeling that I want to do less essayistic posting about, say, how John McWhorter's entire politic stems from , and do more impressionistic/imagistic posting of , , , , , , and so on. To make matters worse, I'm going to Kenya for a month and I have been desperately trying to figure out how to document that in a non-trad yet nifty way.

(Snaps? Uploaded video? GPS google mapping?

)
All of which is to say, that while I'm drawn like a moth to certain kinds of , I think that moving forward I'm only going to do certain kinds of blogging in the comment sections of other people's blogs. Doing so is attractive to me on a number of levels, first, of course, being the perverse, -ness of the gesture - "for that reason, I refuse to blog, except in blogs!" - and, second, being the kind of slack doing so might cut for ebogjonson.com, hopefully allowing it drift/settle into some other configuration.

That new class of "comment post" is going to be linked to from here, but will all come with some as-yet-to-be-determined and recurring formal device, and will also be cross-posed to a new MT category - ebog o'blivion - for the purposes of neat architecture and taxonomy.
The above rule, will, of course, be immediately broken. For one, there are going to be topics that no one has written about first, and there will also be things that won't fit into a comment or a photoshop gag.

(That review of that I keep needing to write, for example.) Additionally, I intend to still link to stuff via the del.icio.

us box on , or, maybe, I'll implement the instead. (Either way, those of you reading this via feed should to at very least make sure you get those del.icio.

us links in your reader.)
And that's pretty much that. Let's see how it goes, shall we?

Just wanted to thank all the folks who linked to the process flow, especially (in no particular order):
, , , , the ladies at , , , , , , , and anyone else sent me some eyeballs!
I created the chart in response to the Jane Hamsher thing, but reading the blogs of folks who linked back to it reconfirmed to me how unsettled the problem of race remains in our politics. If engaged, otherwise thoughtful white progressives like Hamsher can't wrap their heads around basic racial etiquette, it seems hard to imagine that less thoughtful, less engaged, or generally hostile white folks will ever grok to it.

I've added a feedburner feed to the site and am testing it out with an eye towards moving all my feeds over to that stream in the next few weeks.
Please update your feed and let me know if you have any issues.
I'll give proper warning if I decide to deep-six the other feed formats.

I just wanted to apologize to anyone whose newsreader is mistaking my ongoing tinkering with posts in the archive section for new updates. I'm working to finish reformatting these archival posts ASAP.
thanks and sorry!

(if you're wondering what I'm doing, I explain .)
So, for TOP SECRET reasons related to a gig I may or may not be in the running for, I'm going to be posting a ton of old articles of mine into the category of the ebog blog. These are portfolio items of limited contemporary interest, so don't feel obligated to read them, although I am (for the obvious reasons) inclined to believe there may be a few items of lasting value.

That's pretty much it re: these reposts, although I do feel strangely compelled to add that the basic reason I've been forced to build this archeological exhibit is that AOL has completely ethered and disappeared the entire Africana.com archive. None of the links to original Africana.

com content (as opposed to Encyclopedia Africana entries) in google or anywhere else work anymore, meaning that AOL effectively disappeared the work of literally hundreds of black writers from the Internets. (Lets not even get into the disappearing of thousands of black things those writers wrote about that were never covered anywhere else.) Sure, there is google cache and , which is where I am pulling a lot of this stuff from.

But a "fuck you" remains a "fuck you" in my mind even when there are ways for the clever among you to get around it.
Having managed Africana.com and built AOL Black Voices, I can tell you with some authority that this is an actual fuck you.

There is no compelling technological, legal or copyright reason for AOL to have evaporated the archive so completely, making the act basically one of spite, that and disregard for the community of readers and writers associated with Africana. At some point or another, someone likely told the new AOL Black Voices staff that they had to get all the articles into some masterstroke AOL content management system, and no one on the new team felt inclined to do the heavy lifting to preserve the archive. Definitely their call and I'm really not sweating it.

I'm just making sure I remember who it was that did what to who.
The view from a table in front of the Bishop coffee shop.
Let me indulge in some random geekery: My mobile photo blogging solution has been to take low-res snaps with my Treo 600, which I then "share" via Sprint's picture mail service.

I don't particularly like the results, but I'm locked into my provider (mostly by inertia) and disinclined to upgrade my phone. (Sprint doesn't offer the Treo 700w yet in my area and the camera on the 650 doesn't seem like a meaningful of an improvement.)
The workaround displayed above involves taking a better res snap with my Nikon (at 1024; more pixels take forever to upload), swapping SD cards between cam and Treo, mailing snap to Flickr, which automatically blogs and ta da.

The next gambit I intend to try will involve uploading snaps directly to my server from the Treo. (Using movable type? Is that even possible?

) Stay tuned for further updates in random wonkery...

update: the browser I'm using on the Treo screws up the MT publishing interface. any suggestions?
So I just deleted my first set of comments.

I don't mean comment-spam, but genuine response comments that said things I didn't like. The comments were in some of the Katrina posts and they were from a single right wing moron who was intent upon using my bandwidth to spew at me and mine.
I deleted some posts and also left some of the idiot's comments up, triaging on the logic that while I can eliminate hate speech in good faith, I should let bad ideas fend for themselves.

I don't see a point in subsidizing (even at micro-cost) right wing racism, but I also don't want to sanitize anything.
So basically, what I'm saying is that I'll be arbitraily deleting comments at my discretion. I don't want that to be a disincentive to posting, but thems are the rules of the house.

Unless you intend to curse me out or wax racist you shouldn't have much to worry about. Down the line, I may decide to keep all comments but my pool is still to small and the chemical mix is still too new to let anyone piss in it.
As Drudge says: Evolving.

...

A - I'm a compulsive tinkerer. Nothing ever feels right or finished to me, especially after it's supoosed to have been right or finished. Of course, like most things, my tinkering runs hot then gets a little cold.

(Picture candle-wax being shaped and sculpted.)
B - I have a kind of editorial color-blindness, by which I mean I don't fully "see" my own writing unless it's been made external to me via some form of actual and public publishing. I can make all the print-outs in the world, hit preview till my fingers bleed and I will still miss all kinds of writing and thinking problems.

Until a reader actually exists who is truly external to me I have a hard time imagining him or her, making me a fairly lousy self-editor and potentially a worse marketer. Get me on the newstand or on the public server, though, and I am about three times smarter than I was before the circuit closed.
(In so much as I can explain these behaviors, I think it has to do with the fact that shame is likely the strongest interactive force in my personal grand unification theory, meaning that unless I am at risk of some kind of public exposure I'm kind of lazy.

But that's for another post.)
The above confessions are obviously a song sung in praise of editors, and I thank the Holy Virgin for them every waking moment of my miserable writerly life. Unfortuantely (and you know where this is going), ebogjonson.

com has no editor except for me and (by extension) those of you kind enough to write in and tell me exactly what the fuck it is I'm doing wrong.
This is a problem.
One way that I've been dealing with this problem is to spend a few minutes every day changing already existing posts.

Besides presenting a practical problem for the reader (sorry, that thing I asked you to read last week? That was the wrong thing. You should have read this thing.

) this practice makes me feel a little ethically queasy. While I have zero issues with making my language stronger from here until kingdom come, I do feel honor bound to cop to factual errors as well as changes that have been motivated by the observations/ripostes of readers and colleagues.
I've looked around at blogs I like, but haven't found a solution or convention that satisfies me.

Since I'm fairly new at this I know I'm probably missing an obvious and already extant motherlode of guidelines on this question and I eagerly await the world's instruction.
In the interim, though, I thought I'd cobble together the following temporary/evolving set of guidelines to govern my editing and revising behavior and make them public:
1 - Any time I update a post after publish I'll flag it in the title with the date of the update. I don't intend to adopt finer resolution on the flag than date because I don't envision being able to return to posts on a shorter cycle.

(But I'll keep an eye on my habits and adjust the convention with a timestamp if needed.)
2 - Any factual error will be left in the posting but get a strike-through, followed by the correct information and an [EDITOR'S NOTE: XXXX] explaining the error if needed and crediting dude that brought it to my attention.
3 - Simple word changes, grammar fixes, point modulations, nuances added/deleted and WILL NOT produce any visible version tracking unless I've substantively changed the meaning of the posting.

My thinking on this is mostly mercenary. I believe that most people will likely get to these postings via search and referral links, meaning one will probably encounter a post after I've stopped tinkering with it. Burdening everyone with version tracking most useful to a minority of early risers (and true fans :( !

) strikes me as a kind of false piety so I'm not going to bother. However, if I add/delete whole paragraphs I'll flag them as added and change the title. Also, if some aspect of the piece evolves in response to the news cycle I will flag that at the bottom of the posting.

[UPDATED: The above is obviously a sloppy stop-gap and is likely to evolve both in practice and presentation.)
[UPDATED: Uh, all this is going in effect from 8.9.

05 9:26 PM EST on, as I did some stuff I said I wouldn't do but I did it yesterday. Note that the current time - 9:26 PM EST - is about an hour and a half after the timestamp on the posting.]
4 - Exchanges with commentors will always go in the comments.

I think it's kind of talking down to people to revise the source post in response to something written in the comments.
5 - This is just a thought, but I might flag the first versions of a posting with "RAW" or "DEVELOPING" in the title, meaning I am actually online and making updates. I may not do this at all, but if I do, you'll know it.

6 - I swear to tell the truth, the whole and whatever the third part of that saying is, so help me BLOG!
That's it for now.
hey there, my name is Gary.

Some things to know about me:
I grew up in Queens, NYC and just moved to Downtown LA.
My family comes from Haiti.
I am a huge fan of DDR, TiVo, GTA and Battlestar Galactica.

For the last seven or so years I've been preoccupied with building, editing, and managing websites for African Americans and their various corporate admirers, community/programming portals like , and .
For the seven or so years previous to the above web gigs I mostly bounced around Fort Greene, Brooklyn, dating various biracial women and writing film reviews for the , and other publications.
These days, I am mostly keeping to myself, my lady and my cat.

This site you've found is my virtual sandbox, a place where I intend to sit for a spell and play with some of the ideas and topics that have been my main concern over the years. These include (but aren't limited to) race, tech, Haiti, politics, the B.O.

G., media, science-fiction, work, afrofuturism, movies, videogames, "fitting in," music, urban culture and so on. Like all good sandboxes, the kids here are going to come in a range of ages and stages but no one is going to get forced to play nice with the freaks or outliers - my , for example, or of people and places I love, or the occasional stab at a short story.

I have a firm (albeit cliched) belief that that which doesn't kill freaks and outliers only makes them stronger.
There was a minute or two where I thought that ebogjonson.com should be a professional sort of sandbox, well-mannered and ready for its talking-head mid-shot.

A measured and antiseptic e-shingle (ideally work generating) that would be reflective of my most recent, managerial incarnation. "Fuck it," is all I can really say about all that that at this point. If I wanted to keep bullshitting you or (more importantly) myself I'd have stayed in the treacherous embrace of gainful employ.

Seven years and seven years and...

? Whatever's next gets documented here. All I can say for sure about it is that my score is turning over.

Does the screen change, I wonder? Do I get more lives or just more bosses?