the meaning of blog ( blaugust #2, 8. August, 2026 ) Not too long ago, few months perhaps, I was wondering about an event that happened almost 25 years ago - my first public performance of computer music so to say. It is significant only to me, but also because at the time i was... people would say "out of my comfort zone", but in reality I was a student, surviving one of the biggest cities of the world, soaking in a lot of new influences and hard realities, learning digital artist's tools, and more. In retrospect, I was fortunate to have witnessed some inspirational people and events that shaped my further work. But these days, when I was trying to bring back those memories, exact places and dates, one thing helped me tremendously: an web.archive.org snapshop of my blog from the time. You see, my relationship with web-logging, online journaling, etc, goes back to before the blogger days. It was before the web 2.0, today I know (as I researched it in last few years for #BeYourOwnPlatform project) Darcy DiNucci wrote about Web 2.0 in an article 'Fragmented Future' for Print Magazine back in 1999 (the term was popularized five years later). I was deep into using internet at the time, slowly learning HTML and such, starting my own webserver (thank Ljudmila.org!) and came across this thing called Blogger by Pyra Labs (it was later acquired by Google) and somebody using it at saturn.org (yes, it was Jack Saturn) and the way it was designed influenced me immensely. I got tired of having fights with Macromedia Dreamweaver, learned html, and also learned a bit of PHP, which was a language for my first project: my own blogging engine - 'tsocode' that was running my blog called 'tsotso.org'. Some friends even used it for a while (Adam Zbiejczuk and Potiho for example). My blogging rarely took form of longer articles but were rather smol fragments, sometimes a longer paragraph, but nothing more. Sometimes I cought a glimpse of some kind of my own voice... poetic, slightly hermetic, like glimpses into unknown landscape. I wrote that nicely didn't I? But often I would also get into something pretty close to journaling, a log-book if you like (that's why I never wrote that it's a 'blog' but I rather called it 'logging the life'), and that's where I wrote about events in London which helped me reconstruct this personal history in London in 2002: I saw playing Slub (with Alex McLean) in the public-lavatory-converted-venue called Public Life on an event 'Plug and Play'. I later saw on some public list an invitation to apply, well, reather write down one's name, an open mic type of event, but for 'people doing strange things with electricity' (let me know if you know the reference), and this is how I played my first mess of a Pure Data patch at Public Life. (side note: I didn't know at the time what kind of philosophy was behind that venue, and also the meaning of the opening up events in this way, but I have a feeling there's a strong connection or correlation between implicit attitudes that were present there, and today's 'live coding' and algorave scenes.) My history of blogging (or logging-the-life) is, materially looking, extremely fragmented. I kept changing the sofware and domains: drupal, wordpress, wikiTavi, and more.. I have most of the databases somewhere, and some of the sites are on archive.org, so all the posts can be dug up and reconstructed, but I need time (which I don't have much). And I would like to resurect this history of my publishing on the internet. I hope I can do it on prin.lu with some form of flat file system - ideally in markdown files, so regardless of the software, everything is still there, stored in text files neatly organized in folders. This all makes a lot of sense in light of smolweb and IndieWeb (revolution? or at least micromovement). The desire is there, as we move away from enshittified platforms, recognising the life-sucking machinery behind the BigTech and all its minions all powered by greed and extractive capitalism that makes our planet burn. Many threads lead from here, but let this be enough for today. links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyra_Labs https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/working-within-the-dot-com-world-some-creative-3238728.php https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darcy_DiNucci https://web.archive.org/web/20021017014440/http://tsotso.org/logarch.php?m=200105 images Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. email me · subscribe · support