Blog pause

A couple of years ago, I went to an international teachers conference in Brighton and attended quite a few sessions on blogging. 'Blogs are like sharks,' announced a Turkish presenter in one of these sessions, 'they have to keep moving, otherwise they die.' As a rule of thumb for the social Internet, it was a hard one to disagree with, and can be just as applicable in considering social media profiles, forums, or anywhere else online that requires a virtual gathering of people in a particular space. Berners-Lee's marked up world wide web might have enabled a Library of Alexandria for all to be built and filled with crowd-sourced content, but until the people started using that library and then later discovered that the space could be used for an awful lot more than just reading information, that library would have served limited function.

When the blog as a medium was younger and more novel than it is today, I eagerly embraced the opportunities that it presented and, like many others, enthusiastically set about blogging. 'Postings From An Edge' was started in May 2006 in a suburban Tokyo apartment and is therefore coming up to its seventh birthday. In that time, I've seen blogging become a fairly mainstream part of the online experience as well as witnessing a waning in energies expended on the form, plenty of worthy blogs come and go, and certain writers I admired (such as Lawrence Lessig or Clay Shirky) either retiring their blogging or limiting their output to very intermittent.

Throughout this time, I've tried hard to maintain my own blog and keep it alive - whether through adding features that encouraged interaction and made it easier for communities to gather, or simply making sure that I posted some form of content at least once a month (if not more often). I'd kept a private paper diary on and off from the age of 14, so the discipline of blogging wasn't too much of a jump. The nature of the content changed though, as I tempered what I wrote about in the knowledge that there was a possible audience out there (however limited my readership might be) and the form itself allowed for featuring forms of media not possible in a traditional paper diary. The ability to complement thoughts and observations with audio or even video and then have an actual readership on top was a new paradigm of personal expression at the time. This was of course before the brevity of the tweet and its imitators (Facebook status updates anyone?) became such common currency in networked public discourse.

I recently completed a project that involved repurposing my Great Uncle's handed-down World War Two diaries and publishing them in audio form to a web server, all accessible through a Flash-based interface. As I was narrating the audio files as well as constructing the framework, I felt like I got to know him pretty well - better than I ever had done when I was a child that was sent WH Smith tokens every birthday and Christmas from this obscure old man living somewhere in London (the biggest inhabited place I could then imagine). By immersing myself in his world as captured through his diaries, I also got to know a side of the man that had remained hidden from his relatives whilst still alive - a perhaps darker and more troubled, but certainly more complex man than the one portrayed in his relatives' memories of him. Admittedly, he was writing as Europe was tearing itself apart and London was enduring The Blitz, but these texts nevertheless brought home the common use of paper diaries (for some people anyway) as a place for the psyche's depths and darkest moments to go, as well as a repository for the mundanities of everyday life.

My own paper diary covered the odd few dark moments over the years, as well as more intimate thoughts that were deemed worth preserving, but not publishing until after death. My own blog, by contrast, mostly contained snapshotted moments from my travels around Japan and elsewhere, communications about projects that I was involved in, or nuggets of interest from around the Web, captured and shared on my own little corner of it. While the blog was in many ways a continuation of my writing just in a different medium, it was also quite a different form with a more distinct awareness of audience.

As the Masters degree that I've been taking reaches its apex along with other changes in family life, 2013 is going to turn out to be another one of those paradigmatic shift years where priorities get reassessed and things get shuffled around. Preamble over, I am hereby announcing a hiatus for this blog - possibly until September, but likely until the end of the year. The paper diary seems to have gone into a state of suspension several years ago already, and it's hard to say whether that one will indeed get revived. It is now also time to press pause on the blog to allow me to get through this year and its multiple competing demands with fewer of the other commitments that I've been trying to sustain going on at the same time.

I will still have some level of online publishing activity going on this year, in the form of tweets and Thursday Night Show cloudcasts, but need a little time out from everything else for a while.

Looking forward to the return already and many thanks to those that have taken part in 'Posting From An Edge' over the past seven years and contributed to the slight sense of community around here.

Request for comments: 10 Laws on using the Internet for CDP

I usually spend so much time agonising over getting a blog post just right, with the optimum degree of formatting, linkage, etc. Sometimes though, you have to just type something and post it to get it out there.

I've been attending the 2012 IATEFL conference today, in parts (and via Twitter only). There's a couple of reasons - one, it was such a great experience last year when I actually attended that I couldn't resist going back again for more this year, and two, I'm writing a paper this term on the use of Twitter at conferences (more about that later). There's a pressing need to re-engage in ways that I might otherwise have been focused other things.

(still can't resist a rambling pre-amble as part of a blog post written on the fly!)

Anyway, the reason for getting this post together quickly is to make a request for comments on a topic. Whilst following the tweets for one of the sessions (on the #ELTchat hashtag), I ended up in a separate conversation with Karenne Sylvester about guest posting on each others blogs. She's invited me to guest post on her blog on the topic of '10 Laws of the Internet' from a CPD (professional development) perspective. This came about from an observation that the #ELTchat hashtag convesations also get spammed by companies keen to muscle in on a conversation.

I proposed an observation that 'where there's a will, spam will always find a way'. To extrapolate slightly on this, I'll expand it to 'Any new communications channel on the Internet will eventually become polluted by spam'.

I will not be the first person to state this, but I'll take it as Pates's Law if no-one else steps up to claim it!

The request: to help me out with my guest post, I'm inviting people to submit their own 'Laws of the Net' in the comments section here. I'll then bring it all together and take it over to Karenne's blog.

There are already other well-known 'internet laws', but I'm talking specifically about using the Net in a professional capacity. Can you help me make it as far as 10? If you come up with your own law, please christen it with your name too!

Five Years...what a surprise

'I took Five' by N-ino (via Flickr)

Today marks the fifth birthday of 'Postings From An Edge', so I would like to wish my blog a happy birthday! It's been quite an achievement to have kept it going for a full five years.

Building up to this anniversary, I've been making a number of changes to the blog, which regular readers may have already noticed. These have included finally adding a proper header, swapping the position of the sidebar and generally cleaning things up there, issuing everything under a Creative Commons licence, getting the blog listed in a series of directories, and writing a stronger 'About' page. Quite pleased with the new social media buttons in the sidebar too.

I still need to put in some more work in getting the blogroll more up-to-date, to better reflect where I spend more of my time on the internet and the other blogs with which I wish to interact. What 'Postings' is still missing, however, is you. 

Do please drop by and say hello - I've even cleared you a space...

Changed terms of use

I've got some stuff coming up here soon on using Creative Commons licenses, so thought that I'd put money were mouth is and open up the content of this blog for licensing. I'm not really sure how much blog content gets used out on the wilds of the open Web, but there's a chance of finding out with this little experiment. My pictures at Flickr are already CC-licensed, so I can now add this blog to them as repurposable content.

Have gone for the least restrictive licence, a simple Attribution one. If you want to use any content from this blog, in part, in full or for remixing, please attribute it to Dom Pates and link back to http://www.patesonline.net - full terms available at the bottom of the site.

More on Creative Commons coming soon...

Jabberwocky spam

One thing that this blog mostly lacks is a community that buzzes around it.

I know, I know, in order to achieve that I need to have a far more proactive approach to running it. I should be doing things like engaging on other online spaces to encourage visitor traffic this way. I should be 'marketing' this blog a lot more, in order to make people more aware of it. I should be more encouraging of participation from my seemingly wide-ranging readership (according to my stats). More than anything, I should be writing stuff more often. There's probably a whole host more things I could also do in order to 'build that buzz' (answers in comments section, if you please).

I have however been getting an inordinate amount of 'comment spam' in recent months. That could mean that the blog has reached a certain level of penetration to be able to attract the undesirable visits as well as the desirable ones. Alternatively, it could just as easily mean that little on the internet is safe from the waves of junk and filth that wash over the Web like so much digital detritus.

Typically, I delete swathes of this spam from time to time (without ever publishing it). Today, however, is a rare occasion that I've decided to publish one such comment due to the sheer poetry contained within the nonsense verse. I can't for the life of me make out why the body text would entice somebody to click on the contained link, which seems to be for some kind of diet pill, but at a glance it could be Dylan meets Lewis Carroll in its random nonsense.

Here in full effect:

Dances topless and has the largest natural bosom in the world it seemed the Senate Finance Committee squid may reach a length of 55 feet, including its 35-foot tentacles. Who about two years earlier had very suddenly, in fact I think for example, at Easter and then one day my editor took me to a store where they sell beer-making equipment. Have developed a new wrinkle in mortgages your sailing experience, you should take the routine marine precaution and, before long, the president's tax-reform plan had been modified so much that its only actual legal effect, had it been enacted, would have been to declare July as Chalk Appreciation Month. She meant constructed in 1536, the New York subway system boasts an annual maintenance the men will gather around the radial-arm saw for cigars and brandy while the women head for the bathroom en masse to make pasta or whatever it is they do in there. Ever since I learned most people agree on what is funny, and most i have never met a woman, no matter how attractive, who wasn't convinced, deep down inside, that she was a real woofer. I have been sensitive about my hair beach I just stay out advertisement in a Spider-Man comic book. That in one beer commercial, I think this is for? And.

Anyone else make any sense of it?!


'Spam' van by Kent K. Barnes / kentkb, issued under Creative Commons licence

Happy birthday 'Postings From An Edge'!

This blog is now four years old. There's much planned before it reaches its fifth birthday, including a redesign of the template, reworking of the additional pages and a greater attempt at SEO-ing it and interacting more with my readership (or trying to encourage it anyway).

I'd write more than just a couple of short paragraphs and reflect on things a little better, but I have an exam coming up in a couple of days. This doesn't leave me with an awful lot of extra headspace.

Fingers crossed I pass first time and can move on with the rest of my life! Until then, watch this space...

Tentative steps towards more regularity

Inspired partly by some recent comments from a reader, I've decided to try and post on this blog a little more regularly than I do. It had got to a point where I pretty much only do if I feel I've got something valuable to say, something interesting to share or something I want to promote. This has meant that for the actual writing (rather than just popping up another video), it takes ages to actually get anything said. I spend hours perched in ponderment in front of a little edit window trying to conjure up pearls that are worthy of distribution, but blogs aren't always about that and posts don't always have to be crammed full of pictures or other such design features.

My wife, who blogs in Japanese, posts almost daily. This means that she's built up quite a community around the online musings that make up her digital output. I on the other hand spend far too much time fretting over every word that goes into one of these posts that I end up either writing nothing at all or becoming too distracted by whatever other goodies the Web lures me with. Sometimes, just a few paragraphs of text are enough to get a flavour of where things are at!

Commenting elsewhere is also considered to be a good way of drawing the like-minded towards your own works and I've broken out a little more on that tonight too. To my jaded surprise, in an interview with The Guardian and in response to the rise of the Liberal Democrats on Britain's political stage, David Miliband had the temerity to suggest that Labour had been 'punished enough' over Iraq. I almost never comment on The Guardian's site despite reading it daily, but this time I felt compelled to add my own contribution to the conversation (as Globalism). As if ignoring the views of millions of people against the invasion, the millions more turned into refugees as a result of it, and the hundreds of thousands killed in the name of securing some oil fields is going to be easily forgotten!

Brighton: born ('71), lived ('92-'03), married ('08), returned ('09)

I'm in a short period of transition at the moment. It's a positive one and in the right direction (after being in limbo for too long), but it means I'm only with very intermittent internet access for now.

Having the tap turned off for a few weeks certainly makes me realise how much of my life I usually spend online. It's actually quite nice in a way. The birds seem to sing a little more brightly and I've been interacting with people that live much more of their lives offline. I'm still rather itching to get back on though.

The first year back in the UK was spent in Scarborough, on the North East coast of England. It's a place that is not entirely without its charms, but after the thrills of five years in Tokyo, was a significant comedown. Browse through the pictures below to get a bit of a feel for the place:

After six years away from my birthplace and the town where I also spent my twenties, I have now returned to Brighton, with wife in tow. We're about to get ourselves set up a little more solidly. It's going to make a radical difference to being stuck out on a limb in Yorkshire or rushing headlong through the madness of the metropolis, and is suiting us both very well so far already. I hope to get a bit more involved with Brighton's netheads too, but all in good time.

In a fortuitous piece of timing, we've arrived in town bang in the middle of the Brighton Festival too, giving a whole stack of things to see and do. For non-British readers of this, the pictures below will give you an idea of this fair English seaside city I am now calling home again.

I won't write too much now as this is just a snatched moment online amidst all the mass of sorting out of a new life. When the dust has slightly settled, I'm hoping that this blog will gain a new lease of life. Until then, I offer a final group of pictures from the last place that I called home before returning here - the city that marked such a major turning point in my life - Tokyo.

Catch you soon.

Rural and online living

I'm going through a self-imposed moratorium on most creative activity for the time being, while we wait out the transition period of moving from Tokyo to settling somewhere here in the UK (hopefully London). The wedding is over and that was a major operation. The job hunt continues apace, with that dream job hopefully just around the corner to be more than just the cherry on the cake.

Until that next phase is reached, I can't really allow myself to get too into making any new songs, putting together the scraps of video ideas, compiling the book projects I have in mind, or writing many more stories or articles, as any of these would easily distract from the main task in hand. Almost there, almost there.


In the meantime, there's still a notable backlog of content patiently awaiting uploading and other online activity always beckons. As the eagle-eyed among you may have spotted, I've finally managed a little tinkering at the edges of my blogs. While not exactly a relaunch, this one does have some of the more recent Blogger features that I'd just not had time to even think about incorporated into it, and it certainly looks a lot better for the spruce up. There's as RSS feed button (at last) and I'm proud to claim 15 subscribers since I added it just a few days ago (thanks to Feedburner for showing me how easy it really was). Do please hit that button and join up - it might even encourage me to post a little more regularly!

The other links have been tidied up a little more, with my other sites listed near the top and a roll of blogosphere compatriots a little lower down - if you're reading this and you think yours fits with the Globalism scheme of things, drop me a link and I'll take a look. The posts are now more easily navigable and there's also a news feed on the page. Consider this an experimental move at the moment - might also throw some widgets for my favourite news sites up instead, once I've developed them.


For the time being, I'm back teaching again (at the best school I've ever taught at, which is lucky). The wife and I are are living at the folks' place while we get ourselves sorted out, and it is perched right on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors. After Tokyo, it's quite a radical change. Greenery everywhere and surrounded by nature - a delightful respite before we get back to the 'Big City'. There's pheasants in the garden, owls and foxes making their night time noises, grassy banks and neat gardens brimming with all sorts of colourful flowers, and such a clean freshness in the air.

We're also blessed with wide open and expansive skies too, and some of the most fabulous colours get thrown up over the hills and woods during sundown. The pictures on this post are a few tasters, advance previews before they make their way onto the Flickr site. Seems like they're good enough to share early, so here you go!