Put no right-click script on archive page. So silly. Made scrollbar pretty and font size tiniest bit more readable. Still ugly in Netscape. Down with Netscape!

Day was boring. Chemicals in Painting room have made eyes all itchy and dry. Throat messed up, too. Q is coming up later to borrow extra desk to do work. Shall have to have something interesting to watch. "Ah! My Goddess: the Movie," perhaps.

Have decided that Flash is lame.

Because I don't know how to use it.
Amezri @ 7:52:35 PM

Made pretty new diary layout featuring lovely Hudson. See the equation: clickity-click. So pretty.

Yahoo! Implementing Charges System (via Vicky from the Bringers list)

There's been talk for a while now of possible charges for yahoogroups. Yahoo recently started charging for the forwarding service on yahoo mail and there's talk of charging for the mail accounts themselves. Obviously, that's going to have wide ranging implications for this group and fandom as a whole, not to mention people without computers at home having access to e-mail accounts.

There's a petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/11213/petition.html

Incidentally, comics writer Warren Ellis recently moved his mailing list from yahoogroups to a non-corporate system after clues started to appear that people might be charged and there's dispute over his message forum at delphi.com after they announced new changes to the free version they offer. Here's a column from his new mailing list about it:

bad signal
WARREN ELLIS (29th March 2002)

The web has to pay for itself. But do we have to pay for the web?

BAD SIGNAL is now on a nice donated non-corporate system organised by some lovely people in London. It was previously on Yahoo. Actually, it was first on coollists, which was shit. Then I moved it to onelist, which was excellent. Onelist was then bought by egroups, with a little degradation in service. Egroups was swallowed by Yahoo, which led to serious degradation in service. Yahoo took some months to get its act together -- and, a little while later, started making noises about making people pay for it. I was tired of Yahoo and its shit advertising inserts by that point anyway. So here we are.

Since 1998, I've also run a message board at Delphi. The Warren Ellis Forum -- WEF is the usual abbreviation. Delphi have been through a lot of changes since 1998. They've revamped the board software twice -- the second time, to introduce a pay version of what was previously an all-free service. DelphiPlus provides a bunch of additional functionality. Some of it, like a built-in HTML editor for message writing, is fun and very well-designed. Some of it is fancy crap. All of it is pretty much surplus to requirements. It costs $3.95 a month, which isn't much for me. The basic free service is still in place for everyone, and that's good enough. On basic, you can still hand-code HTML into messages and all that.

Which is about to change.

Delphi are currently, very badly, rolling out a three-tier service. Basic Delphi is now called Delphi Advanced, and runs to 99 cents a month. DelphiPlus stays in place. And Delphi Basic is a crippled version of the old basic service, for free.

WEF relies heavily on HTML in messages and attachment of files to messages. It's a success (2000 people a day, half a million message views a day, 8500 messages posted a week) partly because people can see each other in photos, can see where each other live, can arrange meetings through the board and the attached chatroom -- are not anonymous to each other. We have the first two marriages of people who met on WEF this year (one of which is Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction, who also became my colleagues on Artbomb.net). Without people having unrestricted access to the basic message board tools, right from the moment they enter, I'm not convinced WEF will work as well. DelphiPlus was introduced because people weren't clicking on the ad banners. Or the pop-ups, or the Sprink ads that were dropped in the frame gutters between messages for a while. Ad revenue is bad all over, as we're all constantly told. And, you know, the ads were shit anyway. The only one I ever clicked on was eyada.com, which made the fuckedcompany.com listings last year. I kind of liked the idea of having my own internet radio show. Until I looked at the incomprehensible interface.

But, even through all this, I can't think of paying for web services as an especially bad thing.

People pay for services useful to them all the time. I mean, this is pretty basic free economy stuff. If I make something you want, you pay me for it. Even an old mixed-economy English Socialist like me can see that. And I like the cult of personality. And so did Stalin.

The web, however, has trained the online community to expect stuff for free. The refrain goes that since I'm paying for my online access, everything I get on it should be free. That's Napster in a nutshell. Fuck you, I want it. There'a nascent activist enclave getting behind the new wireless protocol, fronted recently by egroponte, declaiming that the sphere of influence of wireless nodes will let people just ride on whoever's access field they're passing through. On the understanding, of course, that it's reciprocated, and I don't use your wireless access to grab down eight feature films and reduce your porn-surfing to a crawl.

Information wants to be free. But if that means I have to sell my computer, how far has that got you? No-one has really philosophically recovered from the dot-com crash yet. We're at the point where the web either becomes a community or an economy. It doesn't seem able to become both. Either it's where we talk, and show the things we made ourselves, and facilitated goodwill trade and exposure for our arts -- or it becomes a network of services that we are prepared to pay for according to their value to us.

This has been on my mind for a couple of days. I do shop via the web -- I buy food, books, DVDs, music, hotel rooms. There will always be useful vendors making the web work for them. But operations like Delphi? Or Yahoo? (and a lot of us can remember when they were just a useful directory.)

Will people pay for community?

And I don't mean, will people pay for community because they are naturally cheap. Although, since the announcement broke, certainly a few people on WEF have revealed themselves as just painfully tight-fisted. What I mean is: If you access WEF from the library because you don't have a computer at home but you're involved with something in discussion, or you want to show people your art or your writing, or you need help finding a job or somewhere to live, or it's the best way to see photos of your boyfriend when you're in another country. Or if you get BAD SIGNAL from a Hotmail account you access from a friend's computer or a public net terminal. Or you're reading this on the train, grabbed from a handheld or a WAP phone. or if, crucially, you don't have a bloody credit card. I've only had a credit card since '99 or so.

If that financial and societal barrier to participating in, or just reading of, the various communities in web culture is introduced... where does the web go?

Well, the web's a big place. And themore I think about it, the more I think the pay-community sites get left for dead.

Time was, I would've left WEF for dead. I toyed with the idea of shutting it down more than once. But it's bigger than me now.

Tonight, all over the world, there's going to be about fifty people drinking together who would not have met without WEF. There'll be two thousand people in the doors of the Forum tonight, about fifty of whom won't have been there before. Certainly part of me thinks that the organisation that facilitates that shouldn't be expected to do so for free. But I don't know if you can pay for that.

Do you know how creepy it is to think that at least eight people will be having sex tonight because of you?

I should tell them. Let's see the boys keep it up after that.

Warren
with Red Bull
Friday
Amezri @ 11:24:39 PM

Stomach starting war with me. Hated uncooked potaotes from meal hall muchly. Feeling sick and queasy. Will be going to bed now.
Amezri @ 12:58:43 AM

Eyes hurt. Brain fuzzy. Daylight Savings Time is a bad, bad idea. Make me lose whole hour of sleep.

No more webpages. Sick of them and don't want to be arsed.
Amezri @ 11:44:51 PM

Fire BAD. Tree PRETTY.

Also forgot to pick up paycheck. Money very important.
Amezri @ 7:59:12 PM

Message from super-secret list about Yahoo!Mail and Yahoo!Groups. Yahoo is so stupid.

"On the web site you will see in the privacy statement a reference to "Web Beacons" you need to click on the OPT-OUT button to opt-out. If you don't Yahoo will follow you around on the Internet tracking the sites you visit and every thing you do and sends this info back to Yahoo for "marketing" info. This is a Web Bug. It is not cool and it is an invasion of your privacy, but it is still legal.

All Yahoo HTML email that you receive also includes a Web Beacon (Web Bug) this is so they can keep track of live email addy's and to see who is opening up the email. All Commercial and HTML email you receive has a web bug, not just that from Yahoo."

Here's the link to opt-out: http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy/us/pixels/details.html
Amezri @ 5:24:02 PM

Burner replaced. Yay, Gerard! Took three people to figure out how to get drive out of bay. There were two metal tabby things under front plate. So silly.

Emailed Crisso about cloak commission. It is just about finished and she will mail it to me. Will be $200 poorer, but will not have to kill Boromir for it. Sezza will be very happy. Silly Man with his Horn of Gondor. This is cloak. Will be black and wool and pretty and have fastening like Merry's cloak.

Amezri @ 2:13:08 PM

Back from dreaded holiday. Much screaming, yelling, and general unhappiness. Am glad to be back here.

Dorms are disgusting. Dusty and icky. Have been cleaning for 3 hours. Gah.

Bought new burner from TigerDirect and brother was to install today. Can't get old drive out of bay >_< Stupid tabs are stuck. Will have to carry heavy tower to Help Desk this week. Very pissed. Keeping self calm with picture of elf boy. So pretty.

Amezri @ 8:50:52 PM