Three new dossiers are up:
The Process Church of The Final Judgement, the 60s cult.
Amber Case, the cyborg anthropologist.
David Cronenberg, the body horror film director.
One of the various ways that media organizations make money is by selling special reports. These include technical white papers from Information Week or the various guides from Vice or the very high-end business data from The Economist or the dubious quality “info products” from Internet marketers. I’ve written about this before.
I’ve been thinking about doing something like this for a while, but have never been sure what I could cover that would be of interest here. Then it occurred to me: life extension. I’ve covered a number of studies on how to improve your own longevity, and I’ve been following the transhumanist thing with some interest for years. I could do a “premium dossier” covering everything from practical longevity to Kurzweilian ideas. Studies covered would use the rating system I proposed earlier.
It would probably be between 20 and 40 pages, and cost, say, $23 (it’s called “premium” for a reason). It would be available in multiple formats – PDF, epub, HTML, etc. No copy protection.
It would happen when it happens – I’m still plenty busy writing for ReadWriteWeb, it would take a while to write an extra 20-40 pages on the side. That’s part of why I’m asking in advance about interest.
What do you think?
This blog appeared in the Tumblr Spotlight section for technology today. A warm welcome to the new followers, I hope this blog continues to hold your interest.
Technoccult BrainSwarm is a brand new experimental project. It’s an idea management system for practically any idea.
Idea management is usually used by corporations looking for customer feedback (Dell’s IdeaStorm and My Starbucks Idea are two examples), or by governments looking for ideas from citizens (such as the White House Open Government Dialogue).
BrainSwarm is a different sort of idea site. It’s not dedicated to generating ideas for any particular government or company. It’s a place for any sort of idea. I hope it can be a launchpad for projects. By posting an idea to BrainSwarm, you can get feedback on an idea, and either find collaborators or just share it and hope someone else picks the idea up.
It’s powered by IdeaScale, which I think is mostly used by government sites. It has a points system, comments and some basic social media integration. If this takes off, I’d be willing to upgrade to a professional account with more features, or possibly work on creating some custom software. Right now I just want to see where this goes.
A sketch of an early layout for Technoccult I recently found in some old papers. It was on the back of a pay stub dated 7/08/2000.
I’m starting a new series of posts on the Technoccult Twitter and Facebook accounts: 10 Years Ago on Techncocult.
You see, Technoccult started out doing dossiers (this was the first), like the early days of Disinfo. But ten years ago today, I added a blog to the site. I straight-up copied the layout of the now defunct political blog Media Jihad, and was also influenced sites like Slashdot, MetaFilter and especially Plastic.
So starting today, I’ll be posting links to the deep archives of the site from Twitter and Facebook. I was going to do this from Tumblr too, but I accidentally already spammed-up Tumblr with the old posts. I was going through and cleaning up the HTML and fixing bad links in the old posts, and didn’t realize that the plugin I use to cross-post to Tumblr was adding those old posts after I saved changes.
Enjoy.
PS – I meant to include this song, “Scatterlings and Refugees” by Red State Soundsystem, with my year in review post but forgot. Although it was released in 2009, it was the song that defined 2010 for me.
I’ve been meaning to do my “year end/new year” type posts for a while, but I’ve been insanely busy. Today is the 11th anniversary of Technoccult, so I thought it would be a good occasion to get these posts out of the way. Enjoy!
So without further ado, here were the most popular 10 new posts of 2010:
1. The Philosophy of Punk Rock Mathematics – Technoccult interviews Tom Henderson
2. 3 Novels To Read if You Liked Inception
4. Twincest: Gay porn’s hottest couple are twin brothers
5. Professor Abandons Grades for Experience Points
6. People with Negative Attitudes More Likely to Learn From Mistakes
8. Beyond Growth – Technoccult interviews Duff McDuffee and Eric Schiller
9. Binaural Beats with SbaGen Developer Jim Peters – Technoccult Interview
10. Cyborg anthropologist Amber Case, the Technoccult interview
If you follow me on Twitter you already know that I’ve joined the ReadWriteWeb team as a writer for the ReadWriteEnterprise channel, where I’ll be covering business technology trends. My first post there is: Massive iPhone Security Issue Could Endanger Enterprise Adoption.
Between my commitments at RWW and my full-time job, I’m not sure how much time I’ll have to commit to Technoccult and Mediapunk in the near future. I’ll certainly still be updating Technoccult, and adding new dossiers, but expect things to slow down considerably. Mediapunk will slow down even more. Hatch 23 is winding down now that LOST is over anyway.
As I’ve mentioned on Twitter, I’m starting a series of “dossiers” in the style of old-school Disinfo.com. I’ve finished three so far:
The next three will probably be Robert Anton Wilson, Genesis P. Orridge, and Alejandro Jodorowsky. I’m going to focus first on writing up dossiers on people and subjects that have been covered here at Technoccult previously and can mine the archives for links. The idea is to create more accessible portals into previously covered subject matter on the site. As time goes on, I might start to add dossiers on subjects I haven’t covered much in the past.
Each dossier is a work in progress and will be updated as new info comes and as time permits. Please, please, please report dead links – and better yet, include replacement links in the comments.
In my ongoing attempt to solicit feedback from readers, I would like to pose this question:
If Technoccult were to focus on only ONE area (in effect, stop being a “generalist” site), what ONE area would you want it to cover?
A question to help you answer that question: what do you find here that you don’t find elsewhere?
The reason for this question: The advice most bloggers give on being “successful” (whatever that means) is to have a particular focus and to become an expert on it. I think, however, at least part of whatever success that I’ve had is that I haven’t specialized in one particular topic. And I doubt that I ever will. However, I think really delving into a smaller number of areas might be a good thing. So what I’d really like to know is what you really value at this site – what you would least like to give up, if I were to get more focused.
(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smoovey/3367530271/ / CC License)
As you can see, for the past few weeks I’ve been putting up more original content and interviews. I’d like your feedback about who else you’d like me to talk to, what you’d like me to write about, and what topics you’d like to see covered more (or covered less).
I can’t make any promises, but I do value your feedback. Feel free to comment on this post and let me know.
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