Where has the blog gone?
Zeth.info has been my blog and online soapbox for the last few years. I had assumed that Zeth.info would enter its fourth year but now its future looks uncertain, I have decided to suspend this blog for the time being and this page explains why.
Any blog worth its salt should be updated daily. I basically have more commitments both on and offline so posts have been becoming less frequent. The blog concept was useful for me but I now I may need to move beyond it.
I am now looking towards a more collaborative way of contributing online. A blog about 'Zeth's views on anything' is not particularly open for others to contribute to. While the blurring of boundaries is a good thing and even if the reader was willing to accept posts on any subject, at some point there needs to be some kind of route map, if only for those who may want to contribute.
Therefore I have replaced my blog with a new site called Aoeui.com and I hope you will like it. Aoeui is based on the belief that culture is free; we only choose to burden it with shrink-wrap, advertising and so-called "intellectual property".
In the age where the marginal cost of distribution is heading toward zero, or indeed has become a minus figure - think about Bittorrent where the more people download, the faster it becomes - we no longer need middlemen, advertising billboards, shrink-wrap or lawyers.
Indeed the shady middlemen and lawyers working in smoky back-rooms just need to get out of the way and the creation and distribution of culture will happen in an open and interactive community of creator-users where middlemen can never have a place.
The middlemen, the companies that represent the old ways of doing things, would have you believe that there are only two choices - legal shrink-wrapped culture or illegal downloads. Don't believe it, they are trying to mislead you. There is an ever growing amount of free and legal culture coming online everyday to an internet near you, culture that you can share with your friends and neighbours.
The problem of this new cultural movement is not, for example, the question of how to 'incentivise' musicians - people create music because they love music; nor is it a problem of how to overcome distribution costs - because they don't exist anymore; the problem is how to manage the flood of this new culture. We need new ways to annotate, to describe and to recommend.
The basic concept is that I will talk about what I download - songs, books, videos and so on; and I will invite others, i.e. YOU, to do the same, to join the conversation.
Let me know what you have made, what you have downloaded, what you think is cool. Please tell people about the new site and link to it.
Thanks for all the readers and visitors of Zeth.info, especially those who left comments.
As for the archives of this blog? I will sort them out at a less busy time. There may need for this page again, perhaps as an archive of what I contribute to third party sites. Any views or comments on religious matters will be submitted to Crossring, Theology.me.uk and elsewhere.
What are you still doing here, move over to Aoeui.com.
