The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

Thank you to Jason Gross at Popmatters for naming us alongside writers like Trent Reznor and publications such as Salon and The Wall Street Journal in their 2009 Best Music Scribbling Awards.

It’s nice to get some acknowledgment, especially from a professional in the industry.

The post he liked was this one.

But make sure you visit Popmatters and read the other articles as well—they are some great ideas, well put.

Thanks for the nod, OnlineCourses, I hope we can live up to the endorsement.

100 Best Blogs for the Literati

If you feel that you’re destined to be an intellectual long after you graduate from college, you’re going to have to work a little harder to keep up with high brow culture and scholarly debates on your own. These 100 blogs will help you jump in on the discussions influencing the art, literature, political and culture worlds, even without the support of your professors and fellow classmates.

“High brow culture”? That reminds me: I better get to work on the next Eurovision post…

On other blogs when the authors are too busy to post, the convention is to post a Lolcat or something, just to kick the RSS feed over once or twice. At Memes, we are far to arrogant to do that.

Trust me: something will turn up here again very soon. I might even get to tell you about my sekrit project!

Until then…

OK people, we are rapidly closing on our 1,000th comment. Who will hit the jackpot? The 1,000th comment will earn an honoured place in the history of Memes and its author will enter the annals as one of the most significant contributors in a prestigious and honoured medium. There may even be a cash prize*.

Quickly, to your keyboards!

*There definitely won’t be a cash prize.

With three years worth of postings, we felt it was time to introduce a search function to the blog. Look under “Site Navigation” in the left-hand side-bar. As far as I can tell, it only indexes the posts, not the comments, and I’m not sure about the titles even, but in a few tests I ran yesterday, the returned results seemed to be accurate.

If you find any problems, let us know in the comments.

November 4: an auspicious day. One of the most significant presidential elections in recent memory; in Australia, it’s the day of the horse race that “stops a nation” (apparently); and back in 2005, it was the day that Nick decided that writing a blog would be cool and published our first post.

It’s only been three years, but a lot seems to have happened: wars, environmental crises; financial crises; a change of government in Australia; Nick saw the light and moved from academia to web design; Lisa finally finished the PhD; John keeps plugging away at his.

Memes isn’t the sort of blog where we chat about ourselves (not that we are saying there is anything wrong with that), by I think we can take the indulgence occasionally. So, by way of a smug “happy birthday”, here are some statistics that we thought were amusing.

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I’ve set up a Twitter account for Memes with an automatic RSS feed. If you’re on Twitter, feel free to follow us.

It seems a little too much of the self promotion thing, but I’m actually exploring mechanisms for providing web-based information largely automatically. More about this later, maybe.

I’m putting the site on comments moderation for the time being as we’re experiencing a sustained spam attack on an older post. I’ve deleted the existing spam comments and banned the IP addresses associated with those comments. It looks like the scum-sucking spam merchants have learned too much about Textpattern. I’ll be investigating our options for spam-blocking plugins over the next couple of days. I like the idea of an unencumbered public forum, which is why this site hasn’t defaulted to moderation until now. But spam is why we can’t have nice things.

A little spam attack (since fixed, I hope) brought the blog back to mind, and I realised that no one has posted for over a month (inexcusable!) In our defence, we’ve all been really busy…

I’m back studying full-time for three months, courtesy of a completion scholarship, and I hope to state posting parts of the thesis here, looking for comments and advice (which was part of the purpose for the blog in the first place), so watch this space. In the meantime, it seems I’ve found Lisa’s room of my own: I’ve got the run of the house, iTunes is on overload, and I can spread across the table (even if I do have to move everything back before I can start getting dinner on!)

But anyway, back to the problematics of a touristic construction of a temporary and contingent community…

OK, it has been quite a while since “Memes” has had a substantive posting. There is a reason for this: Pownce, j’accuse!

The main contributers to “Memes,” as well as many of its most frequent commenters, have found ourselves enjoying the ease of communicating within a semi-private forum, based on shared values, ideas, and experiences. It seems easier to throw an observation or insight into a known space, than into the dark where who-knows-who will pick it up (“Memes” has been mercifully free of flames, but it is curious to see who will sometimes drop by with an objection). Exchanges have also been more casual and funny than you would expect on a blog (well, our sort of blog), as is natural to this sort medium.

Sometime colleague, blogger, and Pownce-buddy Catherine offers some insights into the Pownce interface. She’s right: there are still problems with the interface, particularly the thread handling capabilities, but the developers are working on it, and as a group, we are starting to develop our own conventions. The publicity talks about Pownce as the “Twitter Killer”, or as the IM that lets you send files. Many of the people in our little Pownce group have used it for purposes across this range, but on the whole, we tend more to the threaded discussion-cum-IM capabilities, and I for one can’t see Twitter going anywhere very soon.

So, as an experiment in IM on steroids, I’m finding Pownce flawed, but valuable. I just wish that I could have shared some of the discussions on “Memes”: makes of car named after mythological figures was a particular highlight!

Anyway, expect some real content here soon: I promise!