Temporary... oh, so temporary

Interrupting the previous train of thought... I just posted (elsewhere) a post about ephemera, and how paper seems to have taken over my life. How so, in the day of the grand white screen? Why, oh why, haven't I filed everything in the electronic file bin? Ah! This electronic beast of so-called permanence, it seems, is in itself temporary. Computers crash, websites fade, dashboards disappear, software upgrades, interfaces change, corporations merge. I cannot find my blog, I cannot find my dashboard. My database, wiped out at the drop of a hat or a sneeze, all by some silent, faceless entity, which this moment, perhaps, has decided to merge, or disband, or go bye-bye in whatever form or fashion pleases them; barely a blink, a nod, or an email ~ leaving me and my ephemera to fend for ourselves. But supposing, just supposing, I could trust today's host to be there tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Then I'd still have to digitize my ephemera to save it. Photos, papers, cards, scraps: files cabinets and bins and baskets full: these things, I have. But to scan them, to transcribe them, even to make brief extracts, would take another lifetime or two. So, this Lord of all Human Knowledge, this Information of the big "I," this electronic file cabinet ~ this wonderful, much-touted savior of humanity, the computer, the Internet ~ 'tis all merely ephemera. And so it goes...

Southern Tech?

An offhand post here or there would result in another bit of information about the Internet and how it works. For instance, one time Philip mentioned that he had painted a mural of The General in Kennesaw, Georgia. I had visited that museum and seen the mural. This made me curious ~ he'd been hanging around the Art Forum for several years by then, and I just thought he was one of those techie guys. I thought he and a bunch of guys had started MiningCo dot-com, and that they all were sitting together in a brick-and-mortar building in California, hacking away like Bill Gates or something. And he explained that such was not the case, he was just a paid guide, a plain old joe and an artist, not a dot-com owner or anything. It was just a new bit of information for me to digest, about how Internet and file-sharing work, and how a dot-com owned by a corporation in New York City has a guide who lives in Smalltown, USA. And not a real tech guy. In fact, another artist. Kind of like me. It's not as if the concept of remote work was new to me. For several years now, my job had been as a local interviewer (North Georgia) for a corporation that was located in Maryland. But finding a "local" (sort of) guide on the Art Forum was just another funny coincidence. It was another bit of data to add to my growing understanding of what the Internet is. What it might become.

The Artist's Exchange on About.com

When my old link to The Artist's Exchange didn't work, I began to search for other art forums. The art sites I found, once again, were pretty dismal. But I finally came across "The Artist Exchange" again. At first, I was confused. This new Artist's Exchange was on About.com, not MiningCo. It seemed to be an endless maze of links that led to brief, shallow articles. At first I was puzzled and not too impressed. I was about to give About.com a quick pass. Searches for art kept bringing it up, though, and eventually I discovered a link to a forum on there. It had the same name as the other forum and was similar in a lot of ways. This forum, it turned out, was even better than the old one. I found the same same excellent, in-depth discussions; there were just more of them. This new forum enjoyed steady "traffic," a thing I could fully appreciate, having already surfed around in several interesting but rather "slow" forums. And I had tried my hand at starting the little Bugbones Buzz forum at Inside the Web. The new Art Forum had many layers of art resources, discussions and links. Artists were posting on it regularly, on a varied array of art-related topics. This was what I'd been hunting for so long.

MiningCo, The Artist's Exchange, and About.com.

Few and Far Between...

I guess I know how I came to lose the art forum. I was alternating between playing with my Bugbones web page, e-mailing and net-surfing. Somewhere along the line I had caved in and gotten Internet at home. Maybe it was that tiresome 20-mile drive... or maybe it was the foot-tapping of waiting while other people used that one-hour timeshare on the library computer; because by now, I wasn't the only one in our burg who knew about Internet. I'd tried the local community college and found the waiting time much less (they had a whole row of computers, sitting idle outside of peak hours). But parking at the college was a whole new ballgame. Sometimes you could barely navigate between the double-parkers. Some days I just gave it up and went home. At some point I slapped down my money, hooked up my modem, and started surfing in the luxury of my own home. One line, no waiting. All mine. Internet in living color to view as I liked on my 8-inch green screen. But sometimes, as Spock said, "having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting." Now I could check my favorite forums daily and surf to my heart's content. But having my own Internet hook-up brought whole new problems. Not only was there familial conflict (I'll get to that); but popping into forums, eagerly awaiting the next bit of wisdom wasn't what it was cracked up to be. Posts were few and far between. And as crazy as it seems, I had, by now, even started my own little forum: the short-lived Bugbones Buzz. What with all this going on, and with having to restrict my 'Net-surfing time, I must have quit checking art forum daily. And right about then, it just disappeared. Along with MiningCo.

MiningCo, The Artist's Exchange Art Forum, and Bugbones.

One-Sided Conversation

I first mentioned MiningCo when I blogged on Christmas Eve 2008, back when I was discussing scanners, when I mentioned the 'quest,' when Philip asked for photos of my art. Philip was the art forum guide, and I had discovered the art forum through MiningCo...so I know that my discovery of MiningCo was early on in my Internet adventures. It was before my Hotmail account and before I borrowed the use of Terri's scanner for a day. In fact, MiningCo was what led me to seek a scanner. I can't say I had foreseen all this, but I can say that the day that ad flickered past and disappeared, I knew I'd lost something important. So I was glad to find them again. And I wasn't disappointed. MiningCo's directory started with 'A,' and 'Art' was included ~ something Yahoo couldn't boast, and still can't to this day. (Why should they. They have 'B,' which apparently stands for Brittney Spears, and does the world have to look further for true enlightenment?) The 'A' in Art led to 'The Artist's Exchange,' a directory of art resources. That, in turn, led to the Art Forum. I posted on Art Forum a time or two as 'Bugbones.' I was intriqued at the thought of discussing art with anyone, anywhere in the world. There were some nice thoughts posted on there, so I jumped right in. Art Forum was nice, it was interesting... it just wasn't hopping. Like many of those early forums, it was in the doldrums. The conversation was kind of one-sided. Someone would post an interesting thought, and I would find it a week or two down the road and reply. But they were by then long gone and might not be back for a week or a month, if at all. The posts were few and far between, but they showed promise. Philip was the guide, and he was pretty good to keep the threads going even then.

MiningCo and The Art Forum (The Artist's Exchange).

Finding MiningCo

MiningCo... I think the way I finally found them was through TV. Theirs was one of the first TV ads I saw for a dot-com ~ and that was after I had 'lost' them by failing to click on their banner ad in time. It's funny that I found them when I did. I had by then become dissatisfied with what I was finding on the Internet. I expected the world's largest library, but the Internet seemed to be one big smiley ~ with chat. (Later I was told that the 'Net itself wasn't at fault, that my gripe was probably with the search engines of the day.) Probably, this is true, and MiningCo was 1999's answer to that. They promised to mine relevant data as one would mine precious ore. MiningCo. A dot-com that would dig through the sludge and find the gems for you! The whole thing was a coincidence. Seeing their eye-catching banner whiz past, losing them, finding them again through TV. Just a funny name, but the tagline seemed promising of great things. MiningCo turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. For, with MiningCo came The Artist's Exchange and Art Forum.

MiningCo and Art Forum.

Searching for MiningCo

I had added the requisite smiley-face sites to Bugbones, but I wanted more. I wanted art sites, good-quality humor sites, education... Yahoo Search just wasn't delivering. Right about then, by an odd coincidence, I stumbled upon Miningco. Miningco was my first real evidence that the Internet might contain access to the great art, intelligent conversation, and educational material that I suspected was out there. (I mean, it was the Information Superhighway, right? not limited to smiley faces.) MiningCo had been around since 1996, but it was about '98 or '99 when I discovered it. At first, I just got a brief glimpse of the name by accident. An ad went whizzing by when I clicked an e-mail in Yahoo. The name intriqued me... whatever it was. Mining Info, Mining Dot-Com, MineCompf? And the banner was not cyan or magenta. Certainly that looked original and promising. I had spied the ad mid-click, but it vanished before I could get a good look. I tried backing up, tried clicking through ad after ad. It was gone. Try as I might, I couldn't recall that odd dot-com name. I searched mine, mining, mining info... (Wanna buy a carbide lamp? I know where you can get one.) I liked-to-never found MiningCo in search. I really had to dig for it. Come to think of it, it is ironic that I was trying to find a search engine through search.

The Perils of Bugbones.
MiningCo and the Art Forum.

Information? Or Pinball?

Early on in my web-page-editing days, I complained to my friend Charlene about how disappointed I was in the Information Superhighway: how hard it was to create a page, what a difficult time I was having with the art tools. She said to me, glumly, "I don't like this new icon-based Internet." I didn't quite know what she meant. I knew what icons were: small symbols, like red-ball Gifs and little blue mailboxes. You clicked on them and they brought you stuff. True, the Web was overrun with smiley faces... Was this her gripe? a grudge against frivolity? I could empathize with that. The 'Net was supposed to be every scholar's dream, and here it was turning into one big pinball machine. I couldn't get Charlene to commisserate with me over how hard it was to layout a page of my own design and theme, and upload my art. I came to realize that her complaint went deeper than than just a dislike of smileys. It was images she despised! Charlene was used to a text-based Internet. She'd had a taste of early DOS. A black screen. Simple lines of plain text in the old Courier font. Catalog cards all numbered and indexed. She resented the intrusion of color!

(Confessions of a fearful geek).