I recently bought a WD TV, a little box that turns any USB drive you connect into a well-featured media center. Even though I don’t have a HD television to make the most of it, it still seemed the perfect fit as I have a couple of unused external hard drives lying around. And so far I’m fairly impressed, it supports almost all video formats I threw at it (no DV though, although I understand that’s not a media center’s priority) and it is apparently a pretty hackable minicomputer that runs a Linux kernel (people have already added rudimentary network support and applications, so I guess the addition of more codecs is only a matter of time).

So, what’s the use of discs?

I find it no wonder that for ancient Greeks the Olympiad was also a measure of time. For as long as I remember big sporting events have been useful marks in my own measuring of time. Being born in 1979, I have a hard time recalling anything about 1982, but I do remember the ubiquous presence of the Spain 1982 World Cup mascot, an antropomorphic orange called Naranjito. My memory of 1984 isn’t much better, but I have this image fixed in my mind of a Giant Ronald Reagan Head (scary!) appearing in the giant screen installed at the Los Angeles Olympic Stadium, during the opening cerimony of the Olympic Games. And even though memories get progressively clearer after that, whenever I try to recall when something happened I immediately think of the closest Big Sporting Event. Those would be either the Olympic Games or the World Cup (and since it became interesting, the Euro, which anyway is held in Olympic years). Both the World Cup and the Olympics (and the Euro) are always held in even years, two years spaced, so it’s they offer a pretty reliable two-year mnemonic.

Enter the 2009 Athletics World Championships, the odd year event I won’t forget. Usain Bolt had already been one of the great men of the Beijing Olympics, of course, but after a somewhat bland season nobody could expect the absolutely otherworldly World Records he set in Berlin, in the same stadium where Jesse Owens showed Hitler where he should stuff his race superiority. Bolt, the most appropriately-named sportsman in history, ran 100 meters in 9.58 seconds last Sunday — 0.11 seconds less than his previous record from Beijing, and today he chopped the same time from his previous 200 meters record, running the distance in 19.19 seconds — that’s 0.13 less than Michael Johnson’s ‘record for the ages’ set at the Atlanta Olympics, and 0.40 seconds less than anyone else ever. And the impressive thing is that you get this sense that Bolt actually put some effort in setting the 200 meters record, but not in the 100 meters, which let commentators speculate he might very well achieve something like 9.4 seconds, which would pretty much close the record book in our lifetime.

There’s something absolutely unique whenever anyone breaks a world record in athletics. When we look at the fastest car ever, or the fastest plane ever, we are looking at a product of technology, which may be impressive, but still the product of an evolution that is partly non-human. We have fast computer chips that enable us to produce even faster chips, which in turn get used to produce even faster chips but also run the simulations that allow us to create faster and more efficient machines. So as I said, an almost non-human process of evolution. But when you see a guy like Bolt run, there’s something your self can really relate with: a quick dash down the street. This is why I really like watching athletics: those persons are really trying to do something no man or woman has ever done before.

Yesterday Tumblr rolled out yet another improvement to their free ‘tumblelogging’ service — the ability to read ‘tag channels’ in your Dashboard, which you can filter by popularity in realtime. I immediately said ‘Wow!’ and found it very cool from a software development standpoint (an aesthetic appreciation my recently academic studies has been sharpening). But still, there was that old part of me that just said:

“Hey, whoa! Wait a minute!”

There’s much to be loved about Tumblr. I happily jumped onboard two-and-a-half years ago, right at the launch. I’ve seen this webservice grow, adding a ton of features in the meantime without losing focus. One of the reasons I like it so much probably doesn’t make much sense: Tumblr is made in New York, not in California, so somehow something has passed into its design and software engineering that I find more appealing to my European sensibility than similar services from the Far West. But there’s another, double-edged reason. When recommending Tumblr to people (which I do, a lot), I tell them “in a nutshell, it’s blogging for lazy people”. I’m lazy, so that’s a great reason. I don’t blog much, and would blog even less if there were no ‘bookmarklets’ or whatever you call them. So in way, the greatest reason for my enthusiasm about Tumblr is the bookmarklet.

If you are one of the two persons who visited If Then Else a few years ago and still do, you know that shortly after I signed up for my Tumblr account my blogging style changed dramatically. It may have taken a couple of years for me to get everything smoothy integrated, but essentially since 2007 If Then Else was ‘possessed’ by my ‘tumblelogging’, and what used to be a text-heavy blog became something quite different, a somewhat random collection of text, yes, but also photos, links, quotes and videos (I never had much care for chats and audio posts), not a web-journal anymore but some cross between a certain 1990s ideal of what an ‘e-zine’ should be and a chaotic Robot Wisdom-esque mess updated for the broadband age (mind you, when I started If Then Else in 2001 it was still costumary for a webdesigner to ensure a webpage’s ‘weight’ was below 50KB — or else people would get fed up with the loading time). In effect, If Then Else became a clone — diligently mirrored by a cronjob I put on its server — of my Found Objects tumblelog.

While If Then Else sports different visuals, a six years deeper archive, a photologue (itself a similar clone of my Fotologue account — I never liked Flickr, so I went Far East rather than West), a pretty pristine hand-coded comment system and some of the other knick-knacks old weblogs usually have, Found Objects ‘follows’ and is ‘followed’, and there are ‘notes’ (that is, ‘likes’ and ‘reblogs’) instead of comments. If Then Else won’t get out much, its best feature is perhaps the RSS feed, which allows people to read it without ever visiting the sorry-ass website a second time. But the party never stops in Tumblelogueland, where people like posts and posts get liked, where reblogs are conduits throughout which content gets pushed and memes gets traced. It’s Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0, my host versus their server.

This is the great trend of the late noughts Internet: centralization. Unless you are an A-lister, your own private, hand-or-Dreamweaver-coded website means squat. Sure you can put a portfolio online on your own host — and you should, as a courtesy for those who google you or so that you can have your vanity address written on the back of your business card —, but all the action’s at Behance, and that’s the place where you should put your stuff. In a sense, we’re back in the old BBS days, and the early Web was a crazy anarchic phenomenon that wasn’t fit to last. Why should I bother building my own spaces if nobody visits them, and people get their dose of whatever Ed is up to in the places everybody lists what they are up to?

I guess the answer lies at the beginning of this rant. While the means to filter huge amounts of information like the ‘tag channels’ are undeniably cool, and somehow meet the romantic promises of early information futurisms such as Vannevar Bush’s Memex, the flipside to the content-sharing cultures of places like Tumblr and Facebook is that nobody’s actually creating anymore. A ‘reblog’, while interesting as a meme-tracing construct, gives us an illusion of production through consumption, and in the end many weblogs and tumblelogs, in their quest for ‘new’ content every day hour become someone else’s parrot so they can improve their ‘tumblarity’ — a Tumblr feature I really dislike, as it introduces a competitiveness that encourages mindless reblogging as original posts are harder to do.

This is why I believe keeping your own, let’s say ‘Web 1.5’, site is still important: It’s your space, so you keep it neat and clean.