So there's this big thing happening Up North called Jackin House and standandarly the southern blogaratti haven't clocked it at all.

Jackin House, or more commonly, just Jackin (also known as/near interchangable with Electroline) is basically Electro House mashed together with Bassline at about 130 bpm, with strong influences from Speed Garage and 2-step, a bit of Dubstep and Funky, and even traces of Jungle thrown in. The other way to think about it is that Jackin is to Electro House what UK Funky is to Funky House. Either way, what most seperates it from international Electro is the presence of MCs toasting over the top of it in the vybezy, bubbling vein of old skool garage, but the truth is it runs on a spectrum, ranging from a whole-lot-of-shite that's little more than Electro House + MCs to some stuff which is far more interesting and nuum'y.

Jackin is kind of a big deal. Marcus Nasty, Godfather/Don of UK Funky has up and jumped ship:

(This is THE Jackin mix to get to know) Leed's main man Tom Zanetti has about as many Facebook fans as Joy Orbison (29,274 vs.  33,478), and in many cities across the North, Bassline is out and Jackin is in. This is a new twist, a new chapter in the 25 year history of the hardcore continuum, yet it's been getting no recognition or love from any of the usual suspects. This seems like critical neglect. 

To be fair to the bloggers, Jackin has any number of things going against it. For one the name's been taken, like, 25 years ago. Jackin shouldn't even be a genre name, it's an adjective: a type of house that jacks, which you can jack to. Popularly understood, it refers to hard hitting dancefloor Chicago trax from the 80s, which makes searching for information about this new northern stuff really difficult.

The second thing is how it bleeds into other genres at all edges, with barely any solid core to grip on to. Simon Reynolds has spoken before of this 'plausibile deniability', whereby as dance genres increasingly seek out the space between existing poles of influence rather than exploring new zones of sonic possibility, it becomes increasingly easy to deny that there's any meaningful difference between, say, Tech-Step and Neuro Funk; Jackin and Electro. Combined with this is a 'whachucallit' syndrome, where on bigtunesmp3 (a dedicated online retailer for the stuff, and from where I'm sitting down Saaf, something of its mecca) every tune is tagged mulitiple times as both Jackin and Electroline, Warper, House, Bass, and Funky, befitting the fact that Jackin is as of yet a space where many influences combine without any new sound to call all its own.

Finally is the matter of just what a parr how much of it is. Bigtunesmp3 is flooded with painfully poorly produced tunes amounting to little more than bait Electro House with some swag northern MC toasting on top of it. It's barely its own thing and most of it's shite; why would you pay attention to this scene?

Because this is nuum shit, that's why! It's a scene filling the gap left by the decline of Bassline, listened to by northern nuumy contingent of multi-racial livin-for-the-weekend ravers.

Musically it's most obvious link to the nuum is the presence of MCs toasting over the top in the champagne and good times vein or Jungle/Garage/Funky/Bassline rather than the darkside verbal pyrotechnics of Grime. But on top of this sonically, at its best it brings together the most winsome elements of the nuum's 20 something years of history in a manner neither pastiche or hauntological, but true to the spirit of rave. Tracks with a bassline/dubstep wobble are called 'wobblers'. Tracks using the Double 99/187 Lockdown Speed Garage bass warp are, fittingly, called 'warpers'. It mixes a 4x4 bounce with the shuffly Dem 2 high hats, bringing the swing and at times traces of Funky in the snares. It's got the vocal science of 2-step (see the Burkie tune above) and some tunes, like this one even bring the Ragga chat and Amen break of Jungle. On top of all these sonic signifiers are other promising signs of 'nuumental activity, not least the surfeit of cheeky pop tune bootlegs:

Though all too commonly, it lies too close for comfort to the Electro sphere of influence, it's clear that Jackin is the latest chapter in the history of the Hardcore Continuum, a summary of which now runs: Hardcore - Jungle - DnB - Speed Garage - 2-step - Grime - Dubstep - Bassline - Funky - Jackin.

And though as of yet Jackin doesn't have a sound all of its own (though that steely, hollow warpy bass is pretty distinctive), there's no reason that it can't develop one. For now, it might be fair to call Jackin one of the first Metamodernist dance scenes, neither straight forwardly postmodern/revivalist nor jetting off into a modernist future, a tension perfectly encapsulated by the first tune of the Marcus Nasty mix (A remix of Majestic's Let's Go Back, but I'm DESPERATELY searching for an ID if anyone's got it).

It starts with a skippy 4x4 garage beat while Majestic spits about the jokes old days of cheap McDonalds and Garage Raves in the early 2000s, untill he gets to these lines:

We can't go back,

That's in the past when I reminisce now 

Bring on the future, here for the day,

I'll be making music come what may.

I don't come from the Old Skool,

But I got to big up the Old Skool,

Reminiscing for times when I was younger,

To this day I still got the hunger.

And it breaks into a cavernous, space-age-shiny j-j-jackin bass riff destined for insta-wheelup and total dance duppiage. Jack to the Future? Yeah, alright then.

P.S. Big up my fellow Voodoo ravers, my boys Frankly $ick and Jack Jambie. They got me into this shit, and they're killer DJs each of them. #crewlove

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It's seems that there is still a lot of controversy about whether the electronic dance scene is producing anything really "new". Outside the scenes own circles, everybody more or less agree that everything is now all about looking back, rediscovering past glories, an endless patchwork of retro styles and pomo recombinations. At best it's "hautological", deconstructions of the retro-process itself, but nothing actually novel or unheard, nothing so new it'll shock, just like it have been the last ten, or is that fifteen, years? Or twenty, if you're brainwashed by rock-based media and think rave music was also a pomo recombination thing (because you see, they were using samples!), and the last time something "new" happened was bloody grunge (is there anything more sad than encountering someone who have lived through one of the greatest moments in music history, the rave golden age, a veritable explosion of innovation, only to hear them talk about how exciting they thought it was when grunge, that pathetic last-grasp-at-authentic-rock, happened, how it was the "new" and "revolutionary" thing of their youth? What a waste of youth.)

Anyway, for those who actually did notice the electronic glory years, there's still a lot of people who haven't given up, those who still think that not only should (electronic dance) music always renew itself, but who also claim that it is actually still doing exactly that. Well, aren't there always someone who will talk about how much great music is constantly being made, and don't the rest of us know how hopeless that is? Because it's not just about how there's a lot of quality stuff around, there more or less always is, and some of it might even sound somewhat novel, perhaps managing to make some small twists of the old formulas. The question is whether that stuff is actually opening up new possibilities, changing our perception of what music means and can be, and basically shapes and challenges the times rather than being shaped by them. Well, I completely agree that this is not really happening where most people tend to suggest it is. As so often before, the front line is supposed to be the british club scene (i.e. "the 'nuum", more or less), and certainly, what is being proposed as the current frontier in that respect, namely the intersection of uk funky and post dubstep/"future garage"/whatever it's being called, is, mostly, just hopelessly dull and regressive. So in a way I'm with the pessimists, led mostly by Simon Reynolds it seems, when it comes to the stuff being championed by this specific post dubstep contingent, on dissensus and associated blogs. However, and this is the point, all sorts of mindbending, shockingly new stuff actually are being made, and can even be classified within the post dubstep area, it's just something very different from all the tastefully lame pseudo house.

Wobble is now what most people think of as dubstep, and I can only see this as a good thing. There was a lot of good stuff in the early dubstep movement, but when it was possible to reject the style back then as a kind of forced or willed and far too self consciously scenius scene, it was because it did indeed contain a lot of the very same concepts of depth, taste and righteous history that still seem so archaic in so much of the current "future garage"-stuff. And most, if not all, of the things that made early dubstep so fascinating and promising, despite all the reggae vocal samples, clichéd dub-echoes and even more clichéd brooding spliff-moods, was precisely the things that eventually became parts of wobble: The aggression, the wild start-stop-dynamics, the over-the-top monumentalism, and so on. I remember writing back in 2008 that I hoped wobbles bass-manipulations would eventually develop to the same level of intensity, complexity and rhythmic/dynamic irresistibility as jungle, and the question is now whether this have actually happened? I'm not completely sure, but to some degree, yes, I actually think it has. Not that wobble seems as perplexing or shockingly new to me as jungle once did, but I think this might just as well be because of me, rather than the music itself.

Back then, I hadn't really been following the breakbeat hardcore scene much (I was mostly into gabber, acid and experimental techno), so when it suddenly broke through it seemed to come out of nowhere, and indeed didn't sound like anything I'd ever heard before (even though I could obviously hear that there was some kind of connection to the early Prodigy-ish breakbeat rave that I was aware of). With dubstep, well, I've been following the development in real time, have seen all the mutations as they have been happening, and perhaps most important, I have constantly been wondering whether this could actually be the "new thing", asking and judging whether it could be said to be as perplexing and shocking as jungle once was. Eventually, this level of attention and historical knowledge will guarantee that I will not feel the same, but if you're as unprepared for wobble as I was for jungle when jungle hit me, I think wobble could very well seem just as mad and revolutionary. The complete redefinition of rhythmic and melodic drive, the constant chopping and deformation of the bass lines, not really being "lines" any more, but rather taking on a melodic and orchestrational aspect, and the completely new two-lane rhythmic structure, where everything is happening in concentrated packages of insanity between two lurching, monumental godzilla-steps, all this is redefining musical parameters and dancefloor dynamics on a scale that inevitably reminds you of jungle.

Now, comparing jungle and wobble, there's obviously also things that are very different. In particular, you can't but notice that there's fewer true "anthems" in wobble, and longer between the tracks that turns everything on the scene upside down. As far as I can tell, this happened on something like a monthly basis during the jungle heyday, and even though I'm not monitoring wobble that closely, it doesn't seem to be the case here. And I think this is because the whole setting is so very different. In the noughties dubstep scene that wobble came out of, and still is a part of in a way, everything just happened so much slower, every new 'nuum development immediately got adopted by the omnivorously eclectic, post historic hipster club scene, rather than being in direct competition with countless other strains of rave, as in the nineties. Dubstep and wobble have certainly mutated constantly and thoroughly, but never in a way that have seemed rushed or uncontrollable. Eventually, it got to the future, but it never seemed as hell bent on getting there as jungle, or gabber, or trance - or pretty much any kind of early nineties rave. And this is more or less still the situation, wobble have been dominant - and generally GREAT - for something like three or four years by now. Compared to jungle, that's a long time to be on top (how long did it take from jungle broke through to it started the jump up/jazzzzzz/techstep-ossification? Was it even two years?), but the reason might simply be that wobble is taking its time, delivering the goods at a much slower rate, and not trying to reach the mutational dead ends as fast as possible. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly means that it doesn't appear as fertile and hectically innovative as the leading rave forms of the previous decade.

In any case, wobble is great, often absolutely insane and utterly exiting, and it have definitely been the final proof that dubstep was indeed the new thing all the early devotees said it was. That the same devotees are now whining about how bad and wrong and stupid wobble is, is only more proof - that's exactly how it should be when the next generation comes along and take all the small innovations that was part of dubstep from the start, and turn them all the way up to eleven, getting rid of all the historical clutter so important to the first generation. Their whining is the strongest sign of health and actual, radical newness that the wobble scene could possibly get, and probably the main reason Simon Reynolds finally, sort of, saw the light. Not that he's really championing wobble, but he clearly got that dubstep now follows the familiar pattern repeating itself again and again throughout rave history (and, consequently, through Energy Flash): The new mutations that actually opens new doors and take things in new directions will always be seen as degenerations by the old guard, and always be described as stupid, unmusical, soulless, unintelligent, primitive, repetitive, monotone, all-the-same, just aggressive noise for losers/students/chavs/whoever you don't like, to go nuts to, and not least: This kind of talk is exactly indicating that something really interesting is happening.

It's actually nice to see Reynolds being consistent and still getting it, even if it took him some time, and even though he doesn't seem to have gotten really into it, as much as it would sort of make sense he did, considering that wobble might simply be just the thing he have been looking for for so long, and that he thought grime was: Rave cultures version of punk. But perhaps he finally gave up all hope that this would ever happen some time ago, and therefore can't really allow it to happen now that the truth is supposed to be that nothing new is happening/can happen, and that everything is retro culture. Strangely, some years ago I really thought that all possibilities of newness was forever exhausted, and certainly that something even remotely resembling punk would be impossible within rave culture, just a wish among those brought up on rock mythology for a magic moment to repeat itself. Nevertheless, here we are. Why anyone would waste their time on retro stuff when so much utterly, shockingly new is happening right nowis beyond me. But so little of it is yet recognised, I guess. Seeing wobble as the trailblazing new thing that it is, is one thing, getting a hold of and recognising the scope of the post-dubstep scene is something quite different.

Post-dubstep is a fitting name, not because it's signifying a post modern everything-goes-mindset of endless combinations and rave-historic excavations, and certainly not because it's "post" like post rock, always so tasteful and humble. No, post dubstep is post like post punk, and not just, as it has been claimed, because it's a collective term for a lot of actually quite different stuff that just shares some roots in dubstep, because that's actually not the case for a substantial part of the stuff that I think it makes sense to describe as post dubstep. Post dubstep is like post punk in that it's a heap of very different artist and sounds thriving in the new fertile musical environment being opened up by dubstep, just like post punk was an expansion into the endless possibilities made possible by punk. That is what's happening now, rather than the coherent and continuous scenius movement that the 'nuum have followed so far, we have all these people coming from all these different places, some actually from dubstep, some from breakcore or drum'n'bass, some from different strains of "club music", some from experimental hip hop, some even from electro and IDM/electronica, and of course some coming from nowhere really, just getting started doing music at all, inspired to do something by the overall sense of excitement and freedom, and they don't seem to think of themselves as a movement, they all have their own ideas as how to twist things and change the rules, to make stuff that is deliberately strange and dislocated and not necessarily "functional" like proper scenius 'nuum-music. As such it's much the same mindset as the experimental techno of the nineties, except that now it's generally driven by and permeated with the new sense of groove and overall viscerality of dubstep. Even when it's clearly brain/listening-music, it still seems fully aware of the physical impact as the necessary starting point when you want to utilize the force inherent in any kind of rave based music, even if it's for much more cerebral and "arty" ends. Which is pretty much the way most post punk - extremely arty and conceptual - was driven by punk, and what made it different from prog rock.

So yeah, I think post dubstep is sort of the right name, except perhaps that it's not all that snappy. But that's easily solved, just compress it to POSTSTEP and we're home, the perfect umbrella term for what is going on here, not least because there's probably not much that could solely be classified as poststep. Just like with post punk, it's more like a vast area full of things that are sufficiently apart to warrant their own labels. There's already a cornucopia of new terminology waiting to happen, and I'll try to use it as a launch pad to demonstrate my claim about how much truly new and unprecedented music poststep is coming up with:

WONKY HOUSE: I think this is an adequate name for a lot of the "future garage" stuff being discussed in the dissensus/blackdown-circuit, i.e. influenced by/parallel to UK funky, but more strange/twisted (well, "wonky"), and sometimes even good. Generally, though, this is the part of poststep that I find dull, and where it's pretty fair to describe it as tastefully feeble, uninventive and backward-looking. Far too much smooth house-emotionalism and this strange belief that some rather unremarkable "clever" details in the otherwise hopelessly regressive four to the floor drum programming somehow qualifies as innovation. Like the worst kinds of minimal and detroit-techno, the cognoscenti can recognise the ever-so-subtle syncopation that most people wouldn't, and that is supposed to elevate the simplistic main pulse to high art. Well, there still are some good things here, the Egyptrixx album Bible Eyes is surprisingly futuristic despite some obvious elements of newer minimal techno on the more straightforward 4/4 tracks. The Night Slugs label has released other good tracks, but mostly they're highly outnumbered by slightly-more-inventive-than-actual-house pseudo-house.

GHOST STEP: This is the hautological part of poststep, and perhaps the first strain to separate itself from the larger dubstep movement. The example par excellence here, looming high above everything else, is of course Burial, and the majority of the stuff going on is more or less descended from him. Which is all fine and dandy and have resulted in some highly enjoyable music - after all Burial made some of the absolutely greatest records of the last ten years, so it's hardly surprising that someone could get absorbed in his particular aesthetic and make something good with it as a template - but often it's not something I've felt especially compelled to follow, just like I've never felt Joy Division - to use that old comparison again - to be so compelling that I've wanted to immerse myself in the scene that was built on their particular vision. That said, there's also lot of potential here outside the completely Burialesque tradition. As mentioned earlier, Distance represent a related and yet completely different aesthetic, drawing on and subverting the "doomstep" elements of proper dubstep, and yet there's not many who have tried to follow that promising route. Strangely, some of the most interesting examples come from the American end of things, with connections to the "downtempo" scene (i.e. "posthop" below): In each their own way Lorn and Nosaj Thing create a kind of doomy-yet-hushed, dubstep-influenced post rave ghost music. Lorn is the most bombastic and cinematically melancholic, while Nosaj Thing, on his amazing debut Drift, manages to be as otherworldly and truly haunting as Burial without sounding even remotely like him. And interestingly, some of the best newer British ghoststep producers seem related to the downtempo aestehetic as well; both Illum Sphere and Ital Tek combine a kind of burial-derived hollow emotionalism with more rounded production structures and sleepy beats, as well as some of the more fractured videogame-elements that are getting increasingly used in the Californian scene as well. In this respect, Ital Teks Midnight Colour album, as the title suggests, seemingly try to tick off as many poststep boxes as possible. It's quite good actually, if perhaps a bit too long for something that polished and uniform.

POST HOP: This is the prime example of how people from a completely different and more or less stuck leftfield area suddenly seem to explode with creativity, seeing all sorts of new possibilities in the space opened up by dubstep. I've always been extremely suspicious of the downtempo/abstract hip hop/illbient scene that I guess is the roots of all this. Dull laid back stoner music made even more dull by an oppressive knowledge of hip hop history. Intellectually righteous pomo mashup, really. Overlapping with the J Dilla end of things, which always left me cold as well. All those things are still, to some degree, present somewhere deep down inside the new poststep version, but all the same they have been eclipsed by a completely new style, drawing on anything from pure dubstep to chip tunes and computer game music to dreampop, sci fi soundtracks and seventies synth prog (Vangelis is being sampled a lot). OK, haven't this style always been drawing on many of those influences, you might ask? Well, it has, but hitherto only in the sample collage sense - as cool styles to drop into the mix, flavours and references to be recognised. Now, on the other hand, they're used as integrated parts of the compositional structures. Rather than just finding some oldschool arcade bleeps or eerie sci fi synth and placing them on top of a stoned beat, new producers like Free the Robots, Mono/Poly and Shlohmo seem to take these elements as the starting points and build a whole new world with them - music that is actually futuristic because its inventing new and strangely contemporary equivalents to the forms where these elements once was used, rather than just combining stuff that signal "futuristic".

I've never cared much for Flying Lotus, who was arguably one of the first to take things in this direction. Somehow he never fully got free of the aforementioned downtempo trappings (see also Samiyam), and even when he really tries to tear up the rulebook and disrupt all the usual structures, like on last years Cosmogramma, to me it somehow comes off as just aimless. Which is why it was such a surprise to encounter a record like Shlohmos Shlohmoshun Deluxe, technically belonging to the Flying Lotus family, but all the same working on all the levels that traditional down tempo isn't. And then discover that there were many more producers from the same Californian milieu doing things equally new and exciting, yet not necessarily similar. In Shlomos case, the drowsy laidback mood that is always such a turn off in downtempo have turned forebodingly unearthly and worn, sometimes on the brink of disintegration, and with an almost glitchy feel which somehow merges perfectly with the Zomby-like dislocated arpeggios and angular stabs of bass, sometimes clearly drawing on wobble. It's simultaneously reminiscent of the early Octagon Mans rigor mortis-electro and a pixelated version Reqs proto-hauntological meditations on sample based entropy and decay, yet it all comes together as a completely self contained vision, diagnosing the messy world of now just as convincingly as Burial or Zomby. The same holds to some degree for Dibiase, related but also quite different, going all 8bit/Nintendo-crazy on machines Hate Me, probably the clearest example of what could be called bit hop, a small sub genre slowly coalescing within post hop. It's a record that is actually loaded with very obvious "historical" samples, from both video games and old school hip hop, but which nevertheless manages to make it sound disturbingly disoriented and fractured. Rather than a cosy exercise in feel good nostalgia, the album is a treacherous maze of mangled memory fragments and jarring sonic scrap. Closer in spirit to The Residents' Third Reich'n'Roll than any contemporary "mash up".

The grainy digital entropica of Shlohmo and Dibiase is only one part of post hop, though, and others - most prominently Take and Free the Robots - take things in the opposite direction, while clearly belonging to the same "movement". Here there's also plenty of 8bit cascades and heavy, at times pseudo-wobbly machine bass, but it's also extremely well produced, not to mention well composed, with tracks unfolding like miniature stories or sonic short films, dazzling sci fi moodscapes that seem like a heir to both cosmic prog and space funk as well as chill out and trip hop, but all done in the new framework that has evolved in the intersection between (post) dubstep and (post) instrumental hip hop. A lot of the same elements that are found all over poststep are also present here: ghostly, futuristic alienation, glittering synthetic colours, "neon" as a metaphor for the luminous-yet-eerily-insubstantial quality of the overall moods. At times this kind of post hop gets too smooth or chilled or laid back funky, which is unfortunately, to some degree, the case with both Takes Only Mountain and Free the Robots Ctrl Alt Delete. Still, at their best - which they fortunately are on big parts of those albums albums -, they're magnificently bewitching, like an endless glide through kaleidoscopic dreamspaces, as succulent and engulfing as they're strangely disturbing and bittersweet.

Post hop is probably one of the largest and most popular fractions of poststep, not least because it's partly build upon a pretty big and well established scene. However, where this scene seemed stuck and irrelevant just a few years ago, now all of a sudden it's coming up with all sorts of new forms that seem to constitute a small revolution within the dowtempo/chill hop community. There's even a lot of it I don't particularly care for, especially all that going in a indietronica-ish direction (like, say, Tokimonsta), but I can still appreciate that they're making their contribution to the overall sea change. And there's also a lot of stuff outside the Californian stronghold, like the early stuff by Lukid and Rustie, or to some degree Robot Koch, who, like Ital Tek, is pretty much all over the poststep map. Few of those are as consistent as the best of the Californians, but they're all part of the larger picture.

BITSTEP: This is where things get really amazing in my opinion, and probably something like the big, all-connecting hub of poststep: Almost all other kinds of post dubstep intersects with bitstep, mostly sharing some characteristics but not all. Still, there's also a lot of stuff that is exclusively bitstep, even though it's difficult to define it precisely. Something that doesn't belong anywhere else, yet is clearly poststep, usually sounds very much like bitstep, even if it doesn't directly use the defining 8bit sounds, computer game effects or pixelated arpeggio madness. It's a bit like those elements - jerky angular rhythms, jagged scraps of trebly-scratchy guitar, punky dub-funk bass -, that are often a sort of shorthand for post punk, even though a lot of post punk didn't use them. In a similar way, the collapsing dubstep syncopations, stumbling 8bit-patterns and labyrinthine, ever-fracturing dynamics of bitstep will, I hope, eventually be the stylistic summing up of poststep. This is the greatest, most world shattering revolution developed in the wake of dubstep, and it's what ought to be recognised and championed as the essence, so far, of poststep, rather than some inhibited house-mutation.

Some try to dismiss all this by claiming that the 8bit and Nintendo-elements makes it retro music, or at the very least dependent on a historical knowledge, but I suspect that people making this claim haven't heard much bitstep, or have only listened for the elements here or there which can be used to support their dismissal. Bitstep is generally no more retro-chip tune or dependent of Nintendo soundtrack history than, say, The Slits or PiL were retro dub or dependent of historical reggae scholarship. The 8bit elements have been popping up in different kinds of electronic music - techno, rave, electro, hardcore, you name it - practically as long as these styles have existed, sometimes in a specifically melodious way, sometimes as abstract sound effects, sometimes as clear historic references, and sometimes as a hitherto unheard new idea. Bitstep takes this last tendency and runs with it, creating a whole new, completely unprecedented aesthetic fully exploiting the 8bit techniques potential for wild abstraction, yet at the same time inventing an equally new and unheard form of melodiousness out of those very abstractions.

This is where Zomby really ought to be classified. Especially on his early releases he was pretty much the archetypical bitstep producer, along with a substantial part of the Hyperdub roster back when that label had a legitimate claim to the leading edge: Quarta 330, Cardopusher, the early Ikonika, the early Darkstar ("Squeeze My Lime" is perhaps the greatest single of the noughties, while North was an equally great disappointment). Runner up as bitsteps founding label is Ramp, which, in addition to several Zomby-releases (and a lot of other slightly bitstep related stuff of different quality), released the "Gritsalt" 12" by Slugabed, pretty much taking things to the next level after Zomby. Slugabed made a bunch of remixes and contributions to compilations and split records until he released the - so far - definitive bitstep milestone, the Ultra Heat Treated-ep, kind of the crowning achievement of 2010 as the greatest poststep year yet. Pretty much taking all the most wild and colourful elements of 8bit-influenced dubstep and practically inventing a new language with them, breaking them into jagged, unbelievably contorted pieces and then reassembling them in bizarre patterns, abstract cascades of 8bit-splinters somehow coming together with a paradoxical melodiousness, syncopations so bizarrely twisted that they're practically dysfunctional, yet at the same time almost as forceful and invigorating as full on wobble. Quite simply one of the most revolutionary and radically new records of any period - if anyone could listen to this and not hear the shock of the future, then they could just as well have been listening to "Acid Tracks" in 1987 and dismissed it as a regurgitation of disco, or to Are We Not Men? in 1978 and dismissed it as retro-prog.

Slugabed, and in particular Ultra Heat Treated - his new ep Moonbeam Rider is still pretty great and unique but unfortunately also more polished and smooth - might be the peak of bizarre bitstep so far, but luckily he's far from alone, others have joined and develop the style further: labels like Error Broadcast, Low Riders and Donkey Pitch, artists like Loops Haunt, Ghost Mutt and Coco Bryce. Some of them take things in an even more abstract direction, all dysfunctional beats and kaleidoscopic sound splinters, and others, like Suckafish P. Jones and Eprom, while equally twisted and colourful, somehow manage to be almost wobble-ravey. There's also a more atmospheric direction, spearheaded by Jamie Vex'D/Kuedo - on the In System Travel and Dream Sequence eps - and Dam Mantle, whose incredibly strange and uncanny Purple Arrow ep might be second only to Ultra Heat Treated as the greatest poststep release of 2010. And then there's of course the many examples of bitstep merging with other poststep trends, as well as more open ended crossover artists: Lazer Sword, Robot Koch, Starkey, SRC etc.

WONKY WOBBLE/(WONKLE?)/RAVE-STEP: The wobbly-ravey end of bitstep blends into a larger trend within straightforward rave dubstep and wobble: a style that is simultaneously meant to be full-on tear out dancefloor-anthems, yet utilises a lot of weird'n'wonky bit/post-step tricks to make things even MORE mental. Some of this is just wobble with added catchy poststep elements - typically 8bit bleeps or quirky detuned bass sweeps -, others make full blown poststep weirdness that just happens to work on a hyped up wobble dancefloor as well, and a lot of it falls in between: dubstep and poststep at the same time. Not much to add to that, actually, except that at its best it's a great example of a truly popular avant garde, in the great rave pulp modernism-tradition - i.e. also quite scenius. I guess labels like Bad Acid and Rwina are the leading exponents here, and some of the best representatives could be artists like Geste, Rachet or Doshy.

HYPERGRIME: In a lot of ways poststep have revitalised the potential for strangeness and newness that was originally present in grime, but which somehow got eclipsed as that genre got to be more and more about MC egos, while the actual music - the instrumental, non-narrative element once so sharp and radical - more or less got reduced to an opportunistic afterthought that could be pretty much anything. A lot of the things that made early grime seem so revolutionary have returned in poststep, and are now being used and further developed as an aesthetic in its own right, rather than as a purely functional means to back up an MC: The ultra synthetic plastic sounds, the bombastic, fanfare-like riff-melodies, the almost preposterously inorganic syncopations. As dubstep became the route that most instrumentalists would take away from grime proper, these elements became sort of forgotten, until the poststep scene created a whole new place for them, practically divorced from the scene actually descendant from the original grime scene, and finally allowed to flourish and evolve.

The key example is of course Terror Danjah, one of the only first generation grime producers that fleshed out the instrumental side of the style and used it as an end in itself, a lab for wild experimentation and invention with sound design, complexity and new compositional structures. From being slightly forgotten, the amazing Gremlinz-retrospective suddenly put him back in the front line as a part of the general poststep landscape, as an inspiration and forerunner for a lot of the prevailing ideas, and demonstrating the huge, still untapped futuristic potential in grime when the pure sonic aspect of the style is being recognised. Afterwards he was immediately embraced by the poststep scene, and a whole bunch of releases flowed from him in 2010, not least on the two most influential poststep labels, Hyperdub and Planet MU. Most of it was pretty good, with the Hyperdub album Undeniable getting most accolades. Personally I'm not completely convinced by that - mostly because of the vocals - while I find the sadly somewhat overlooked mini-album Power Grid on Planet MU much more compelling: Precise, intense, bursting with ideas and innovation, and fitting the overall poststep feel of newness and freshness like a glove.

Of course Danjah is not alone, and fully formed experimental/instrumental grime seem to have a bit of a heyday right now, independent of the MCs and allowed to go its own way, which seem to run parallel to the rest of poststep. Labels like Earth616, No Hats No Hoods and Oil Gang, and artists like Teeza, Swindle and Darq E Freaker, push this new grimestrumental-breed into still more exaggerated, twisted and complex shapes. A really strange part of all this is the Belgian DJ Elephant Power, who started out as one of those mash up DJs who utilised grime as yet another exotic flavour, never really being a part of the scene as such (he also did glichy collage stuff), but ravey dubstep apparently showed him a much more exiting and convincing way to have a mad party, and his Elepha in da Flash-album is one of the best poststep party records out there, at its best giving cartoony-grimy tracks some of the energy of tear out wobble.

SKWEEE: Much like the Californian downtempo-scene, this Scandinavian style developed on its own, but now seem to be an obvious part of the larger poststep-whole. It utilises elements present all over poststep - hyper-syncopated electro funk beats, twisted 8-bit melodies and deliberately synthetic neon synths - yet it all comes together in a way that is all its own, sometimes perhaps a bit too conscious of the eighties electro-aesthetics, sounding more like what used to sound futuristic rather than actually sounding futuristic. Most of the time, though, it's either some of the most strange and unheard, undeniably new and futuristic stuff to have come out in the last five years, or it has the "lost future" feel so central to poststep, sounding like the blurred memory of an unknown future that should have been happening right now. This is the case with records like Daniel Savio's Dirty Bomb and Nekropolis, as well as Rigas den Andre's Guilty Feet, No Rhythm, while artist like Limonious, V.C. and Mesak (on his new stuff) go all the way into the unknown. With his debut lp House of Usher, Limonious is up there with Zomby, Slugabed and Dam Mantle as one of the most revolutionary poststep-producers, twisting beats and melodies into shapes so absurdly angular and unnatural - and yet so paradoxically catchy - that it seems impossible to even start to look for something to compare it with - except perhaps some of his most out-there skweee-colleagues.

At its best, skweee is a bit like what industrial was to post punk: In many ways a quite different aesthetic coming from a different and unique background, yet sharing some central aspects of the overall vision (structural disintegration and hyper-syntheticity with poststep, transgression and starkness/bleakness/coldness with post punk) and thus becoming an integral part of the whole, sometimes sounding unlike anything else, sometimes almost indistinguishable from more "archetypical" poststep-forms, and sometimes clearly influencing artist from other areas. Bitstep-ish producers like Coco Bryce and Nino have already pledged allegiance to skweee, while the French "post funk" maverick Debruit seem to have reached a closely related sound independently.

JUKESTEP: During the last couple of years, juke/footwork have become the club connoisseurs great black hope for the next big scenius thing. Personally I can't say I'm completely convinced by juke, and not just because it's so functional and scene-driven that there's an almost intolerable low hit-to-filler-ratio, though that's definitely also a part of it. Most of all, I just can't see it as being all that radical and new. The super fast rolling drum machine patterns sound strangely regressive to me, after all we've been through jungle and 2-step and Timbaland-style r'n'b beat-science, and then this kind of busy clutter of 808-sounds seem almost old fashioned, and almost like the sort of thing you'll always come up with when you try to make really complicated and weird high speed beats on a drum machine, but eventually give up on exactly because you think it sounds a bit too forced in it's complicated high speed-weirdness, a bit too obviously held back by the equipments limitations when it comes to exactly this kind of beat science. And then there's the vocal science. Well, what vocal science? It's not like looping one vocal sample throughout an entire track is some sort of revolutionary new concept - really unimaginative producers have certainly done it in other sorts of electronic dance music all since the early nineties, if not earlier. Only, they rarely did it so unimaginatively, and perhaps that's the whole point: the vocal loops in juke are clearly meant to be detached and primitivistic. It just doesn't make them less dull or annoying.

Still, I'm slowly warming a bit to juke, it seems to become better and more innovative, and I seem to be hearing more tracks that are actually pretty good - with ideas and weird, unearthly moods, and beat structures that actually seem as multidimensional as they're said to be. While I thought that the first juke solo-albums on Planet MU - DJ Nate's Da Track Genious and DJ Roc's The Crack Capone - was completely absurd (who on earth would ever listen to such endless, one dimensional endurance tests all the way through), I must say the Bangs & Works-compilation is a brilliant introduction with a good selection of (mostly) very good tracks, and the new DJ Diamond album Flight Muzik is actually really good - engaging and fascinating tracks with lots of ideas and personality almost all the way through. Which takes us to the point, namely that juke is also being used as one of the main inspirations in a lot of new poststep. First of all, it's worth noticing that a lot of record shops actually file juke records as dubstep, even though it comes from a completely different scene and context and doesn't sound even remotely like dubstep. This seems pretty weird, but I suppose it's a reflection of the fact that, outside the actual, original core audience in Chicago, for which it's a pretty much isolated sound dictated by its functional context, the international audience for juke is exactly the poststep audience that uses it as a new set of useful ideas in their general search for futuristic beat-abstraction. And I actually think that it often works much better in this way than with "true", authentic juke. Which is of course the absolute opposite of how it used to be with the scene/lone artist dynamic in electronic dance music. Unlike, say, jungle, where the crossover and electronica outsiders takes on it always seemed a bit tame compared to the real thing, with juke, I often find that it's a fresh angle that just need to be used for something, and that's what the poststep producers are doing.

Sure, it's not always a success, something like Machinedrums Room(s)-album is just the kind of predictable IDM fusion mush you'd expect from an electronica veteran who have utilised different strands of new underground dance sounds as exotic-authentic flavours for ten years. But with many others, it makes much more sense: On the new albums from Kuedo and Sully, as well as Dam Mantles awesome new ep We, the juke beats simply works as a fully integrated aspect of the overall sound, to the degree where you sometimes doesn't even notice them- they're just a part of what makes the music strange and unique. Both Kuedo and Sully certainly have backward looking aspects (Dam Mantle is still sounding like little else), but I can't really hear them sounding "retro" at all - at most perhaps slightly "hautological" - and a reason for that is precisely because they've managed to integrate weird and destabilising elements - like juke beats - so smoothly into the whole.

Still, more interesting is the possible concept of "jukestep", a more equal combination of juke techniques and poststep aesthetics. You DO hear more and more of this cropping up I think, though so far only Jamie Grinds Footwork-ep - of what I've heard - make it work really convincingly. But I'm sure more is on the way. And you could also ask if it has to be poststep producers approaching juke, couldn't it be the other way round? Some of the more ambitious juke producers might notice the potential of the poststep scene that is giving them so much credit, and eventually try to approach it from their side. Perhaps this is what happened with DJ Diamond, the reason Flight Muzik is so unorthodox and intriguing. I have no way of knowing, but it would certainly be an interesting development. Perhaps juke is playing much the same role as avant garde jazz played in relation to post punk: A beguiling contemporary frontier of far out extremism and abstraction, eventually creating a loosely defined interzone where you can't really say what is what and which practitioners might originally have come from each starting point.

In addition to these more or less major trends, there's also a lot of other, different poststep-things going on, some being small micro-developments by a single producer or label, others having a potential still waiting to unfold. There's the 8bit-dub invented by Disrupt and his Jahtari-label; it's often regressing into lame digi-reggae, but at its best - basically meaning Tapes and Disrupt himself - it's truly unique and innovative, somehow tuning into the same vision as many other poststep producers, yet not sounding like them at all. There's Anti-G and his incredible Presents Kentje'sz Beatsz-album, apparently a kind of bizarre experimental version of the duch "bubbling" sound, and definitely some of the most mental and jaw-droppingly strange music I've heard this year. There's Debruit, who might have a lot in common with skweee, but who is also his very own twisted thing. There's the dream-step of the Tri Angle-label (Balam Acab, Clams Casino etc.), often a bit too indie-friendly for my taste, but clearly creating their own path. And then there's this concept of "post bassline" which I've seen mentioned somewhere (dissensus?) recently - bassline producers going eccentric/experimental - which I haven't investigated further, but it's obviously something that could happen, and could be very fascinating. You could perhaps also suggest something like post wobble - not the kind of experimental rave dubstep discussed earlier, but rather the harsh, industrial textures of the most brutal wobble forms turned into experimental mood music. Former Vex'D member Roly Porter goes all the way into dark ambient on Aftertime, but it seems obvious that some might eventually create an in between sound.

Today, nobody's encouraged to think of the music they make as a factor of actual social/political/philosophical impact or consequence, and nobody seems interested in hearing those things in it. Music is music and even though you might have big and ambitious aspirations for it, whether as artist or listener, they're always purely aesthetic aspirations. Music is now a part of the endless flickering landscape of choices and distractions - youtube hits and briefly exiting micro trends -, and neither listeners nor producers are able to focus entirely on one clear vision and use it to build an ongoing dialogue with or response to these troubling times. However, you could argue that poststep is a brilliant expression of the zeitgeist exactly because of this, because the vision it is creating - more or less subconsciously I guess - is a sense of flickering, dislocated unreality, caught somewhere between a perpetually disintegrating mosaic of bizarre shapes and colours, and a ghostly yearning for something unknown or half forgotten that ought to be here. And if that isn't how right now feels, I don't know what is.

Maybe there's a few places in my pieces about dubstep and mainstyle-gabber where it looks like I'm kinda badmouthing breakcore. And, to some degree, I am. Breakcore is bloody problematic to me in a lot of ways. Despite the fact that it developed out of the more-or-less experimental hardcore scene that I've loved for so long, and despite the fact that I was totally into it in the beginning and bought lots of records, and even though I still love and regularly listen to a lot of said records, it was pretty obvious for me right from the start that this stuff wasn't going to have a - let alone be the - future. For a start, the name is a dead giveaway, so sadly uninspired that it's almost directly proclaiming a lack of ambition - this music is just a combination, and a rather obvious one at that. It's hardcore with breakbeats, innit. Jungle meeting gabber. It had to happen, and of course a combination of two of the greatest forms of rave ever has to deliver some good stuff, but the point is that just adding up stuff doesn't automatically advance the used elements in themselves. Breakcore didn't develop neither jungle nor gabber any further. At best it managed to revitalize them slightly, but mostly by placing them in a new context.

Of course, it might not have been 100% doomed from the start. Dupstep, despite having an equally lame name, and also starting as a kind of obvious combination (something like instrumental grime+2step+tech step), eventually ended up with it's own powerful innovations, taking a giant leap forward. It just didn't happen with breakcore, and for some reason it never felt like it actually could. But why? I guess it has something to do with the core audience and the producers, mostly coming from styles already infected with either anti-rave crossover aesthetics or an ironic mash up approach. Two of the most crucial elements making up the breakcore scene is probably lapsed IDM-nerds, lured into breakbeats by drill'n'bass rather than jungle/'ardcore, and former Digital Hardcore-disciples with much more of a noise/punk approach than a rave one. That would be a huge part of the American segment I'd say - digital hardcore was surprisingly big in the US, maybe just as big as any kind of genuine rave music (of which I'm not counting house), and the same goes for breakcore too I suppose.

Anyway, the point is that a large fraction of those making breakcore were kinda doing post-rave mix-it-all-up music right from the start, working with self conscious deconstruction, references and parody rather than developing the musics genetic material from within. Too large a fraction for breakcore to ever free itself from the gravitational pull of the past, the knowledge of history, and engage a sufficiently amount of new blood. Unlike dubstep, which, no matter what people like K-Punk or Reynolds want to believe, certainly have a large audience - and probably a growing roster of new producers as well - that are not scholars of 'nuum history. This is the reason why, despite all the great music, breakcore never convinced me the way dubstep did, and why it probably never could have developed into a really fertile rave scene. To get the full meaning of breakcore, you had to know too much, there's no starting from zero. Which is finally, to some degree, getting us to the point of this piece: Because even though the majority of breakcore is made up of either: 1) extremely hard and noisy jungle overloaded with ragga samples, 2) drill'n'bass beefed up and rhythmically anchored by massive gabber bass drum density, 3) silly plunderphonic party music, 4) post DHR-noisefests with punishing amen shrapnel, 5) sluggish industrial goth-core or 6) a combination of any or all of the above, breakcore was also an extremely versatile genre. The producers came from a huge variety of backgrounds, and it all became part of the sound, which could be anything from absolutely serious noise/art-experimentalism to feel good party music.

As much as breakcore lack a truly independent, collective movement, and never managed to create a new, unique and defining sound separating it from its sources, it also has a much higher maverick ratio than perhaps any other electronic music of the last twenty years. Precisely by not being a scenious movement, breakcore had plenty of room for geniuses, or at least producers creating their very own odd take on things. This is where the great breakcore innovations are to be found, and of course, none of them initiated a movement, they were all specialized signature curiosities, personal micro-innovations that could hardly be followed by anyone else without plagiarising them. As a result, there's a big treasure chest of wonderful and thoroughly enjoyable breakcore to be excavated, and while the genre have few defining classics (let alone anthems), there's plenty of amazing obscurities, as well as stuff that's just so bloody original that it can't help to fascinate. So here we go, a collection of 15 more or less unsung breakcore gems:

Patric Catani: Hitler 2000 (Digital Hardcore Recordings)
Perhaps the greatest artist on DHR, and definitely the one who made the best records released by the label. Alec Empire is probably as good as Catani overall, but his best records remain the albums he did for Mille Plateaux, even if he also made some good ones for his own label as well. While Empires Destroyer is one of the few truly trailblazing breakcore records, opening the amen-punk route followed by far too many, it's nowhere as great as this, which shows how inventive, funny, destructive and sometimes even downright groovy breakcore can be. Some people talk about Shizou as the pinnacle of DHR; I've got absolutely no idea why. To me he seems pretty anonymous and stereotypical. Others mention Christoph de Babalon, but even though his highly praised If You're Into It, I'm Out of It-album IS pretty good, it's also slightly overrated, a bit uneven quality-wise, while probably a bit too even in mood and atmosphere. Hitler 2000 is quite the opposite, sticking in all sorts of weird, twisted directions, from the baroquely contortive to the nightmarishly beautiful, and most of it not sounding like anything else in breakcore, though maybe at times slightly foreshadowing later developments. With it's superb balance of earshredding noise and mangled grooves, Hitler 2000 was in many ways the next big leap forward in breakcore, since 1997s foundational records like Panaceas Low Profile Darkness, DJ Scuds early eps and Alec Empires aforementioned Destroyer, while simultaneously remaining a unique, inimitable entity. It kind of map out the scenes potential, you could say, and consequently, in a lot of ways, the journey begins here. Mind you, Catanis trashy fictitious computer game soundtrack The Horrible Plans of Flex Busterman might actually be his greatest achievement for DHR, but that's not really breakcore, and unfortunately not something anyone really followed.

No-Tek 5 - Urban Break Corps (No-Tek)
A brilliant obscurity from the transitional phase in french hardcore, where the cutting edge switched from manic speedcore to twisted breakcore. Apparently, No-Tek is both a label and a producer, and responsible for some of the greatest of that french speciality, psychedelic gabber. This four track EP, which is actually kind of a mini-compilation involving Psai-Zone, Axl and "Znobr the Break Fucker" as well, is in a much more loose and grungy territory. It's still driven gabber bass drums as hard and heavy as big blocks of concrete, but they've become strangely rolling and syncopated and countered by rattling breakbeats, creating the overall impression of rusty and ramshackle machinery pushing ahead despite being close to a breakdown.

Cavage09 - Sans Dessus Dessous (Cavage)
Mostly known for organizing raves in the Paris catacombs and sewers, which is obviously enough to give them eternal cult status, the Cavage label was also a central cog in the french breakcore scene, mirroring the developments made by experimental-hardcore-institution Praxis, which made a shift from industrially sounding four-to-the-floor mayhem to industrially sounding splatter breakbeats around the time Cavage started. Cavage became the french part of the whole milieu surrounding Praxis - including labels like Ambush and Deadly Systems, the c8-website and the Datacide-magazine -, and released a string of compilations centered around prime mover and label mastermind Saoulaterre, aka Boris Domalain, also working as Gorki Plubakter and DXMédia (and often on the same record), and accompanied by a floating roster of artists like Nurgle de Trolls, Gamaboy and Praxis stalwarts like Dan Hekate and Nomex. In this way, the Cavage records are not so much traditional compilation albums as they're the latest adventures of Boris and friends, and the style change according to his current whims and whoever is otherwise participating. The most recent Cavage record, number 14, is absolutely brilliant, but couldn't really be called breakcore by any stretch of the definition. Rather, it's deeply psychedelic avant garde hardcore, simultaneously beautiful, noisy, sorrowful and disorienting/terrifying, and definitely worth tracking down. For their breakcore output however, they were probably never better or more unique than on Cavage09, where all traces of traditional breakcore clichés are practically gone There is one single lame cliché on the album, in the form of a short and utterly generic noise track, but the rest is a bizarre and captivating mix of twisted french hip hop, drifting psychedelic soundscapes and slowly-disintegrating-yet-deeply-groovy breakbeats, not to mention even more odd elements like stuttering guitar riffs and oldie show tune-samples. This might sound like it's one of those annoying everything-goes-no-genres-binding-us-we-can-and-will-fuse-everything-we-please records, but what's so amazing is that it actually isn't. The weird mix of styles and ideas never sounds like forced eclecticism, it's all just coming together in a way that seems obvious and right and so much it's own strange thing - physically searing and totally ravey while at the same time permeated with a strange sense of loss and sadness - that you hardly even notice that it's actually a combination of pretty awkward elements.

Electromeca: Riddim (Casse Tête)
The most successful french breakcore label is probably Peace Off, specializing in archetypical breakcore styles from a huge cluster of international leaders in the field, like Sickboy and Doormouse. Electromeca could be described as something like Peace Offs secret weapon, their one true claim to innovative fame and on a completely different level from what's otherwise on the label - a bit like Req on Skint, you could say. It often seems like Electromeca is the breakcore producers breakcore producer, recognised within the scene as something extraordinary, but still somewhat unknown outside it. His trademark is the incredibly heavy, crunchy rhythms, treacherously chopped start-stop-syncopations that are nevertheless infectiously funky and groovy where most breakcore is linear and frenetic. The Batteling Doll Beats-ep on Peace Off is arguably the definitive Electromeca record, showcasing his style at its most pure and effective, but this one hits harder, so intricately brutalized that it's almost disintegrating, and yet it still delivers an irresistible dancefloor impact.

Inushini: Inushini (Ohm 52)
It's not easy to dig up information about this guy. There's a myspace-page, but as usual that isn't much help. He seems to be german, and given a split LP with Society Suckers, perhaps from Chemnitz/Karl Marx Stadt as well, or at least from the former East Germany. It would certainly make sense considering the music, which is easily the most bleak, grainy, gritty, grimy, low res-sample rate damaged breakcore you're ever going to hear. The sound of a world turned into one big polluted, frozen, industrial dump, an absolute forsaken wasteland of dead sounds and sonic dirt. In a way, it's breakcores very own hauntology. A few of the tracks are aggressive noise+amen attacks with a clear DHR influence, like bursts of desperation in an otherwise worn out world, but mostly, this is a record of atmospheric and understated breakcore, often saturated with an almost unbearable, ghostly, heartbreaking sadness. An obvious comparison could be Christoph de Babalons highly praised If You're Into It, I'm Out of It-album, but Inushini is actually better and more powerful.

LFO Demon/ FFF: Clash of the Titans (Sprengstoff)
Probably the most successful rave-anthemic breakcore producer around, and definitely the most versatile, LFO Demon only tangentially belong to the genre. His secret weapon is an utterly honest and heartfelt love for the Mokum school of cheesy happy gabber, and this record even contain a track - which is obviously totally great - called "Mokum Riddim". His best tracks are true anthems because they're free from any hint of irony or mockery, he simply makes euphoric hardcore rave so irresistibly catchy that you think you're back in '92, not because the music sounds like a retro construction a la Zombys back-to-'92-album, but exactly because it doesn't. What LFO Demon resurrect is the future buzz itself, through a music that is clearly contemporary. It's only the feeling it ignites that isn't. The three tracks on LFO Demons half of this split EP - the other half is pretty good but also much more ordinary ragga-breakcore - are all among his most anthemic tracks, combining breakbeats, ragga samples and incredibly catchy gabber, and are probably the closest he have ever been to something that can be adequately identified as breakcore - even though that still isn't all that close, maybe it's more a kind of raggabber, as I've once seen it described. In any case, it's just one side of his polymorphous talent, stretching from psychedelic experimental hardcore to gloomy and achingly beautiful electronica. I really should make an entire post about him some time.

Ove-Naxx: Ove-Chan Dancehall (Adaadat)
Japanese gameboy-breakcore, rhythmically pretty similar to the typical Venetian Snare-ish beat-butchery, viciously thrashing forward while constantly stumbling over its own feet. What makes it special, though, is the exquisite sense of melodic playfulness and the highly inventive arrangements patching together all sorts of twisted dynamics and mad build ups. It's the kind of thing that could very well have been totally annoying, but somehow Ove-Naxx manage to make it thoroughly enjoyable with just the right amount of cartoonish charm. Also worth mentioning is his ability to actually use the bleepy arcade sounds in new and sprawling ways, as an inspiration in the original sense of the word, rather than as a signifier of a particular era and sound. Is Ove-Naxx what some people call clownstep? If so, I'm all for clownstep.

Slepcy: And Again (Ambush)
This polish duo took the most abstract avant-noise end of breakcore - the early Ambush/Praxis-axis as well as the more extreme parts of DHR- to the logical conclusion, eventually creating something that was as close to musique concrete as to jungle. It's also sonic violence of epic, almost wagnerian proportions, like monumental cathedrals made of sonic scrap metal and nerve gas. Certainly an example of breakcore in thrall to the noise scenes quest for self-indulgent extremism, but it nevertheless manage to turn completely atonal and hostile abstraction into something truly thrilling and strangely spellbinding. Slepcys greatest achievement is probably the peculiar electronica-ish LP We Are the Newest Battle Models, only containing superficial vestiges of breakcore, but this one is arguably their most crucial, simply because it defines the outer limits of this specific strain of breakcore - how far it can be taken as well as to how good it can be done.

Overcast: 3PM ETERNAL (Bloody Fist)
We mainly think of Bloody Fist as crusaders of the most distorted and ruthless speedcore gabber imaginable, probably a notion primarily based on the success of the early Nasenbluten stuff. As it happens, the label always had room for fast, noisy breakbeats, and a lot of their records actually contain a kind of proto-breakcore, as well as full blown breakcore later on. 3PM ETERNAL was one of the last Bloody Fist releases before the label closed in 2004, the magnum opus of label owner and Nasenbluten member Mark Newlands, and clearly a labour of love - to the degree that "love" is a word that can be used in any relation to Bloody Fist at all. Despite being a declared lo-fi Amiga primitivist, Newlands is also a highly skilled DJ in the traditional b boy-sense - cutting up records, scratching and building his tracks as raw sample collages. That approach is pretty much the starting point for this records, which only contain a few remnants of the terrorcore mayhem usually associated with Bloody Fist. The result is a kind of breakcore, based as it is on punishing breakbeats and industrial noise, but it's not really like any other breakcore out there - it's more like the breakcore answer to, or mutilation of, the whole Ninja Tune/Mo Wax/Depth Charge journey-by-DJ aesthetic. Not mashup like all that tiresome Kid606/Shitmat/Jason Forrest-pomo-idiocy, this is this thing done right: massive breaks, ugly samples and gritty gloomcore coming together to form a style so consistent that it seems almost obvious, while still being unique to Newlands.

Shiver Electronics: Soultrade (Widerstand)
Doomy breakcore fused with 8 bit atmospheres and horror movie samples, in many ways silly like old school gabber, but also very evocative, almost epic. Like Overcast, Shiver Electronics have forged a very personal style that seems so right that you'd think it was part of a long tradition, yet there isn't really anyone else doing anything quite like it.

Karl Marx Stadt: 2001 - 2004 (Lux Nigra)
The brainchild of Christian Gierden, who is probably best known as half of the Society Suckers, a pretty great, if much more ordinary, breakcore duo, whose Not the SUCKERS Again-ep contain some of the most irresistibly catchy tracks the genre have ever produced. As Karl Marx Stadt he's trying out all sorts of strange ideas, and while the first KMS-ep 1997-2001 was an uneven hodgepodge of mostly IDM-influenced hybrid styles, this one is pretty focused on a unique vision, with the exception of the closing "All I Wanna Do", which is a standard lazy mash up that tries too hard to be funny, and "Nsk 1 Shareoom", which is truly beautiful, music box-twinkling electronica. The rest is opulent breakcore where massive choir- and orchestra-samples creates a cod-symphonic yet absolutely exhilarating apocalyptic vibe, further twisted by nutty 8 bit melodies and a hyperactive approach to composition that cram the tracks with details and ideas, yet somehow keeps its balance so it never seems cluttered or showy like the typical dril'n'bass-derived breakcore-programming.

Venetian Snares: Rossz Csillag Alatt Született (Planet MU)
This can hardly be called an obscure gem, Venetian Snares is, after all, something like the biggest breakcore figurehead around, and this is probably one of his most celebrated releases. However, it really has to be here - this is where he completely transcends his own formulas and makes something that truly stands alone. Mostly, his output have been so enormous, and so influential on the rest of the breakcore scene, that it's somehow drowning out itself, but this one defines it's own territory in a way that's more or less unrepeatable - that is, you might try to do something similar, but it would just make you look like a pathetic copycat. Of course, it's utterly contrived and overblown, with its mock avant garde stylings and hungarian melancholia and sad poems, but unashamed contrivedness have always been a big part of what makes Venetian Snares interesting, so it's all the better that he goes all the way here, and eventually makes some kind of framework for his power drill-breakbeats, gives them a point besides their own hardness and complexity.

Hecate: Negative World Status (Zhark London)
Once Hecate seemed to be something like the queen of goth-dustrial breakcore, and Venetian Snares' closest rival, but I don't really know how much that is the case any more. At some point I lost interest as she got too stuck in pseudo-occult horror movie theatrics and eventually even black metal wreckage, but I still cherish her early stuff, which actually managed to make the usual darker-than-thou overdrive truly scary. The clunky, butchered breaks have been drained of even the slightest vestige of funk or groove, but that's all part of the point here - like Inushini and Slepcy, this is breakcore as 21st century industrial through and through, a brutal, disintegrating soundscape rather than rave music.

Panacea: Chartbreaka (Position Chrome)
After creating one of the main breakcore blueprints with the industrial mayhem of Low Profile Darkness, Panacea went on to produce a heap of minmal-doomy and macho-metallic techstep, slightly thrilling in it's attempt to build the hardest, most single minded punishing headbanger-sound around, but obviously also very tiring in the long run. Eventually he started to cheer up, adding more silly and ravey elements while pledging allegiance to the original british 'ardcore together with DJ Scud. The culmination of that development was probably this triple 12" and its sister release Underground Superstardom, both kind of borderline records between rave-tastic breakcore and contemporary monster riffing drum'n'bass. It's tasteless and cheesy to the extreme, all bulid ups, mentasm hoovers and gothic pomp, and the main breakcore community certainly didn't like it at all. To these ears, though, it's simply some of the most exhilarating music this scene have ever come up with, not to mention the best Panacea have done since the first album.

Istari Lasterfahrer: "Breakcore" The Death of a Genre
A playful internal critique from one of the scenes most prolific producers, apparently realizing that the style is degenerating and becoming a parody of itself - hence this parody of its most tired mashup-ragga clichés. Lasterfahrer have always been oscillating between straightforward breakcore - like his masterpiece Do You Think, which somehow managed to find the perfect path between abstract hypersyncopation and the invigorating thrust of old school ragga jungle - and records that challenge the form through a more twisted, unorthodox approach. This one is a prime example of the latter, full of wit, charm and silly melodies, quirkily syncopated breaks and bright plastic sounds. On "Fuck with My Crew" the ruff ragga vocals are pitched up to near-helium hysteria, so they're losing the usual menacing machismo while simultaneously becoming sexless, alien and creepy. I don't think this record is meant to be the last word in breakcore, but perhaps it should be. Lasterfahrer mostly makes dubstep now, I think.

His real greatness, to my ears, is exactly in this area where he's a sort of a bordeline case within the traditional classical world, almost too far gone and esoteric to belong to it at all. Even someone like Penderecki seem rather old fashioned and retrospective by comparison, his extreme noisescapes related to the expressionistic outpourings of the late romantic school, whereas with a great deal of Stockhausen, it's like there isn't really any ties with any tradition. Things like Gruppen and the early chamber pieces obviously belong to the modern lineage, and his electronic pieces are clearly a part of the early electronic avant garde, but after that, he not only didn't sound like anything else, he didn't even sound like he had come from anything else. This is even the case with something like the monumental opera cycle Licht, or at least the parts I've heard, which are hardly recognizable as opera in any conventional sense. The only part of it I know in depth is Donnerstag, an overpowering work containing some truly strange and mysterious music (sometimes sounding like ethereal space jazz), as well as some parts that are actually rather silly, as you'd often find with the later Stockhausen. Equally idiosyncratic are the solo pieces for clarinet - Harlekin, Traum-Formel etc. -, you'd think that with something as specific as that it would at least sound a little related to some existing sound world, but it's actually some of his most odd and enigmatic creations, thoroughly alien and deeply intimate at the same time.

Writing in the Telegraph last year, Stephen Fry reflected: "Many of us like to believe that we understand the point of history. We all pay lip service to the idea that yesterday makes today, but it is hard to make the imaginative leap that truly connects us to the past. It is as if we are forced to move forwards in such a narrow passageway of time that the act of stopping to look behind us is difficult."

Fry surmised that the UK's blue plaques – erected to mark the physical locations occupied by people from history who have left a notable mark on our culture – were a living corrective to this. But are they really? What if these inert short-form stories were re-animated by augmenting the physical markers with a layer of digital information that made looking back in time from the present day a far easier, richer and more immediate experience? Wouldn't that be a greater step forward in terms of bringing history to life?

Even as Fry was writing this in June 2009, a project was already underway do just that - to open up that heritage and make it accessible, expanding the narrow passageway of time that Fry lamented.

Credit to kickstarting this goes to Frankie Roberto who came away from a conference on mobile learning for the museums and archives sector in January 2009 with a bee in his bonnet:

"You see them everywhere - especially when sat on the top deck of a double-decker bus in London - and yet the plaques themselves never seem that revealing. You've often never heard of the person named, or perhaps only vaguely, and the only clue you're given is something like "scientist and electrical engineer" (Sir Ambrose Fleming) or "landscape gardener" (Charles Bridgeman).

I always want to know more. Who are these people, what's the story about them, and why are they considered important enough for their home to be commemorated? I'd like to be able to find out all this, and to do so at the point at which I stumble across a plaque - which to me suggests something on a mobile platform."

In the 15 months since, this desire for deeper and more accessible context to these static emblems has crystallized in the Open Plaques initiative. An open source community project; it is also community-driven by necessity, due mainly to the data surrounding the UK plaques being fragmented between hundreds of bodies, and not only inconsistent but sometimes totally absent.

It gathered momentum when Frankie's early efforts caught the attention of Jez Nicholson, Simon Harriyott and Marvin Baretto who’d already (coincidentally) teamed-up to do a blue plaques project for the Open Hack London event in May 2009. So it happened that they prototyped a website that could pull this information together.

The Open Plaques service which emerged from this ad-hoc grouping (which I joined later last year) synthesises a number of tactics and workarounds to overcome the challenges it faces. As the plaques by their very existence are in public domain, Frankie has made a series of Freedom of Information requests for data and records of the plaques to several of the bodies that hold them, so they can aggregate them together and offer the data in standardised form for free re-use by others.

In turn, the already existent Blue Plaques group on Flickr proved useful and amenable, and the idea of using images from Flickr on the Open Plaques service gained an important leg-up when Flickr agreed to grant a "machine tag" option to photographs of plaques uploaded under a Creative Commons licence.

It's remarkably simple and works like this: each plaque location listed on the Open Plaques database (which you can search on their site by name, place or organisation) has a number. When the number is added as a machine code in the tags of the corresponding photograph on Flickr by the user – and if the user gives the photo a Creative Commons licence – the image is pulled from Flickr onto the Open Plaques website. The service also allows geo co-ordinates to be imported.

The site itself is still in Alpha phase of development but is already substantially populated - with 38.44% of 2297 known plaques in the database now having a corresponding machine-tagged photograph.

The whole project is still in the earliest of stages. Making it fully functional and accessible on mobile devices still lies ahead. Any number of possibilities for what could be done going forward suggest themselves. But in the very act of pulling it together, it already bears the DNA stamp of what it could some day become. The plaques themselves encapsulate people-powered history: a history of action, ideas and invention. Open Plaques has the potential to transform them into a living resource - and make each one a porthole that helps us connect with, understand and traverse moments in place and time, just like Stephen Fry said.

Re-shaping historical interest points nationwide as dynamic experiences is a mammoth task but Open Plaques – which is unfunded and 100% volunteer based – is already gearing up for a productive 2010. In February, Simon and Frankie attended the first ever English Heritage conference on commemorative plaques (yes, they're not all blue) to find out more about the organisation's thinking and plans, and talk to people about the initiative. Simon also talked about the project at last week's £5 App Meet in Brighton.

In the meantime, we need more people to help fill up the image database - yes that's you Flickr users! – plus help with the technical development. Spreading the word also matters and you can stay in the loop by following Open Plaques on Twitter.

Any input is welcome. You can even source and suggest plaques that aren't on the website's (incomplete) list. So if you'd like to get involved in connecting past and present, and do some local or further-afield exploring in the process, visit the site’s Contribute page for more instructions, see Jez's blog and the Open Plaques group for simple Flickr tips or get in touch directly, and lend a hand in joining the blue dots.

[UPDATE 12/5/10] We now have an Open Plaques blog and I’ve added my first post: Meet the time bandits.

Telling the story of my Finding Ada heroine for 2010 – photographer Lee Miller – requires taking a broad perspective. Her life’s achievement is a composite of a number of key strands: art, photography, fashion, technology and war reporting, bound together by a pioneering spirit.

This hurried blog isn’t the place to explore and understand these all in detail. Lee Miller was a breakthrough figure for a number of reasons – this is just a snapshot.

Born in Poughkeepsie, New York state in 1907, Elizabeth “Lee” Miller left for Paris at the age of eighteen where, according to Ursula Butler:

"She studied lighting, costume and theatre design at Ladislas Medgyes's School of Stagecraft. She later returned to New York and enrolled in the Art Students League. There she met Condé Nast and he introduced Miller to the world of modeling. From 1926-1929 she modeled, but eventually wanted to see what life was like behind the camera. Miller studied under the great dada-surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. Under his supervision, Miller learned how to manipulate the photograph to make a self-contained, semi-abstract or dreamlike image."

She also became his wife and established her own studio. So far so interesting, but things were just hotting up.

The word ‘photography’ was coined by scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel in 1839 (though it had been coined seperately by Hercules Florence in 1834!) and is actually is derived from two Greek words: ‘photos’ meaning light and ‘graphein’ meaning draw. The pace of technology development in cameras and photography accelerated during the early twentieth centry, but our subject’s contribution to the science of photography was a marriage of chance and artistry. Miller brought the alchemy.

Much debate surrounds the issue as to which of the couple stumbled across a technique in photography that – like a reverse negative of the ‘photography’ coinage – had been discovered a few times previously but not clearly defined and adopted: namely solarisation.

“The effect was usually caused by inadvertent severe over-exposure or occasionally by accidentally exposing an exposed plate or film to light before processing. Artist Man Ray perfected the technique which was accidentally discovered in his darkroom by his assistant Lee Miller." [Wikpedia]

Whatever the facts, Man Ray was soon flying the flag for perfecting this technique whilst his collaborator Miller was merely, again, known as his model (although she marshalled the technique to equally compelling effect – see her above ‘Portrait of an Unknown Woman’ from 1930). Man Ray was of the controlling variety, and Miller being a woman of substance soon broke free of his grip. She continued to be deeply involved in the Surrealist movement, amassing a body of work in her late twenties and early thirties that puts her on a par with the leading figures in photographic art and photo journalism, though this has only been recognised in the last two decades after her death, thanks to the meticulous recovery, ordering and promotion of her archives by her son.

A friend of Picasso – and combining commercial fashion photography and artistic work while entwined in a bohemian milieu – what beguiles me is the mastery she achieved in the realm of photography by bringing with her all her selves as she worked though each chapter of her career and each dimension of her work. There was truth and artifice – with neither undermining the other – in her iconic photo 'Women with fire masks' (1941), taken on the street of her own residence in Hampstead.

Conversely, when Vogue sent her off with a Rolliflex to Europe to cover the end of the war and the liberation, her photos combined a self-sufficient, often mysterious power with a visceral sense of unfolding drama. As she travelled through a bombed-out, shattered Europe, her camera captured many of the most powerful images of the closing months of that dark chapter in the last century. From the Italian front and the first ever use of Napalm at the siege of St Malo, to the death camps of Buchenwald and Dachau, and the liberation of Paris, you can view a wide selection of her potent war images online in the Lee Miller Archive.

Mistress of the lens, at the height of her career she lived for several years in this house on Downshire Hill in Hampstead, also spending time in Egypt and travelling widely, before moving to Farley Farm House in east Sussex. She had two further marriages, the second to British surrealist artist Roland Penrose whom she stayed with.

After the war, whilst still doing the occasional fashion shoot, Miller’s overall profile declined and she suffered bouts of clinical depression alleged (in retrospect) to have been symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the horrors she had seen while on war assignment. In turn, her ironic sensibility was reinforced with disillusionment at the limited type of commercial work she was being offered. Women en masse had successfully taken on all sorts of previously "male" roles during the conflict, and as a surrealist photojournalist embedded with the US army Miller was among them. But after the war, governments scrambled to promote traditional values in their efforts to glue broken societies back together, and opportunities for women in the working world shrank.

In her lifetime, she was all to aware of the cultural - and personal – impact of womens’ abilities and output being marginalised. A photograph she composed of Max Ernst and his partner, artist Dorothea Tanning, encapsulates her subversive take on this.

The recognition she has posthumously achieved was acknowledged on a grand scale some 30 years after her death in a major retrospective at the V&A in 2007, which I attended, plus coverage and exhibitions globally in the last decade. Now the scales have been duly re-balanced, we can celebrate Miller as a true icon and pioneer in the art and technology of photography. For innovation and inspiration personified, look to Lee Miller on Ada Lovelace Day.

–

Ada Lovelace Day is an annual worldwide day of blogging to celebrate the achievement of women in science and technology. More information on Ada Lovelace Day 2010 can be found on the Finding Ada website.  This post hasn’t been much about technology per se – it’s what we do with it that matters…

In December 2007 I went on a media diet, inspired by a Digital Health Service Workshop I’d attended. To be truthful, it was mainly a social media diet. I was an early casualty, as it seems to be catching on more widely now.  After being relentlessly engrossed in reading and then creating blogs since 2004, and then diving into the participatathon of Facebook in October 2006, and Twitter the month after, plus a host of other social-sharing-crowdfacing-wikified-whateverisms (on top of all the other web stuff I do), warning signals were sounding.

Having partaken in these principally as a core (and very fruitful) part of my job, they were completely taking over, and the side-effects were not exactly glamorous. I’ve written about them before.

In some ways social media latecomers are lucky and have probably adapted better to the social mediaverse. Plus most don’t have to do it as a matter-of-life-or-paycheck, (although a few dozen tweets can get you a social media intern gig these days, but what did you do before that Tarquin? Enough said).

After I emerged from the two-week zero-fat diet of Xmas 07/ NY 08, things were different. Nowadays, it’s all about judicious media consumption for me, honing a better skim-and-plunge technique… supposedly. I still spend my working days neck-deep in the mechanics and strategy of all aspects of online communities, social media and their ilk, and find their business, tech, social and cultural impacts fascinating. Evenings, if I’m dabbling, it’s more likely reading, bookmarking and the odd tweet. Sometimes I’ll even try out a new web service. But there’s more to life…

And the part I was missing most was books.

(I’d just about managed to keep up on music, film, art and other stuff; somehow that was possible).

When I first moved to London in 1998 I didn’t read a book for 6 months. I was shellshocked – by the material stress of the move, the quantum leap of my job, the social rupture of leaving my life in Glasgow, the general disorienting strangeness (I’d been to London 30+ times previously, but living there – sorry, here – is different). As someone who’d normally read – and often review in my freelance journalist guise – 3-5 books a month, the book-reading famine was symptomatic of a larger destabilising episode.

I just couldn’t sit, zone-in and immerse myself in the great books I’d got queued up to read. When I think about it now, the wave of social media that’s washed over me in a work context in the last 5 years has made me exhibit many of the same behaviours that resulted from my transplanting to Londinium. But you always – hopefully – resurface.

So I made an effort to get some nourishment. Here are (some of) the books I read in 2009. Mainly – if sometimes vaguely – work-related, hence the exhibitionism…

Books queued up in December 2008

I’m not reviewing them (if only!) but I have to admit two of the pictured editions are unfinished: Yochai Benkler’s (seminal) The Wealth Of Networks (see also the blog and wiki) and Grant McCracken‘s Transformations. I’m still in transit with them, gradually snacking my way through. Must be the microblogging ripple effect

Books queued to read August 2009

I can’t wait to read 2010′s offerings. The pile is currently being assembled. And the project of filtering too many media inputs continues

If anyone wants to do a digital / social web book club (preferrably offline), this reader might be interested.

As digital capture of our lives edges ever closer to ubiquity - and that seems to be where we're heading - what are the consequences for memory and for judgement on both a personal and societal scale? Is it a curse or just a new aspect of the modern age that we're inevitably making some mistakes in coming to terms with?

That's the subject of a new book 'Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting In A Digital Age', and on 19th November I attended a talk at the RSA given by the author Victor Mayer-Schonberger, director of the information and innovation policy research centre at the National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, which was ably chaired by Kevin Anderson, Blogs Editor (now Digital Research Editor since December ’09) at The Guardian.

It's a wide ranging topic, and a lot was covered, but the crux was this: the growing tendency to default to digitally documenting and sharing experience is creating a digital legacy that we as individuals are not fully able to control. In many cases this can lead to information being taken out of context, or shared beyond appropriate boundaries, with baleful (and other, still unknown) consequences.

Take a trio of now commonplace examples. The innocent party photo passed through Facebook or stored in Flickr or Google's image archive means you're passed over for a promotion or job, or sacked from your current one. The long past relationship is made ever present by related content from that time being accessible at the push of a button and compounded by current two or three-degrees connection to the ex. The holiday or special occasion is experienced less as something we live through intensely in the moment and later recollect at leisure, but is constantly punctuated with recording for posterity and increasingly stylised and calculated for the consumption of a small or not-so-small audience.

The second interlinked thesis is that our slowly evolved patterns of memory, learning and recollection are being distorted and un-bound by reliance on digital recording and storage. Memory reconstructs the past to minimise cognitive dissonance, the author explained. This is more potent and interesting, if an area I'm less familiar with. Normally, we cannot deliberately forget (for the reverse, see Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman's fantastic movie Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind) and memory naturally both selects, filters and deteriorates over time. But if the default is moving to not physiologically but digitally remembering, is the solution to delete?

Mayer-Schonberger is himself ambivalent about this, but citing a woman known as "AJ" he shared some compelling evidence of studies of human beings who have biological difficulties with forgetting. AJ experiences total recall as a curse. Tethered by an ever more detailed recollection of what has gone before, she is continually haunted by the past; resulting in an inability to live in the present, to generalise and to abstract from experience.

Another worrying consequence touched on by Mayer-Schonberger is our mass participation and compliance in the creation of a temporal Panopticon - in other words our collusion in the ability of institutions to store and always see our actions at any moment in time. My colleague Ian Delaney has written about this more eloquently than I can.

Accelerating referencing of digital content taken out of context - according to Mayer-Schonberger - means we also increasingly deny each other the capacity to change, evolve and grow and as such we are becoming a more unforgiving society. He floated an extreme scenario: what if we disregard our own recollection and instead depend solely on digital memory? Wouldn’t we have lost more than we had gained?

Clearly a thought experiment, he added the caveat that as only fragments of our experience are captured digitally, this cannot actually happen in totality. The problems right now – as mentioned with the careers, relationship and holiday examples – come when it happens on a piecemeal, ad hoc or imperceptible basis.

Solutions proposed by Mayer-Schonberger, include:

(1) Reintroduce forgetting by technological means - an expiration date put on information that we are prompted to input when we add time and GPS co-ordinates to data (or more simply, when we save it). The pitfall of this approach is if it's public it can be copied by others and stored elsewhere.

(2) "Digital rusting" - a closer approximation of the tactile and receeding nature of memory. The issue with this is how we can know at the point of recording how we might feel about the material in the future. This might be a workable model for some public data, but personal information (and creation) has different implications, and personal and public often overlap. Ultimately, I feel current and future historians might beg to differ with this approach.

(3) Go back to forgetting by default. This means either we cease to record and save information (not gonna happen), or that we forget we have done so - which is a much worse nightmare! The key I think is that information, however private or public, somehow needs to be understood and placed in differing temporal and social dimensions.

(4) The dark side of the network – and the downside of the end of silos – is that because social conventions lag behind the increasing openness of information it's easy to find "personal" information about "impersonal" connections, and once this data is exposed and fed into to impersonal judgements it's not so easy to get a second chance. The solution? We should promote the exercise of judgement [privately and publicly, I presume], argued Mayer-Schonberger. Guy Parsons shared an optimistic twist on this at Chinwag Live: The Dark Side Of Social Media, an event I organised back in 2007. But not all elements of society will consistently act this way, so the risk remains.

If the wisest survival response is then self-censorship, how far should you go? Even private use of search engines is not immune. Mayer-Schonberger cited AOL's now infamous search query datastream release c*ck-up in 2006, wherein the supposedly anonymized data of search records was rapidly traced by technologists at the New York Times to some of the individuals who'd created it. What if it you had been one of them? In turn, how much does constant watchfulness really benefit public and personal development? Is it right that privacy is being eroded so much that we need to be so careful?

Nico Macdonald made the point that you can't code the solutions to social problems. This seemed uncontroversial as I don't think much store has been put by the "expiry date" solution in responses to the book. We shouldn't be "subjected" to technology but be more active in shaping it, he inferred. Perhaps that's what we really need reminded of.

Much was said about search engines and the Internet Archive even got a namecheck. But the cash-strapped Internet Archive is shrinking not growing I've noticed. Google is dependent on the trust of its users, and that trust is tantamount to its business model Mayer-Schonberger stressed. But a recent remark by Google's Eric Schmidt tells us this is changing. Facebook now faces the same issue. Despite their recent announcement about the Open Graph API and their latest privacy settings swerve, most people expect privacy from Facebook. Whether or not that expectation is foolish, Facebook could still be wrong-footed by being too open.

Returning to recall for a moment, timelines are something I've always thought that, conversely, digital content could do with more of but their genesis requires some subtlety and serious forethought. Fear of interrogating the past could diminish us as much as it might protect us. Surely it's a function of human enquiry and maturity to be able to embrace our past, to reflect on and dwell in it on occasion without becoming paralysed like AJ? Why would the digital storage and referencing of past information stop us from being able to interpret it wisely and still live in the present? This is really where Mayer-Schonberger and I part paths.

Flexible and reliable privacy settings are just a feature that should come with such services. The first one I came across was Rememble, which enabled you save and store selected text messages, blogs, tweets, photos and other content in a visual timeline. Creator Gavin O'Carroll likened it in 2007 to a washing line for your digital bits and pieces. It was a narrative-led yet accessible framework for piecing together fragmented content and reconstructing memories, conversations and events at the personal level.

If you're looking to place stuff in a larger historical context, a landmark project – sadly no longer existent – came in the form of Miomi. It was an exciting melding of content from different sources to create user generated history that I saw demoed at the Minibar start-up event in Brick Lane in 2007. Miomi allowed the user to zoom in and out of particular years and decades over the last century and a half and see relevant content (eg. from Wikipedia and public digital records) relating to that time, and also location, as well as annotating and adding their own. Unsurprisingly the more contemporary part was already very detailed. I'm doubtful it would have scaled well in terms of moderation and accuracy, but its ambition was refreshing. I'm sure it's next-gen version is being cooked up somewhere.

So digital permanence was the dish of the day at the RSA. But the opposite view - that digital is an extremely fragile and ephemeral medium for so much of human culture and activity to be engraved and invested in, and that we should make far more effort to selectively and robustly archive it - wasn't voiced at this event. Paradoxically digital content is both brittle and persistent, transitory and important. There is no black or white answer to seek refuge in.

Finally the context question. In his talk Mayer-Schonberger seemed to side with the view that personal digital content - in the very act of being accessed beyond me and forwards in time – always lacks a contextual 'je ne sais quoi'. Granted he may say much more than this in the book (I have it on order) but this is where the story both begins and ends.

While I can't talk with any depth about the brain's gradually evolved ability to remember and recollect, surely the digital overlay is just a new frontier for the human ability to record and sometimes simultaneously interlace experience with another layer of data?

We've done it before. We drew pictures, told stories and wrote books. These things took time to permeate our cultures but they enriched them. In the last century we had social panics about radio, recorded music, film and then television being available to the masses (just as we had panics about women voting and going to work, for instance). More recently, there was somewhat more minor fretting that people listening to walkmans walked this earth as if in a bubble. It's funny when you look back on it now - because it's y’know, recorded – and remember…

Now the context is evolving. That's why creative projects such Britglyph and Open Plaques are intriguing, using the medium as a canvas to help us collectively discover, trace and find new ways to map meaning and think about human activity back and forth in time. This is what Bill Thompson was driving at when he described Britglyph as "a fascinating example of what is possible when you work with the grain of the internet, building something around the things the network makes possible."

So rather than disgorging personal data to the network, we should always be curating and shaping. That's the trump card digitally-augmented context - mastered and done well – is bringing to the table.

Are we really so incapable of adapting to and interpreting new contexts that this growing layer of digital information augmenting our lives will render us personally dysfunctional? Or worse still, divided into slaves to "one ring that rules them all" (whether that's Facebook, Google or your friendly local authorities) on one side, and savvy digital invisibles on the other. Or is this just the messy late-teenage phase of the unfolding web canvas? It seems like it could go either way.

Last words, for now, go to Chris Stein circa 1978.

…watchful lines vibrate soft in brainwave time.
Silver pictures move so slow.
Golden tubes faintly glow.

Electric faces seem to merge.
Hidden voices mock your words.
Fade away and radiate.
Fade away and radiate.

Beams become my dream.
My dream is on the screen.

–

For a reverse panopticon of the event itself ;-)  Neil Perkin has provided a good write-up, the event was recorded by the RSA (MP3 download) and Mayer Shoenburg was interviewed by Reuters beforehand.

Apologies and thanks to Stein et al for the title.

While media budgets are squeezed still further as we trudge onward under the cloud of recession, trillionesque debt and the massive public spending cuts gathering on the horizon, the focus on social media ROI grows ever sharper, but less energy is expended looking at the benefits that focused online communities can bring to businesses.

Communities for not-for-profits and membership bodies have a slightly different flavour to those developed for commercial entities. While commercial brands answer to shareholders or private owners, NFPs and membership bodies exist for the benefit of their constituents. There is already a genuine, real-world community or shared interest in place – just as there isn't (really) between me and say, Sainsbury's – so a digital community is a natural fit.

But that doesn't mean it's any simpler, nor is the transition to deeper member or supporter engagement any less challenging for the organising bodies than a renewed focus on customer engagement is for businesses. There is a lot of overlap. An event I attended at the Law Society on 6th October, "Surviving in a Recession - What Member Organisations can Learn from the Commercial World” addressed the challenges and opportunities in this area.

One of the things I liked about it was the way it set online communities in a longer timeframe than we're used to talking about. Many membership bodies have been around for 50-200 years. Most started out when enthusiastic and committed people come together informally - usually in a bar room, hotel or coffee house – to improve and professionalise emerging crafts and knowledge.

Fast forward to now, and these bodies occupy grand buildings, wield influence with governments and business, and provide letters after your name. But are they achieving their original aims? How close are they to their members today, and how can a geographically dispersed membership benefit from the knowledge and experience of their fellow members and the wider interested audience? In other words, can we re-boot the association?

The event was co-hosted by Sift - who are the technology and consultancy supplier for CIMAsphere, the online community I manage - and Madgex. Rather than reading a re-cap of the discussion, you can watch the presentations from two of the speakers that morning.

First up is Adam Cranfield, my former colleague, who was at the time Digital Media Manager at CIMA.

The second presentation is from Lawrence Clarke, Head of Consultancy at Sift. Sadly you can't see his slides in the video, nor Adam’s in his. But the stand-out points for me were Lawrence’s thoughts on the tendency of subscription-based associations to rely on inertia and top-down, one-to-many communications, and how that is being undermined by the connectedness and transparency the web brings on the one hand, and recessionary pressures on the other.

That talk is a companion piece to this post Lawrence wrote a month earlier on the Sift blog. Highly recommended.

Online communities have been around for as long as the internet itself, but the path technology has travelled in the last decade means the options for what you can offer and what you can do with them today have exploded.

Despite this, they’re still viewed as a bolt-on or feature of a brand’s web presence. This has led to what’s been termed as the "iceberg effect of community management".

Image courtsesy of Rita Willaert, Greenland, 10th September 2005 on Flickr

The full-spectrum of web and social media tools is now being vacuumed up into and integrated with communities: so beyond forums and chat, we now have blogs, RSS, aggregation, email, polls, Q&A, photos, video, audio, virtual worlds, groups, ratings, attachments, events, microblogging, profiles, focus groups, networking, widgets and wikis, to list only the most obvious…

These tools protrude the ocean's surface, along with the reams of content created by community members. But that is only a small fraction of what is happening. As more brands and organisations come to recognise the potential value of facilitating their own communities - but still consider it as an “add-on” to their main website - what does this mean for the role of community manager? What do they need to know and what do they do all day?

Image courtesy of The Brain Toad on Flickr

This is my off-the-cuff list of community management under the bonnet. I prefer the engine metaphor because communities commonly have a goal - they’re supposed to get you somewhere. I’ve also included the pre-launch stages. Depending on your product and whatever way you slice it, there’s a lot to get stuck into!

1. Business Plan
Translating business objectives into a workable plan that is agreed with stakeholders across the business. Finding and agreeing a budget. If you’re already on board at this stage, you’ll need to be involved in this in order to understand the business needs, if you’re hoping to translate it into a successful product that is…

2. Technology Platform & CMS
Choosing a technology platform – low-cost off the shelf packages you can tailor to suit community interaction, eg. Ning, Squarespace, Joomla; bigger-budget customised developments based on for example Drupal (the system I’ve worked with in my last three roles); or maybe you go totally bespoke whether in-house or with an agency (potentially the priciest, and beware proprietary lock-ins that could come back to bite you).

3. Personas & User-Centred Planning
Personas are a useful heuristic for surfacing the needs of the different key groups who’ll be using your community. You think you have your audience all figured out, but have you thought about their activities and requirements in community terms? Explore this in workshops if you can.

4. Design & Build
If you’re around during this phase, you could be called upon to input from the following (and more) perspectives: web design and wireframing, information architecture, usability, accessibility, user experience, on site search, SEO, taxonomy and folksonomy, APIs, browser compatibility and web standards. Many brands are still lacking in some or all of these departments, so your broad knowledge and experience can help make or break the end product! In terms of collaboration and notation around refining design and navigation concepts with your devs and designers, I can’t recommend Conceptshare strongly enough. I used it for that purpose in Chinwag‘s previous re-build and it is genius.

5. Registration & CRM Integration
The first experience of a community member is often to register; don’t make it painful and onerous, you'll annoy and lose people from the get go. Communicate the importance of this to direct stakeholders, preferably with story boards and demos of best practice. The experience generally is so poor and under-thought that Joshua Porter’s writing a book about it. Get advance estimates for the costs of integrating community registration / login with your current CRM system (preferably when you’re in Business Planning stage). The figures – and actual effort – can be unexpected. Is there another solution?

6. Testing & Tweaking
When you have early “alpha” versions of the site to play with, plan for an extended period of UAT (user acceptance testing). Get people across the business involved. Allow for some less structured “guerilla” usability testing too, at different stages of the build. You can learn as much from this as from pre-scripted interactions. Make sure your community manager is involved for most if not all of it and has oversight on the final sign-off.

7. Guidelines
Social networks revolve around me and are a bit of a free-for-all, they’re social but generally selfish. Communities bring benefits to people by having a common purpose that may facilitate but also overrides pure self-interest. So community rules and a general etiquette are essential. These guidelines need to be agreed by your organisation, and include some legal considerations. You may also need specific guidelines: for your bloggers, for group managers, for staff members and for sponsors, depending on the scope of your endeavour.

8. FAQ / Help
The more multi-faceted your site, the more bases your FAQ will need to cover! Basic instructions on your different areas, tools and registration are essential, should be visibly linked to everywhere and also feature somewhere in the site-wide navigation. Keep them readable and concise. A good FAQ is not an afterthought, and harder to write than you’d imagine. Be community-minded and have a site help discussion forum too, where your input and peer support can mingle to the benefit of all concerned.

9. Seeding: pilot before launching
There's nothing worse than being told of some cool new community or cutting edge network, and hoofing it over there only to find it bereft of visible life forms. Counter this by running a closed pilot, while you also beta test the site's taxonomy and functionality. Invite a segment of your audience to participate in the pilot. Make sure they know they're getting a special preview, listen to their feedback and iterate rapidly to solve key technology, content and user experience design issues during this period. Allow for a couple of months minimum, or at least until there is lively activity before opening up. Then when the world turns up, they won't be confronted by a confusing environment of unusable tools and tumbleweed. [See also .17]

10. Moderation
Think about posting controls, editing permissions, alert systems, freezing tools, spam filters and of course, moderators! Which is better for your community: external agency moderation, user-mods, or moderation by the experts, contact centre staff and people who know the answers and issues themselves inside the business? As community manager for CIMAsphere I run staff training workshops, and oversee the moderation workflow and rolling schedule. A closed group on the community for geographically distributed moderators to discuss issues and share best practice is another plus. Relying solely on external mods can be un-feasible and also means the brand is not fully engaging.

11. Inboxes
Not everything happens *on* your website, so common community inboxes you may have to set up and manage include: info, help, feedback, and abuse; plus the community manager’s personal inbox of course. That’s a lot of email! Who else can help you mange these inboxes? Hunt down the most apposite or amenable folks and spread the inbox love to spare the pain!

12. Enhancements & bug fixing
Gotta love those bugs as a community manager! Living in perpetual beta with a modest budget, bugs follow you wherever you go. Users complain on the site, people email for help, some people struggle to even login if your registration process isn't perfect (and whose is?). Bugs perkily await you in the morning, and they're there when you go to sleep each night. The thing businesses need to consider is that bugs impact users much more directly and frequently in communities than in other websites. And who else can communicate these bugs' intricacies and preferred fixes to developers apart from the community manager? Prioritise ruthlessly, and use a good bug-logging or collaborative project management tool. I recommend Trac,  Adminitrack, or even Basecamp (but not Bugzilla – it’s strictly for the engineer contingent). Realise you'll never get them all fixed if your support budget is minimal. Communicate with your users about the bugs, and discuss with the business how they plan to support product development in the future.

13. Analytics
Unique users, dwell-time, page views, referring sites, search traffic, browser and device breakdown, exit pages, pages per visit, popular keywords and content, campaign tracking… this is just the beginning, but if you can't report on the above, something's wrong. Even if you use a paid analytics vendor like Neilsen, Omniture or Nedstat, it should be possible to also plug in the wonderfully free Google Analytics. But realise there's more to GA than meets the eye - look into its deeper facilities.

14. Community & engagement metrics
Another beast from analytics entirely: clicks are not the bottom line! Value comes in many forms. Most active participants; most active groups / forums; total posts / interactions; average posts per user; ratio of posters to passives. These are some fundamentals, but don't tell you much more than if you're properly monitoring the community from a managerial perspective in the first place. But how many go onto recommend you, or redistribute your content elsewhere? How many buy? How many change their sentiment from negative to positive, and vice versa? How many act creatively? How many contribute valuable feedback and knowledge to other users and to your organisation? Only some of these metrics are directly monetary, others contribute to site and business objectives in the broader sense and longer term. Think about types of value, what you want to measure, and what you effectively *can*.

15. Bloggers
Internal or external, expert or enthusiasts, detractors or advocates? Okay, it might not be the most sensible move to hire detractors as bloggers, but critics will have a voice on your site nonetheless, and are part of the positive future of your organisation, catalysts for beneficial change. This is because they often speak loudly the frustrations and uncomfortable truths that the brand smoothes over. That's because they’re passionate, so some could be bloggers eventually :-)  Get a mix of bloggers on board, make sure a variety of business and community interests are represented, and within your guidelines allow for freedom. Give them ongoing feedback. Run training for internal bloggers and monitor their progress. Try out different things and don't expect it to purr along like a dream. Expect it to be bumpy.

16. Groups
Groups are very powerful clusters: a key trait of people is to identify by similarity of experience, location or interest. According to the Ruder Finn Intent Index, 72% of people go online just to become part of a community. Groups in communities facilitate this clustering further. Do you have pre-defined or user suggested groups, or both? Devolving group control to community members is common practice. Group guidelines and moderation can ameliorate the risks involved, as well as reassure the group managers that you're taking their group's good health and sanity to heart.

17. Advocates, evangelists & early days participants
Prior to launching, identify and open a communications channel with brand or business advocates who can get motivated to sign-up and post when you launch, and help spread the word. These could be dynamic individuals already championing your brand elsewhere in the social mediaverse, or people who present themselves and have good ideas when you (for instance) do a mail out to your audience asking for ideas and involvement before the community goes live. In turn, your first active users should be carefully listened to and responded to. Those first weeks are critical. Having turned up first to the party and said hello, they deserve special attention!

18. Getting to know you
If you don't "know" your community, you're onto a loser. By know, I mean get familiar with them as participants. You don't need to be the resident expert on the community's focus (though input from experts is essential) but you do need to know who's unhappy, who's helpful, who's critical, and who's smart. Many community users will be a combination of these and other types. Some people can even be accidentally evil and destructive. Unless they've been heinously bad, don't jump to cast judgement! We're complicated creatures after all.

19. PR, content and attention planning
Do you know why you're building your community? Then the PR and content planning should be seamless. Schedule in some eye-catching events and content around your launch; but remember it's not about broadcasting “messages” or parading shiny baubles. Instead it's about being interesting by providing value and being relevant and useful. If your event isn't going to really matter to those early days and ideal users, then all the press coverage and email-outs in the world aren't going to get people logging in and participating! It's the same with content and event programming going forward. What might impress journalists and influential bloggers on the one hand and what tickles your community on the other don't necessarily correlate.

20. Culture shift and cross-business input
The governance and ongoing development of the community shouldn't be left to one person, or even one department. A cross-business steering group is one way of bringing a range of business eyes and knowledge to bear on the project and prevents it being siloed or becoming a political football for competing fiefdoms in the organisation. Communities languish and fail every day due to the latter scenarios. Breaking down those barriers is one of the great leaps forward that a community can begin to facilitate. People talk about operational efficiencies, but they're rarely delivered in a meaningful or positive way. Well managed communities make this approach tangible, and eat away at the barriers and inertia both within businesses and between them and their customers.

21. Direct engagement and response
Follows from the above. If your community is a platform for CRM, R&D, product development, PR, marketing or customer insight, direct engagement must be baked in. As community manager you should liaise across the business to make sure the right people are aware, listening and acting upon feedback - whether that's publicly, or off-line, or in specific community spaces. And the community needs to know you're listening, even if you don’t respond publicly on every single occasion. Ignore them at your peril. Creating community areas and content that your users have suggested and asked for is one of the best outcomes of engaging with them. Hosting raw, unfiltered and real-time feedback is also a wake up call to complacent businesses; you can gain insight and improve your key business offerings based on monitoring conversations and analysing positive and negative comments.

22. Communications & Marketing
Communities do generate their own buzz, but those who can gain most from community often don't have the time or aren't in the right context to pick up on these vibrations. That said, neither does traditional marketing always reach the parts that other, more context-specific comms can. Marketing in and for communities often falls flat, or as one marketer has put it “there’s a hole in my funnel“. It's got to be clear: what's in it for them? Reaching out and partnering with other networks is likely to be more fruitful (see 23.). In turn, setting up group, discussion and blog alerts, and a community newsletter, can also spur new members and accelerate activity. Working with advocates in your community and elsewhere also has a grassroots halo effect.

23. Off-site community: partnering & networks
Linking with or extending to external communities can create a virtuous circle, with value for the brand and community flowing in multiple directions. Are there directly-related or relevant groups elsewhere? There were already 30+ CIMA student and member run groups on Facebook when I started at CIMA, which up until then had been ignored by the business. We decided to work with some of the livelier groups rather than starting our own, we recently set up a Facebook page and Twitter accounts, and we're reviewing other networks. Think about the positive impact of reaching out, but beware duplicating your product and effort on a platform you don't own. Be realistic about your workload but inform the business that your customers are out there – they're organising themselves and being courted by others. So for how much longer will your brand be relevant, or will it soon be surplus to requirements?

–

Think a lot of this is a job for other people? Web editors, web designers, CRM staff, digital marketing and PR folks, web producers, brand managers, product and business development, perchance even some community assistants? That's as may be, but community management is an emerging profession and – in the main – little understood.

Online communities are viewed much like websites were 10 years ago – “oh, that new thing, let’s get one”. As time goes by, community management will become more specialised. But for now, it's a whole lotta skillsets rolled into one…

So it follows that I've actually left out some things – 23 things is enough to be getting on with ;-)  What else do you think goes on under the bonnet of community management?

In line with this (if you'll forgive me for mashing my metaphors) it's also time to ask: what other new roles will emerge to power communities forward and keep the iceberg's complex ecosystem intact?

If you’re a fan of Mad Men, who wouldn’t want to be Don, even if just for one wheeling dealing afternoon or rollercoaster nocturnal session? What's begun to happen with fictional characters on Twitter in 2008/2009 is heading in this, and other equally interesting directions.

Mad Men vs me at a Mad Men party - courtesy of Laura Brunow on Flickr

It kind of started when digital planner and strategist Paul Isakson donned the guise of early 1960's adman Don Draper on Twitter in the summer of 2008,  unbeknownst to Mad Men programme makers AMC. As of writing Don/Isakson now has 8,880 followers. All the other Mad Men characters are on Twitter too (my current fave is Roger Sterling). From what I know, they too are mostly unofficial.

Isakson came clean as to his ownership of the @don_draper account in November and to their credit it seems AMC didn’t demand that Isakson hand it over. Now the chance to be Don (or at least that particular Don, for there are now multiple Dons on Twitter) is up for grabs - and the deadline is today.

Whoever is picked – by a combination of a forthcoming audience vote on the finalists, laced with Paul Isakson’s editorial judgement - will be Don Draper on Twitter for the remainder of Season 3 which began transmitting 16th August in the US. What's more, if folks don't rate the new Don's performance, he can be fired and replaced by the runner-up at any point during the season.

I'm not even going to go into the aptness of all this given Don's very particular backstory, because if you haven't yet followed Mad Men that would be a heinous spoiler.

Looking at his blog post today, I'm not sure Isakson got enough entries (I'm guessing some went via the back door of email and the side entrance of tweetbacks). But as an exercise in crowdsourcing an audition, and expanding the kudos Mad Men accrues by layering multiple, more permeable Dons around actor John Hamm's TV incarnation, it’s a Stars In Their Eyes/X Factor mashup for the transmedia generation.

Of course it's all somewhat jarring for Mad Men fans not in the USA, but y'all know these transmission lags are a major reason why TV torrents are hugely popular in the UK and why the old school TV distribution model is declining.

Concerns of brandjacking and Twitter-squatting aside - and increasingly these concepts seem hugely over-simplified if not redundant – unofficial is often good if not better. Characters are being liberated, authorship is be re-shaped and unforeseen talents are taking the reins. Simples 

In fact the Twittersphere is now awash with fictional personae. I’ve already been following “Gene Hunt” from the BBC's Ashes To Ashes for a few months. Daft but bolly good value.

Peep Show is going down the same road, with Mark getting the most interest. All of which feels oddly natural given that a year ago it would have been freakish; and a choice counterpoint to the dreaded real-world insistence that we must “be who we say we are online”, an exhortation that incites me to commit unspeakable acts.

In short, it's exciting territory and ripe for more quality excursions. To take a very random and subjective sample of arresting characters, imagine if you could have been, or be able to converse with:

John Rebus in Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus novels

Teddy Hoffman or Richard Cross from Murder One

Renton, Begbie or Spud or from Trainspotting - chapters of which were first published in the groundbreaking Edinburgh-headquartered Rebel Inc magazine.

Henry (“helicopters!”), Karen (“Henrrrry!”), or Tommy (“guns”) from Goodfellas

Pembleton or Munch from Homicide: Life On The Street

Bridget Gregory in The Last Seduction

Caleb Temple in American Gothic

Patrick Bateman in American Psycho

(Rita Hayworth as) Gilda in Gilda

Nick Carraway or Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby.

All so moreish…

Elsewhere this month author Philippa Gregory (working with digital agency Blonde) created a Twitter feed for the main character Elizabeth Woodville in her latest novel The White Queen - all the better, you see, to reinterpret the story through a series of tweets in the week prior to the book's publication.

For one week only? Hmm, not a lot of time to become really hooked or intrigued you'd think. But no, with very little fanfare she garnered 700+ followers, and the feedback in @ messages was equally potent from numerous viewpoints: the author herself, marketer and publisher intelligence gathering, online PR of course, and practitioners of transmedia generally.

After the first week of this project, we were able to read the tweets in more traditional narrative order on this Flash site. Analysed per-tweet, the quality is variable but from a birds-eye view the concept's overall execution is quite beguiling.

A central challenge for The White Queen project lay in matching the quality of the source material, and in the transition of perspective and literary skill from print page to ambient digital flow. A big ask, but sometimes (if not this time) the Twitter offshoot is even better than the original fabrication.

In that vein (to lower the tone for a minute and head over to present-day adland), while I don’t set much store by comparison websites, I've lately followed CompareTheMeerkat.  As always with creative marketing, the risk is that we're merely delighted, and this doesn't translate to sales. But that's nothing new, and as part the perennial tug of love between advertising, marketing and branding, largely immaterial to this discussion. What's compelling is the character and @Alexsandr_orlov is a highly diverting creation.

This particular clutch of character extensions are also textbook transmedia shortcuts. Is it just me, or do you ever get tired just thinking about all those Facebook pages connected to the YouTube channel connected to the SEO strategy connected to the website connected to the email sign-up form connected to the mobile campaign, etc, etc, ad infinitum..? All these rinky dink agencies trying oh-so relentlessly to herd our weary eyeballs round some archetypal loop of media integration. Like it was all orchestrated for some slick presentation designed to wow lazy executives at whatever new media conference, ugh.

Oh no, wait, what we should *really* be doing is aggregating them all in FriendFeed or one of its ilk for a full-fat, 360, planned to the nth degree social media experience. Oh, Facebook just bought Friendfeed, umm, well then just wait for 12-18 months, add semantic web – and bada bing! What, the semantic web thingy will take at least 5 more years you say? No, just stop it. It really doesn’t work like that.

Instead, how about we park the whole 360 shizzle, look at the shortcuts that are working some magic and think about the implications? Being @Don_Draper and its Kaufmanesque cohorts are entry points to the future of storytelling. If fictional prototypes like these are the prelude to a new era of character development and narrative interplay, I can’t wait to see what unfolds over the next decade.

Sheesh, is it really six months since I left Chinwag? Crazy times. Half of my hybrid role there (the other being planning, wireframing and launching/editing the new website) involved hatching ideas for and bringing to life their wish for an events programme…

What shall we call it, Sam mused, when I joined in October 2006. I processed this while getting other stuff done. A few hours later I blurted out “It’s a bit cheeky, but how about Chinwag Live?”. So, he asked with his customary chortle, what’s it all about then D? “Casting light on trends in the digital media and marketing industry” I reasoned, deadpan. Actually, it was Sam who insisted we add the words “and marketing“.

Me introducing Chinwag Live: Media Widgetised - part of Widget Week 2007

So I got onto it. Oh yeah, and the marketing and the PR and the whole social media fandango. Bloggishness? Obligatory. Old skool press release? Easy. Facebook Goup? In an instant. Upcoming? Check. Oh, now we need a Facebook Page too huh? Sorted. Flickr photos of every event? At once. Multiple Twitter accounts? We have the technology. Endless networking across the digital fleshpots of London (and Texas)? But of course…

All the good people at Chinwag Live: Media Widgetised 16th May 2007

It would all be nothing of course without the thousands of incredible people who were there over the 24+  events… Whatever happens with the recession and the government’s Digital Britain initiative, I know that the UK is a very special place for digital debate and enterprise…

Chinwag Big Summer 07 sponsored by Channel4, Adobe, Neutralize, Agency.com and The Big Chill

Here’s a run-down of the Chinwag Live events that resulted during my tenure, plus the offshoots: Chinwag Clinic; Widget Week 2007; and not forgetting Big Summer ’07 – officially the biggest ever party for digital practitioners in the UK with some 2,000 folk attending.

Chinwag's Big Summer party 5th July 2007 dancefloor moves to The Big Chill's DJs

MY CHINWAG EVENTS CALENDAR:

Chinwag Live: Wobble 2.0 – 6th Feb 2007

Chinwag Live: Mobile Metamorphosis – 26th Feb 2007

Chinwag Live: PPC Earthquake – 27th Mar 2007

Chinwag Live: PR Unspun – 24th Apr 2007

Chinwag Live: PPC Earthquake @ Internet World – 2nd May 2007

Chinwag Live: Media Widgetised – 16th May 2007

Widget Week 2007 - 14th-22nd May 2007
(in collaboration with Mobile Monday & NMK)

Chinwag Live: Dark Side Of Social Media – 19th Jun 2007

Big Summer ’07 – 5th Jul 2007
(a superhuman team effort!)

Chinwag Live: Web TV Takeover – 18th Sep 2007

Chinwag Live: Media Widgetised @ Ad Tech London – 27th Sep 2007

Chinwag Live: Xmas Futures, Crystal Balls? – 5th Dec 2007

Chinwag Live: Skills Emergency – 29th Jan 2008

Chinwag Live: Measuring Social Media – 18th Feb 2008

Chinwag Live: Tomorrow’s Ad Formats – 18th Mar 2008

Chinwag Live: User Centered Advertising (with Manchester Digital) – 15th Apr 2008

Chinwag Live: Real World Usability – 22 Apr 2008

Chinwag Live: Measuring Social Media @ Internet World – 30th Apr 2008

Chinwag Live: Micro Media Maze – 20th May 2008

Chinwag Live: Search vs Recommendation – 2nd Sep 2008
(in co-ordination with Elizabeth Varley)

Chinwag Live: Micro Media Maze @ Ad Tech London – 24th Sep 2008

Chinwag Clinic: Search Marketing Surgery – 30th Sep 2008
(in co-ordination with Elizabeth Varley)
[Testimonials For Search Marketing Surgery]

Chinwag Live: Search and LBS – 7th October 2008
(in co-ordination with Elizabeth Varley)

Chinwag Live: Social Media ROI @ Ecommerce Expo – 28th Oct 2008
(in co-ordination with Julia Eilon)

Chinwag Live: MoSo Rising – 11th Nov 2008
(in co-ordination with Julia Eilon)

Chinwag Live: Xmas Futures, Crystal Balls? – 2nd Dec 2008
(in c0-ordination with Julia Eilon)

That is all.

Want more? Are you for real? Okeydoke, here’s a round-up of My NMK Events.

It’s all about the “now” and the “next” in media and technology; but in the headlong, often mind-numbing rush for mindshare, followers, whuffie or whatever is this week’s shiny nu nu thing, what has gone before is equally important.

That’s why, to mark Ada Lovelace Day I wanted to write about someone who inspired and mentored me directly.

I’d already edited a web site for the Edinburgh Festival and covered technology and multimedia culture for the likes of The Scotsman newspaper and .net magazine before I touched down in Londoninium in July 1998.

I was starting as Web Editor for the international website of Ernst & Young but – I was informed on Day One – there was a month of handover between me and the freelancer who’d previously been editing the site part-time.

On the morning the freelancer was due to come in my nerves were ratcheted up another notch from their already high levels. There was me *way* out of my comfort zone working in corporatesville when in walks this stunning woman: pixieish hair, jeans and a biker jacket. And when she removed said jacket, ooh, the tattoo on her arm was just gorgeous. She smiled and extended a hand: “Hey! I’m Lizzie”. And that was Liz Bailey. I’ll never forget it.

It was less of a handover, more of a crash course in ramping-up my html skills, and getting the ultimate outsiders insider’s guide to my employer, interspersed with some scrumptious Chinatown and Soho lunches and lots of hilarity. The full-spectrum introduction But more than that it was finding – in this most alien of environments – a kindred spirit, because Lizzie was my entry point into London’s embryonic web scene.

A freelancer who also wrote and did web editing, design and production for Wired UK, The Guardian, BBC Online, the FT, Demos, Wallpaper*, McKinsey, The Telegraph and more, Lizzie knew everyone who was doing anything interesting web-wise in London.

Missing my own familiarity with Scotland’s web scene, I was happy to take a cue from my new mentor. If it wasn’t for Lizzie, well I would’ve been fine, but she allowed me to bridge both worlds: the corporate but innovative focus of my everyday work, and the creativity, excitement and bone fide madness of the first dotcom boom.

I’d seen a black and white A4 newsletter once in Glasgow (when someone in London posted it to me) called New Media Age – it carried four pages of news on the nascent sector and no ads! But it was Lizzie who tipped me off re a packed mid-week party in Great Titchfield St dubbed ‘Boob Night’ where I met the editor of the then fully-fledged magazine, a young fella by the name of Mike Butcher who I managed to out-argue . He says he doesn’t remember it, but back then nights of mayhem where the champers flowed gratis were ten a penny for the current TechCrunchUK editor 

At Lizzie’s 30th Birthday party I also met Phil Gyford (then at BBC Online I think), and a guy she was working with on ‘New Media Creative’ magazine called Paul Murphy. Later she introduced me to hotshot new media reporter Polly Sprenger who was fresh over from Wired News in San Francisco (Mike Butcher once described Polly to me as “the Red Rum of technology reporters” after they worked together on the shortlived Industry Standard Europe magazine).

It reaffirmed I wasn’t just working in a “job”, for a “company”, but part of of something game-changing and amazing.

But this melange of web culture, innovation and merriment paled next to Lizzie’s own formidable focus and grit. A web grrrl to the core, Lizzie would magic up websites to die for whilst relentlessly promoting the causes of usability, innovation and the visibility of women in the web design and technology sector.

That movement for change – and celebration of talent – has latter day embodiments in UK-founded networks (some of which have gone global) like She Says, Girl Geek Dinners, Women In Mobile Data, and the briefly existent Digital Womens’ Club – all great initiatives I’ve actively supported.

Three years flew by, and when I was two jobs on from Ernst & Yong working as editor in chief of a VC-funded music website, the entire sector imploded. After a barren several months I decamped to the TV industry back in Belfast in 2002. But Lizzie hung in there. Multi-talented and entrepreneurial to a tee, she was surely the woman who knew most about new media in London. She was praxis.

And just when I came back to London in 2004, as the first timid signs of hope were visible in the sector (I’d been waiting, watching and biding my time you see), Lizzie switched careers and started studying to be a barrister.

Now she’s qualified and doing well, but her influence in web culture and technology still resonates for me. I’ve often been at conferences like SXSW Interactive, FOWA, Changing Media – and the NMK and Chinwag Live events I’ve organised myself – and thought “damn, Lizzie should be speaking at this!”. But looked at in a broader way, she has been…

I don’t know if I’d have dared come back to digital if I hadn’t known Lizzie. There were too many talented people flushed out of the sector back then. As it turns out while digital certainly has been affected by the current recession, compared to the rest of media – and jobs more generally – it’s still *relatively* resilient. In short, it’s nowhere near a dotcom bust Groundhog Day scenario.

Tons and tons of people inspire me of course, but in reality it’s hard to say what it all will mean and which parts will be valuable 10 years hence.

So raise a toast to the inaugural Ada Lovelace Day and sample some vintage Liz Bailey (NB. it’s an internet hazard that most of Lizzie’s work from then – like most of mine – has not been archived):

Boo gets booed – The Guardian 11th November 1999

Britgrrls No Bark and No Byte? – 1999, trAce

Demos publications by Liz Bailey

–

Who was Ada Lovelace?
Born on 10th December 1815, the only child of Lord Byron and his wife Annabella, Augusta Ada Byron (now known simply as Ada Lovelace) wrote the world's first computer programmes for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented  »read more

Credits
Thanks to Suw Charman for co-ordinating Ada Lovelace Day on Tuesday 24th March 2009. The first of it’s kind, it’s “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.” »Ada Lovelace website

Join In!
You (male or female) can still register your pledge to write a blog post celebrating your technology heroine on this day – Tuesday 24th March – at the official »2009 PledgeBank page

While anxiety and frustration were visible on the faces of those gathered at this Core Conversation,  it wasn’t due to the gruelling conference – or social – schedule (in-step with the syndrome under discussion, it's taken me just over a year to write up this final blog post from SXSW Interactive 2008).

And yours truly? By random chance I'd been scanning the room, looking for something else that I knew was on there, but stumbled upon this instead and was drawn to it in a heartbeat.

Weirdly my serendipitous discovery in meat space of a conversation I didn't intend to find, mirrored one of the key issues in the larger digital challenge it was grappling with: the overload tendancy that’s wedded to being “always on”.  You’re only ever one link away from some interesting new fact or opinion.

In a wholesale Being John Malkovich moment, I'd gone through a port-hole and all the voices and daily dillemas in my head that worry about overload were embodied and talking to each other in front of me… Nurse, the screens!

Ryan Frietas facilitating Do You Have to Disappear... at SXSW 2008

So yeah… it was 11th March 2008 at SXSW Interactive, and the facilitator was the one and only Ryan Frietas, then Director of Experience Design at Adaptive Path.

Do we know what we're doing?

Here's the backdrop: we're overwhelmed by information, drowning in email, weary with un-read feeds, tired of Twitter, assailed by mobile comms, productively challenged… and yet the nagging feeling that we're probably missing something very important is strong enough to trample all common sense, and our counter-productive habits surface given the slightest glimmer of opportunity.

Pleasingly, the first point Frietas made was the counter-argument: there's a generation being raised who are multimedia and multi-tasking all in parallel, and are socially different from us. Hurray for them I guess, but what about the rest of us, who didn't use a computer till we were 10 or maybe even 20 years old, and the internet even later? What solace can we take from the information overload?

Self-help required: employers and govt 4 steps behind (as usual)

The group - while commonly exhausted - had plenty of suggestions for coping-strategies. If you're a freelancer, consultant, or just the type who catches up on email and admin at odd hours due to parenting duties or whatever; don't give the impression that you're available and working there and then or the email stream will just increase. Write emails in draft in the evening and weekend if needs be; but send them in office hours.

If you check email, Twitter and RSS feeds first thing in the morning you'll have nothing done by 11am or midday, and that puts you on a psychological downer for the rest of the day. To compound matters, the rest of the day will be less productive than it would have been because of what you did (or rather didn't do) in the morning.

"Eat the frog" was one of Ryan's suggestions. Do the thing you really don't want to do as your first task: a small accomplishment that gives you an immediate sense of achievement and helps you face the rest of the day.

We then paused to talk to the person next to us, and I found myself listening to the woes of a web project manger working at the Austin branch of a large US advertising agency, but she could have been from anywhere. She described an incredibly busy agency scenario, with everyone working lots of unpaid overtime; calls and emails from her boss at the weekend; general over-work and insufficient numbers of skilled staff that sounded identical to many digital shops globally. She loved her job but was unhappy. There was never enough time and the torrent of email was endless.

Firehose slapdown…?

On the positive side, it's an ecosystem of information that we're all contributing to with blogs, wikis, social networks, microblogging,  etc, noted Ryan. This is true, but how much of what we’re actually sharing is valuable, discoverable, and to whom?

One woman told of how she goes on regular media diets. This reminded me a lot of some ideas floated at the Digital Health Clinic run by Gavin O'Carroll which I attended in London late in 2007. I've tried out a diet myself, and it worked a tonic.

In fact the DHS clinic spurred me to check-out of Facebook completely for a few weeks at the end of December 2007. My usage of it has been sparse ever since, but for me Twitter is still a toxic siren. Tweetdeck (which I’ve tried) and the like promise to detoxify the stream, with the ability to sort and stratify the importance of our relationships and incoming data-stream on Twitter. While that's progress to be welcomed, it's still a mechanistic approach to filtering and managing highly-nuanced communication.

Widgets and tactics help, but it's complicated…

Talking of which, some other tools mentioned were the dashboard widget that monitors what apps you are on and when you switch between them. The much-feted Feltron was also cited - it tracks what you do on your computer and builds up an annual report.

Part of the challenge derives from the weak divide between work and social / fun stuff, Ryan commented. There's an element of truth here - for some - but it makes me wonder, how did I not feel this pressure when I was editing a music website back in dotcom boom 1.0? I was obsessed by the subject matter, and 2-3 nights a week I went out to gigs or clubs in connection with my role. And was I poorer, stupider, less happy or as shattered then? No on all counts I'm afraid. The salience of Ryan's point is more general, as the context and nature of work and the concomitant technology has evolved.

The concept of “friendless zero” got the first real laughs of the session. Analogous to the Inbox Zero movement (which gets your inbox down to the magic digit), Ryan admitted he'd gone in that direction lately, keeping his Twitter follows down to a tiny number of close friends and colleagues. Still, I've heard countless stories of how people brutally cut back their RSS feeds to the bare essentials only to find a few months alter they've crept back up again. I abandoned Bloglines two years ago myself for the same reason; and I haven't replaced it with another reader. Nothing bad has happened because of this 

If engineers fall short, what else is there?

The question was asked: can we automate relevance of information and people? That's an engineer’s approach to human interaction, observed Ryan. My friend is a 5, my mother is a 3, etc… it simply doesn't make sense of or cater for the complexity of our relationships.

Another suggestion from the group was only have one device out at a time [great, but are you going to ignore your mobile ringing or beeping just because you're working on your laptop?]. Someone else suggested the classic panacea of having a hobby that takes you out of yourself.

Much of it comes down to time-management and managing expectations, someone said. That may be true, but these are delicate skills to master and practice, and who in the social media ferment is evangelising them? Discounting Tim Ferris of course, who has actually elevated it to the realms of a modern-day religion (and religion is in the province of the supernatural); oh yeah, and sad-sacks for whom GTD becomes the only topic of conversation.

Central exhaustion system

One reason that it's so important for us to check our various feeds [and devices sir ], Ryan argued, is that we're also interacting with another layer of information and media that is apart from our direct experience and what we're doing. This works for me. It's the invisible skin of data and interaction layering over our immediate and physical lives. But isn't that what old skool social connections - aka the ideas and experiences we hold in common with other people - have always done? And wasn't the point of the session to explore how we maintain productivity, creativity and being “in the zone” in the face of endless sources to discover and distractions?

Maybe it's just me, but the flow isn't all that (yet); or at least, it's over-rated. Un-critical social media mavens love to sanctify it, but many information workers are paying the price for the level of dysfunction it produces in its current embryonic state. It's plumping-up already maxed-out email and task agendas.

While a perfect infomediary grid beckons – the venerated digital nervous system predicted of yore – we’re left to deal with our real, complicated and imperfect experiences. Naturally the recession / depression / correction - or what you will - isn't helping. We're all working that little bit harder (than last year). We're all that little bit more insecure, and we're that little bit more atomised too.

The spread of Being John Malkovich Syndrome (#bjms) is merely the solace we can take from each other here and now. It holds the seeds of promise, but it's not yet fit for purpose. Sifting meaning and / or value from the voices, chatter and keywords we skim through is an arduous, often wasteful and frequently un-manageable task.

Twitteresque – digital stylistics or path to a higher being?

Speaking of Twitter, just today Nic Brisbourne summed-up part of the signal-to-noise filtering challenge:

"I'm not sure that tools are the only answer though… I recently read Lessig's Code2.0, a book in which he talks at length about how communities are governed and regulated.  He persuasively argues that for there are four modes of regulation – architecture/code, law, norms and the market (more details here) – Tweetdeck et al are code based solutions to the problem of too much traffic on Twitter, but the other modalities or regulation (as Lessig would describe them) are also important.

"It is pretty clear to me that as the community grows something is going to have to change – and as I have written before it is instructive to think of the Twitter community as an emergent system with rules that need to evolve to ensure that the signal to noise ratio is maintained at a sensible level whilst keeping the service growing… The health of the Twitter community (as with all communities online and offline) is 100% dependent on the rules"

So given the openness of Twitter, the emergent norms are either (1) anyone's guess , or (2) the same norms we see operating in other civilised (or - slight difference here - "consensual") communities. Place your bets.

Broadsight's Alan Patrick keeps saying he hears less noise on Twitter and more signal. I've not seen evidence yet, although most of the folk I follow are reasonably well-behaved. To those I've un-followed, it's not because I doubt your genius But whatever Alan is on, I want some…

Digital Health drop-in surgery 19th March

In the meantime if you're feeling the overload burn, Gavin O'Carroll is running a Digital Health Service drop-in surgery this Thursday 19th March 2009 at the RSA
http://digitalhealthservice.pbwiki.com/

—

FURTHER READING ON INFORMATION OVERLOAD:

Going Without Comms To get a better Connection – Broadstuff 16 April 2009

Digital Overload is Frying Our Brains - Wired 6th February 2009

Distraction: Being Human In The Digital Age by Mark Curtis (Futuretext, 2005)

Overload! By Columbia Journalism Review - 19th November 2008

Dumb, Dumber and Google: Alan Patrick, Broadsight - 9th June 2008

10 Things I Learned from Mental Detox Week: Ian Tait, Poke London - 30th April 2008

Information overload in the web era: Nic Brisbourne, The Equity Kicker - 22nd April 2008

The Digital Health Service

The strain of digital sweatshops: PDA Blog, Media Guardian - 14th April 2008

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop – NYT 6th April 2008

Does work/life balance exist?: Danah Boyd, Apophenia - 6th April 2008

Computer addiction as survival for the ego - 10th December 2007

Notes on Core Conversation: Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done?: Liserbawston - Ning, 11th March 2008

My other SXSW 2008 panel reports:

http://innovationeye.wordpress.com/category/sxsw-interactive-2008/