Blogger seeks donations

Wanna blog faster? Then pay up.

Pyra Labs, the company that makes the Blogger software used to easily create Web logs, desperately needs new servers. It seems that Blogger has been the classic Net victim of its own success. The growing popularity of the free tool has made using it torturously slow in recent weeks. So, on Tuesday, the site asked the blogging community to pass the virtual hat using PayPal. Less than 24 hours later, it had raised $3,424.85, minus the PayPal fees, from 206 people.

"Help Make Blogger Go Faster!" reads the appeal for funds. The site needs just $5,000 to do a basic upgrade. Apparently, shelling out a few bucks beats whining about how slow the service is. The Blogger Server Fund just goes to show that on the Net people will pay to improve something they use for free if it's really valuable to them. -- Katharine Mieszkowski [10:30 a.m. PST, Jan. 4, 2001]

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Great online art (if you can see it)

The digital spirit award of the week goes to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, whose geekily titled Internet art show 010101 launched on -- you guessed it -- Jan. 1, 2001, at 12:01 a.m. The collection, which premieres online with five digital art pieces and will open in the museum itself in March, explores the way the Net, cellphones, e-mail and the ever-shrinking attention span of the wired-up human are changing the way we perceive art. Complete with the requisite "think texts" from Anthony Giddens, Donna Haraway, Guy Debord, Ray Bradbury, Alvin Toffler and Nicholas Negroponte, the online "show" invites art enthusiasts to participate in forums and ponder the meaning of identity, anonymity, nomadism and a host of other 21st century technology buzzwords.

The exhibit is a nifty idea that Wired magazine would surely approve of. And the art itself -- which includes multimedia pieces by Net-arterati like Entropy8Zuper, Mark Napier and Erik Adigard -- is thought-provoking if a bit cryptic and elitist. But the real take-away from the online exhibit is that the digital museum still has a long way to go. Between the leaden manifestos that scroll by at a tediously slow pace, the obtuse user interface (the button that leads you to the exhibits itself is exactly one pixel big and unlabeled) and the -- count 'em! -- three plug-ins required to view most of the collection, visitors will probably give up before they've even figured out how to navigate Matthew Ritchie's abstractly animated nonlinear narrative.

Negroponte may believe (as a "think text" on 010101 explains) that "the change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable." But at least an oil painting won't cause your computer to crash, as mine did twice during my visit. And despite the pixel punditocracy's predictions, until digital art has sorted out its ease-of-use issues it seems unlikely that brick-and-mortar museums will disappear. -- Janelle Brown [11:30 a.m. PST, Jan. 3, 2001]

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Shave your bush to protest Bush!

Mad about another Bush in the White House? Then shear off your own and let him know.

That's the call-to-arms of Silicon Salley co-founder Emily Hofstetter. In an e-mail with the subject line "Emily's election protest/performance," Hofstetter declaimed: "We have the power, now get into the shower and repeat after me: NO MORE BUSH!"

Hofstetter, whose site focuses on women working in the Internet industry, conceived of the protest in her own shower, as she mused upon the recent election shenanigans. As her e-mail -- which she sent to about 2,500 people -- explains: "There in the shower I began softly chanting 'no more bush, no more bush, no more bush' over and over again until I was in a mantra/trance-like state. I reached for the Lady Schick, a slick bar of handmade soap, and before I knew it, there was no more bush. Completely shaven, I stood in the shower laughing. I laughed until I cried and then it hit me: Women are probably going to be the most affected by this recent faux-lection. Why then don't we do something that will at least show our disapproval for the recent decision. The way I see it: ONE CLOSE SHAVE DESERVES ANOTHER!"

In response to the thin margin that decided the recent presidential election, Hofstetter exhorts other women to follow her lead -- to shave themselves as an act of protest and "save the clippings, bag them and send them to our clown prince president for his inauguration. Better still, let's all go to the inauguration and throw the 'bush clippings' at our new president like confetti at a ticker tape parade!"

Does Hofstetter really expect throngs of disgruntled women to shave it off? Well, not exactly. As her e-mail has been forwarded around the Net, most of the reactions she's received have been "right ons" from both men and women. Still, she hopes to inspire others to take their own forms of action: "I was hoping that it would mean a lot of things to other people. This is protest in its most simple and most naked form," she said.

Hofstetter will be traveling to Washington for the inauguration and vows, "I am prepared to stay completely shaved for four years. You think that Bush is the name of our president? I say that Bush is something that I have between my legs and I can get rid of it if I want to." -- Katharine Mieszkowski [5 p.m. PST, Jan. 2, 2001]

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Dot-com cynics mourn Edgewater shootings

It's official. Fucked Company has a heart.

That hotbed of gleeful gossip-slinging and innuendo-mongering about the wretched demises of doomed dot-coms has raised more than $14,000 for the families of the victims of the Edgewater Technology shootings. Seven people died following a shooting by a disgruntled co-worker at the Internet consulting company's offices in Wakefield, Mass., the day after Christmas.

By Dec. 27, Philip J. Kaplan, the creator of Fucked Company, had replaced the site's usual home page poking fun at the latest layoffs and bankruptcies with this statement: "On December 26, 2000, 7 of our fellow Internet workers went to work and were murdered" and a list of the victims' names.

At last count, 693 visitors to the page have made donations to the families using their credit cards or PayPal. -- Katharine Mieszkowski [2:30 p.m. PST, Jan. 2, 2001]

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A random act of kindness for the holidays

In these days of the dot-com doldrums, we always like to hear heartwarming tales of generosity. So when an old dot-commie friend e-mailed us to tell us of a nascent benevolent trend, we thought it was worth mentioning. According to Rocky Mullin, a San Francisco sound engineer, a number of Net veterans have been making good use of Amazon.com's "Wish List" feature to send great books to perfect strangers.

Mullin just likes giving stuff away, he says, so this year, "besides the usual holiday stuff -- food drives, toy drives -- I used the wish-list search on Amazon to pull up people's wish lists. I perused them until I found a few lists with books that I liked a lot, and I bought gifts for a few different people." He sent the idea to various mailing lists, and apparently, it's taking off.

This new random act of kindness is unlikely to replace volunteering at the local homeless shelter as the annual ritual of holiday charity, but think how a surprise gift from a total stranger could cheer up a down-at-the-heels dot-com refugee. Happy holidays! -- Janelle Brown [11:00 a.m. PST, Dec. 22, 2000]

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Give us your pimply, your lovelorn, your hormone-ravaged teens

Valentine's Day is still a long way off, but two teen Web sites have already started playing Cupid. Madhive.com, which boasts that 75 percent of its 500,000 users are male, and Kiwibox.com, home to an equally large group of teenage girls, have opened the dating doors. Teens planning to attend the sites' jointly administered "first ever virtual Valentine's Day Dance" -- a four-hour chatfest on Feb. 14, 2001 -- can now go online and pick their dates. They can also choose to go stag, in which case they could end up with a girl or boy chosen at random.

But why go at all? Teenage life is hard enough, given the pressure to succeed, to be popular. Bringing hundreds of thousands of pimple-nosed, horny teenage strangers together -- those who have nothing better to do on V-day but tap, tap, tap on their keyboards -- will only magnify the awkwardness, the embarrassment, the sheer sweaty-palmed hell of adolescent dating. Sure, giving the world's shyest and geekiest a place to hang may be sweet, even Utopian, but somehow, it's also a bit frightening. -- Damien Cave [12:26 p.m. PST, Dec. 21, 2000]

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Online music will eat itself

Is there anyone left that hasn't sued MP3.com? Today, EMusic.com announced that it, too, was joining the fray and will take the beleaguered online music site to court. The accusation, as usual, is that MP3.com infringed on the copyrights of the albums that EMusic hosts on its site; EMusic is being joined in the suit by six of its independent record label partners.

What a way to end a year. In the last 12 months, MP3.com has already been forced to deal with lawsuits from the major record labels and the Recording Industry Association of America, the Harry Fox Agency on behalf of music publishers and a class-action copyright infringement suit from a number of independent record labels. Although MP3.com managed to settle with the big labels, it cost the company over $100 million. The impact of yet another lawsuit could well drain what little is left in MP3.com's coffers.

But being sued by the record industry is one thing; being sued by your digital-music-company brethren is another. What ever happened to the "united, we are stronger" rhetoric of the early days of Net music? Or is EMusic just embarking on a vaguely nasty series of moves -- the most recent of which was a threatened lawsuit against Napster -- in hopes of ingratiating itself with the record industry and ensuring a top position in an ever-shrinking digital music industry?

In these brutal days, it doesn't seem to matter much that both MP3.com and EMusic were early pioneers proselytizing the promise of MP3s to the general population. Animus is instead king. Et tu, Brute? -- Janelle Brown [1:30 p.m, Dec. 19, 2000]

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