Archives for May 2000

A quick shout-out

May 30, 2000 by Michael Boyle

to fellow Montrealer Aaron, whose A boy and his basement weblog is consistently an excellent read.

That’s not to take anything away from the others here in Montreal – Passerby, Ed, or Vanessa. Or from a nice new Montreal weblog, Flights of Fancy.

and this piece came on about art and the internet. It was geared mostly towards a discussion of how galleries and auction houses are moving onto the net, not net.art, but the last segment was about paintingsdirect.com. As the name suggests, they sell paintings, and they’ve extensively indexed everything for easy searching. Trouble is – art is usually a more rarefied thing – you go to a gallery and you see what they’re showing. It’s not supposedly something you buy by typing in “flowers, blue, oil” and clicking a button. The thing is the work on the site seemed legit enough to me, and the woman in the interview seemed pretty cool, and to know what she’s doing. Would you buy art like that?

Inside out:

May 29, 2000 by Michael Boyle

Jesse Berst gets it. The promise of the web lies in turning it inside out. That’s what it’s always been about, whether “it” is media in general or the WWW specifically. The WWW gets us part way there; fast, always on, internet connections take it a bit further. Symmetrical high speed connections (still rare) take us even further. And the software – whether it’s Gnutella, SETI@home, or whatever – goes still further. It’s also about relationships, not information per se – but at this level, information is a relationship.

Most people

May 29, 2000 by Michael Boyle

won’t understand what the Rocket meant to Quebecers and all Canadians, but I think it’s totally appropriate that he’s going to lie in state at the Molson Center and have a full State funeral at Notre Dame Basilica on Wednesday. Think of it like this: Richard was kind of like Michael Jordan and Joe DiMaggio rolled into one, with a little bit of Jackie Robinson status added for good measure.

I have to move

May 29, 2000 by Michael Boyle

this weekend AND finish a new website, but this idea for a new design for this site has been burning a hole in my brain for over a week now, after several ideas that seemed OK but ultimately flamed out too young to see the light of day. Anyone know any good dingbats fonts with images of people?