This is a story about how I ended up downloading every podcast. But it’s actually a little more than that.

I have a reputation/name as a historian now, and that’s nice, but I’m primarily a collector. I have an innate need to put things with other things like it and end up with a large set of like things. I do it everywhere and in a whole range of ways, and have done it since I was very young. I don’t really discriminate too much about what I like to collect, although I suppose it leans in the direction of information or unusual subcultures. What happened and continues to happen is that in pulling together these collections, I discover patterns and themes that reveals things far beyond the mere collection itself, and I draw on those themes to write or speak about. It’s like enjoying bike-riding and you bike-ride so much you discover how towns are laid out and roads are planned, simply from the mass of places you’ve ridden your bike. A tangental, but important and ultimately vital set of learning.

When putting together a collection of any sort, there is a vital but most-unrewarding portion of the process in the beginning. You start putting like things together, begin assembling them in a rough fashion or order, and are spending some significant amount of time doing so. Depending on the nature of the collecting, you might find that you lose a day or days to it, at the end of which you’ve only increased your collection minimally. Additionally, there’s very little difference between a beginning collection and a trash pile. A lot of people have trash piles that could be collections if they cared about them, but the trash pile is the cast-off shell to them, not the fruit. It is also very difficult to explain to people why you think something needs to be collected in the first place, and so you have the worst of all worlds: a small, non-comprehensive collection of something that you know others have done better and which will never have “it all”, which is taking a lot of your time to put together. This is where most people move on, and put stuff into the electronic or physical trash can, delighted their worthless proto-collection has been set aside to make space for more important things in their world. This once expressed itself in things like piles of magazines, sets of carefully arranged postal stamps, or small piles of rocks representing various minerals and non-precious gems. Now it expresses itself in piles of printouts, files, manuals and hard drives.

About once a month I get a tragic, sad letter from someone who threw away their BBS lives a year or multiple years ago, who regret it heavily now that they see my collection and the gaps they could have filled. These are not enjoyable letters to get. But it’s quite understandable why they did so. There was a definite physical heft to the collection, but no value as they saw it.

(For the record, if you have a collection of BBS material, whether it be printouts, old parts, or archives of files, I will take it, no questions asked.)

So one day I looked at Podcasts. I liked some aspects of them, so I am downloading all of them. Every one. I am going back and swiping older ones as I can find them, but I’m still in the process of getting every single one, so it’s taking some time. I have them in languages I’ve never spoken, and I have listened to less than one tenth of one percent of them. At last count I’m at 75 gigabytes of podcasts which works out to roughly 7,500 individual files. I suspect there are doubles and many missed files, but we’ll see if that comes with time.

I’ll take a moment to describe how I am doing this. Obviously, I need some space to store all these podcasts, but space, these days, is very cheap. I watch sites that provide specials for hardware, and can purchase a 250 gigabyte hard drive for $100. It’s a drive type that is prone to failure, so I buy two. At home, I run these drives on USB2 enclosures, on two separate machines, and I use a program called rsync to keep them synchronized. I download podcasts using a program called doppler, which has several advantages to its approach that are useful for archiving. I have the podcasts on a network drive, so I am not beholden to a specific machine to download the podcasts. I found very quickly that Doppler Radio didn’t check to see if you had pointed it to multiple copies of the same feeds (it assumes you’re using such a small amount of feeds, that you would always notice the doubles yourself), so I wrote a perl script that yanked out doubles. This has held up for the time being, and while I don’t have firm numbers on how much disk space per day this process is taking, I’m not too worried about it.

While I’m here, I’ll give my own thoughts on the general medium of podcasting. I think the name is incredibly dumb. It sounds like the thing only works with iPods, which it does not. It sounds like you’re doing some sort of radio show and nothing else, when in fact it’s just a container for any data you choose to send along. And it sounds new and revolutionary, when it is anything but.

Podcasting certainly has its roots in zine culture, home-brew tapes, BBSes, carbon-copy SF fanzines, and telegraph. If that’s too high-minded and artsy-historian, then I could point to the direct event of the fad of “Push Technology” that infected a number of companies in 1998 through to 1999. Microsoft and Netscape both claimed that Push technology would change everything, and Pointcast tried to build a business on it. Really, it was all a fine idea, but the order of the day was to claim that not only was a good idea good, but it would actually turn dog poop into solid gold, so the actuality had issues with the (stock-driven) promises.

“What is this Blog thing?” my father asked me on the phone just a few days ago. Dad doesn’t buy into much, because life has taught him that everything’s one big massive scam with collusion by government and industry adding to the mess. Describing it to my dad, as I’ve learned over the years, requires about two paragraphs at most before it’s obvious I’m just being long-winded. So I basically said this (and I did, actually, say this; I am not playing semantic or dramatic games):

“Every once in a while, a group of people with a lot of free time who talk too much band together and take over an already-existing hobby, task or medium. In doing so, they invent a whole set of language to describe the already-existent thing they do, so it sounds like it’s really new and neat. They tend to ignore what’s before them, which is bad, but they also cause this critical mass where they force money and interest in the thing, which is good. The thing becomes easier and better put together to help these people get what they want out of it, which is to be really cool or make a lot of money.”

“So blogs are diaries that are online, where people talk about themselves and other people can read them and tell them how cool or uncool they are.”

Obviously the medium of blogs has a depth or meaning far beyond this, but I think that nails a lot of it, for the purposes of a quick explanation to my father when in fact he was wondering when my documentary was going to be finished. (The answer is, I’m working very hard on it.)

For the record, I am not very fond of the word “blog” at all, but the online and offline worlds are littered and choked with etymolgical abortions that grate and dismay, so there’s no sense in crying about it or trying to turn the tide. I’ll stick with “Audio Diaries” in ten years after it all dies down.

So again. Why am I collecting tens of gigabytes of podcasts, when I don’t seem to have an overreaching awe and admiration of them? Because life has taught me several facts about history and the nature of collecting which tell my gut instincts to go after all of them anyway. I gave a speech about this in 2004 called “Saving Digital History: A Quick and Dirty Guide”, but I’ll summarize quickly.

The hardest single part of analyzing history is to be at the historical event when it happens. You could be very good at knowing everything about Lincoln’s assassination, but the best information all flows from being at the event when it happened in the theatre, not reading second or third-hand accounts, or finding cribbed trial notes or anything else. But obviously, it is most difficult to travel back in time and be there.

Similarly, it is very hard to tell what in the present day will have historical significance. There’s some easy, large targets like major political events or spectacular trials, but sometimes it’s just dumb luck, having a camera or a good memory for facts, and being at the right place at the right time. Sometimes, there’s actually no historical significance but the artistry around recounting the event gives it historical significance. (The Woodstock concert/Aquarian Exposition of 1969 comes to mind.) And sometimes it’s merely a case that, looking back, you find that something has an entire other meaning than anybody associated with it could ever have imagined.

Such I think it will be with Podcasts. They are, essentially, a few people (not more than 1500 at any given time) who are recording their voices or music collections into compressed music files and then making them available for distribution. The fact that the clients for getting these music files are geared towards use-and-discard broadcasting models is irrelevant to me. What, instead, that I focus on is that there are entire swaths of life being recorded by these folks: their accents, their way of phrasing things, their lives, pieces of the world around them, who they know and knew, and how seminal events cut across all these geographic and personal boundaries.

The example I like to give (and I’ve done it a lot, just not in writing) is a hypothetical Letter to Home. Imagine a Civil-War era soldier writing home to his wife to tell her how things are. He might tell her how they’re very cold and unhappy but that the war might be over soon, and that he misses her very much and they should think about getting some more cows. Pretty straightforward stuff, and likely, to someone of the time, to be a rather boring or at least unremarkable letter.

Time changes its value. Obviously Civil War-era letters gain some amount of value by merely being over 100 years old, but beyond that the letter itself could reveal facts or insight that were never thought of at the time when the letter was collected. For example, the soldier might mention being in a specific field which will tell when the armies reached a certain point in a battle, different than previously thought. Maybe that soldier used a word or term that was coming into vogue at the time and helps language specialists trace the spread of that term through the US.

Or maybe, just maybe, that letter contains a watermark showing that it was manufactured by a company that claimed it never sold provisions to the “other side” during the war.

The point is, you can’t know. There’s so much information in the nature of the spoken voice and what the spoken voice is speaking of at the time, that it has contextual meanings that might come out months or years down the line. When combined with the times that they were recorded or the location of the speaker, you end up with a whole host of insight that comes up from your collection.

There are a number of other factors which will also assist me in collecting, most of which I pull from my experience collecting other such from-the-ground works. First of all, the number of day-to-day, consistently outputting podcasts will be very low. Like any interesting medium with a barrier to entry involving time or effort, the novelty wears off and the person stops doing the project. This turns it from an ongoing concern into an exhibit, and exhibits are very easy to collect. Another point is that the whole nature of this particular medium is that people are doing all the hard work themselves, that is, generating the content and ensuring its distribution through directories and clients. That means that I just have to keep setting my clients to the widest swath possible, open up every filter, and make sure the disk drives work, and 95 percent of my effort is automatic. When I have time, I might find more contextual information about each feed, but otherwise, even just having it all in one place is good for now. Obviously I have a lot of other things on my plate, but in a given day, I do basically zero work towards collecting, so it’s not a strain.

Where will this go? I don’t know. I don’t see there being a podcasts.textfiles.com and I’m certainly not looking to start a business as a podcast respository. But libraries and collections out there, some of them really amazing, were started because someone said “Why throw that out? I’ll put it away with the others.” and so it began.

So it begins.

The FIDONET episode is ready for the Eye of Doom.

Folks, we’re getting close. What’s basically remaining, aside from some basic refining and icing, is the last part of the MAKE IT PAY episode. I’ll talk about that episode when I finish it, which I hope is very, very soon.

FIDONET was a bear of an episode to edit, and represents months of work all on its own. There are several factors that caused this amount of effort to be expended, but the primary one is simply the subject.

The Fidonet was an ad-hoc network composed completely of volunteers that connected bulletin board systems all over the world, via a very complicated routing setup. It continues to this day, although the gravity well of activity has moved away from the United States where it was created. At the center of this was a figure, Tom Jennings, who achieved a mythic personality simply by the size of the whole project (at one point there were tens of thousands of BBSes connected) and his own unique character.

Along with Tom Jennings are many other giants, all of them with names that ring true for the people who were associated with Fidonet directly or indirectly: Ken Kaplan, Ben Baker, Thom Henderson, Bob Hartman…. and dozens of others.

It’s a nightmare for a person trying to tell “The story”. The Fidonet story is FRACTAL. The more you research, the MORE YOU FIND, until eventually you realize the whole thing is nearly untellable. It’s like trying to tell the story of “Computers”. It goes down in so many ways and so many levels. I wasn’t paralyzed, but I was certainly intimidated.

Luckily, the efforts of a number of good people, notably Bob Hartman and Tim Pozar, got me in touch with a nice percentage of the “big names”, or at least, enough names that would allow me to broach the Fidonet story with some level of authority. There are some people who I was unable to interview and a small amount who didn’t want to be on camera, but nearly all of them helped me with information and pointers to research.

I consider all of my episodes to be “foundations” in telling the BBS story. You have a rapidly downswinging trend when doing a technical story, where you have to balance the technical discussion with the number of people who will be able to understand and parse the information you’re pouring at them. You have to be careful to summarize without corrupting, and you have to be cognizant of not taking things to such an accurate level that only the people who the subject is about could understand them. I feel I struck a good balance with this episode, but I know already that there’s a 1,000 page book beyond it in things that happened that I am NOT covering. I hope that I can facilitate further research and work on this subject, with my documentary inspiring folks to dig even deeper than I have. I hope so, anyway.

I can also say that this episode gave me one of my most harrowing situations of the entire production: last year, I showed a beta version of the episode at the Vintage Computer Festival (vintage.org), along with a good number of the rest. And knowing that I was showing this episode, Sellam, the organizer of the festival, arranged for Tom Jennings to come see it.

It is a singularly stressful situation to be showing a film in which a person figures majorly into the story, and to have that person seated one row behind you watching it. On several occasions, Tom let out a “WHAT?” when people said things that were speculation but not actually true, or laughed loudly when people recounted their thoughts on Fidonet from a perspective he himself didn’t have on it. I talked with him several times at the festival, and he was OK with the episode, a major deal to me.

Realize that for every event I show in the Fidonet episode, there will be a number of people who go “that’s not how it was”. This is, as far as I can tell, endemic to Fidonet. NOBODY agrees on ANYTHING most of the time. It was called “Fight-o-Net” for a reason. I am fine with this, and will host rebuttals or clarifications if there’s major contentions (I’m doing this for all the episodes, in fact). But I think, at the end, I captured a real sense of what this Fidonet thing was.

I want to take this time to thank everyone who bought this DVD set back in October, who are still waiting for their DVDs to arrive. Please be aware that the delay is for the best of reasons: quality. This fidonet episode is a joy for me to watch, to see this magical subject I couldn’t explain to anyone who wasn’t there, now readily packaged and able to show to my family or friends or everyone else and have them go “Oh! I get it now.”

It’s all coming together.

I had an excellent phone conversation tonight, discussing the approach I took to making the documentary and some of the changes in myself and the process that occurred over the four years. My counterpart mentioned, as an aside, a conversation he himself had had with another person who responded to my name in a less-than-positive manner.

The salient phrase here is “Jason Scott is a Michael Moore.”

I have a few moments during this render of the Fidonet episode, so let me just make a quick statement, a blanket one, about this sort of thing, because I expect it to grow as an actual documentary hits the world.

During the time that I’ve been working on this project, Michael Moore has put out two documentaries, one an Oscar winner, both representing the top two documentaries (in terms of box office) in history. In making them, he has brought to bear a lot of attention, ink, and discussion about the subjects he covers, and of course the way he covers them. He has also brought in a lot of criticism and commentary on the documentary genre as a whole.

His name has also been consistently fashioned as a shorthand cultural term for a number of complex concepts: the range of truth in documentary, the nature of political agenda, the role of filmmaker in political life, and so on. A lot of it is generally used negatively or at least the most memorable writing is.

When you make a film of any sort, truth or fiction, you are taking reality, some sort of lived life or representation of it, and cleaving it towards an intended timeline, one of the length of this film. It’s why they had to make cards that said “two years later….” or add narration to the beginning of a movie so you knew what was going on. This is normally quite expected and understood, unless you personally have an investment in the subject matter or the building blocks of the production. Then things take on a different shape.

In making this documentary, I have chosen a relatively obscure subject: BBSes. I have approached it in a rather overreaching manner, where I interviewed an awful lot of people, collected a very large amount of data and artifacts, and spoke to literally thousands about it. It is, therefore, a pretty friggin’ huge thing.

I am, at the end of the day, a single person, driven with his own goals, his own approaches, and his own talents applied to the project. If another person did this, they would have done it differently. Not many folks would drive one thousand miles in a single day to interview a creator of PC-Board. Very few would track down over 700 BBS program histories, just to get a sense of them. And I don’t know how many would have considered conducting over 200 interviews about the subject.

Maybe their film would be better, more focused. Or maybe it would be so short and light that there would be nothing of note for anyone. I don’t know.

When you put your line in the sand, and say “I’m going to cover this subject, because nobody else has in this way”, some people are going to go “finally”, some people are going to go “whatever”, and some people are going to go “the hell you are”. There’s a lot more people in the middle than in the two ends.

Make no mistake, I have gotten hate mail for this project. I have certainly recieved criticism, threats, slanderous implications, and all the glory that the world can shove in my door, telephone and e-mail account.

This is not unfair, not below talking about, not surprising: it’s the cost of living in the world, of creating something that claims to tell a story or be in any way based on factual information. It’s just what happens. It tells me the subject holds passion for people, that they care how their story gets told, and by whom. I would be surprised if I didn’t get any over time.

Some criticisms are valid. Some are not. But they come from an honest place.

I get fan mail. I get a lot of fan mail. I get several a day, praising some aspect of this work or the work I’m doing. If I want to reach out into the world and get validation for what this is all about, I have it, sometimes every hour on the hour. I enjoy getting it, I enjoy reading it, and it’s also a part of putting your line in the sand.

This project is self-created and basically self-funded (I was sent no-strings-attached money from several folks “just for doing this”, including one very generous multi-thousand dollar donation from a gentleman named Frank Segler). I did not do it on spec, I did not do it as my job, and I certainly didn’t do it in a way that someone told me to or where I didn’t have final say on all aspects of the production. The project is mine, fully mine. At the end of the road, I will be able to point to this DVD set and say that the way it soars or the way it flops is the result of my actions. I will have no-one else to blame (but plenty of folks to praise).

I will stand behind it 100 percent, I will gladly discuss my choices made in editing, subject matter, approach, interviewees and worthiness. Some of my answers will suck, talking about scheduling, missing opportunities, or broken appointments. But I will be talking for myself, knowing it all rests on me. And I will do so. Freely, often, and everywhere people corner me, either on a forum, at a bar in a convention hotel, or in a phone call. And I will be proud to do so.

So let’s get this show on the road.

One of my disks is acting flaky. All through the production, I’ve had to deal with the inherent lack of quality of IDE disks. I’ve had fifteen (15) die in the past few years. With over 2.5 terabytes of disks in use at any time with the video footage, I’ve just been playing the odds. I keep three copies of the video footage (one of them offline) as insurance, so it’s not bitten me yet. But it’s a bit of a pain when one drive dies to begin to move hundreds of gigabytes around to safer, higher ground. It takes a while, to say the least.

I can therefore focus on writing this news entry to tell you how things are. I am now getting mails on a very regular basis wondering what’s up. People who bought the documentary back in October of 2004 are of course worried about the long delay and the the lack of DVDs arriving in their mail. I feel horrible about this, but at the very least I can console myself that it’s about quality, about getting all the pieces in place into a package worth buying.

I have played various episodes for a number of people, as a final test for some of them; they are very well recieved, and I’m very happy about that. They definitely tell a story and definitely give people a sense of the BBS history that has happened. Now I just want to get them to the world.

My day job heated up, which has caused some unwanted delays, but on the other hand without that job, it wouldn’t have been possible to do the documentary, so it’s kind of get unhappy about it. I’m likely going to have to take some days off of work to nail the rest of the work.

So what’s left? Subtitles, some minor edits on FIDONET and MAKE IT PAY before they’re considered done, and finishing up any other descriptions for the photo album which is included on the DVD-ROM. Over a gigeabyte of photos are in the album; pretty big and intimidating numbers. But they’re all intimidating numbers, I guess.

I also just finished (finally) the formatting hundreds of paragraphs from the pre-orders. For folks coming late, everyone up to about November of 2004 could order the DVD set and give me a paragraph that would go on the DVD. I’ve now taken these writings and put them into a readable format. There will be a plaintext version, and an HTML version to choose from. The stories and paragraphs people wrote are very, very touching.

The Eye of Doom had flu this week and that tripped him up badly. He should be coming back with audiovisual changes for the episodes in his hands. He’ll be getting these other two very soon.

ARTSCENE is done.

ARTSCENE is the episode dealing with the ANSI Art Scene that rose up in the early 1990’s, which had roots in the 1980’s and decades before that. I mostly tell the story of ACiD (ANSI Creators in Demand) and iCE (Insane Creators Enterprises), who were two of dozens (perhaps hundreds) of Art groups who competed heavily to create artwork for BBSes and beyond for a good number of years.

On a pure technical level, the episode is hellish. It has 14 tracks of audio and video, and takes 21 hours to render on my system. I’d upgrade the system, but that seems like really taking a stupid gamble way too far into the production. There’s a lot of “B-Roll”, which is where the extra tracks are… shots of the artwork, of the writings, and all the rest from the ANSI art scene’s history.

The ANSI art scene, per se, is not in any way “dead”, although the ANSI Art Scene for dial-up BBSes mostly is, which is what the documentary’s about. There are still a good number of ANSI groups creating artwork in that medium and others, and there’s a wide swath of opinion about the documentary from them. This shouldn’t be a surprise; when someone comes along and makes a product, be it film, book or radio show, in which they describe some sort of “scene” or “subculture”, at least two things happen. One set goes “Finally, we are vindicated.”. Another goes “Damn, we are being exploited.” There’s a third set going “Finally, we are being vindicated as we are being exploited.” but these are the folks who are less bothered by it all than inspired to use it to further their subculture. ‘Yeah, like the movie. Now give me server space.”

The Eye of Doom awaits this episode especially. The Eye of Doom’s name, by the way, is Jim Leonard, and he is known to a lot of people as Trixter of Hornet. He was one of the creators of the Mindcandy DVD, which is a collection of computer “demos” from the past 10 years on the PC platform. Believe me, if there is a guy you want on your side when it comes to refining a visual work, it’s Jim. He’s gone over my stuff and pointed out things that a fanatical Kubrick fan wouldn’t notice on the 5th try. He leaves jewelers from Faberge and watchmakers from TAG Heuer gasping for breath from attention to detail. He has already warned me how much attention the Art Scene episode gets, because he feels so close to the material. Keep in mind, of course, that I have final say, so don’t go after Trixter if you don’t like the resulting work.

I would say, however, that the ARTSCENE episode is the most “Accessible”, by which I mean that you could play it for people by itself and they would come away with some knowledge of a neat little subculture and the forces and thoughts within it. So that’s at least something.

There’s no winning, by the way, with a subject like this. People will either think it too short or too long. That’s the nature of going after something that’s pretty darn obscure, even by documentary standards. For myself, I am very pleased to have an episode on it, and I am especially pleased that I got an interview with Ebony Eyes.

Ebony Eyes was everywhere in the BBS world for a while; her artwork was on many, many BBSes and she was really good at what she did. And she could throw out ANSI drawings at a speed that is still breathtaking. It took a lot of effort to convince her that I wasn’t a maniac, and I think I have to give the credit to Rad Man of ACiD, who had been interviewed twice for this episode and who talked to her a lot about it. The interview went very well, and a good part of it shows up in the episode.

There are now two episodes left to finish: FIDONET and MAKE IT PAY. There’s a reason they’re the last ones; they’re quite complicated. I hope to be done with them shortly. Then it’s just a matter of final cleanups before going off to the printer. I’m on schedule… just not the schedule I’d thought it’d be.