branching out

…in which we start a whole new venture with a friend, applying lessons learned.

Harking back to a decade spent—formatively—beyond the fringes of Chicago, we embarked this week on our second site-building romp with friend and mentor Joseph Pinzarrone: dekalborama.com is now rising up from the virtual cornfields of northern Illinois like the dust of a hundred combines marching across the horizon before a harvest moon. The site itself will be a paean to dust: we’ll dust off our archives, resurrect dusty friendships, transfer and convert mildewed recordings—analog to digital, obsolete digital to soon-to-be-obsolete digital—in a brief erection of memory.

We’ll try not to repeat too many of our wikiGong mistakes, at least those we recognize as such. Organization will be a bit cleaner off the mark—we have subdomains already!—and we’ll avoid editing defaults in place to make upgrades easier. There’ll be a wiki, but this time admission will be by invitation only: we know who we once were, and as many hats as we wore, none of them were embroidered with “Russian link-spammer.” And there will be some sort of editorial process, once Joe finishes ruminating on it (me, I’m just the mechanic on this little desert road trip).

Ah, the Past with a capital P. Ashes to ashes, bits to bits, the once-now into a memory now, but still a far cry from the Long Now. Who’s going to look at this digital empire in twenty years anyway, and in what form?

– Cross-posted @ dekalborama.com on May 8, 2011 by gongmaster