CondeNet's president Sarah Chubb on teenaged internet users: "They're not spending a whole lot of time reading Web sites… Their brand is themselves and their friends."

Valid point, but, hey, a five-minute jaunt through LiveJournal (or, heck, Williamsburg) will show you that the same holds true for twenty- and thirty-somethings.

It doesn't stop there either. Think about mothers with thier childrens' names in their email addresses, cultishly insular family jokes and traditions, snapfish photo albums that get passed around long-distance families.

Our obsession is always with ourselves and the people with whom we surround ourselves. No corporate brand can hold a candle to that—teenagers aren't the only demographic checking their friends' blogs before they read other websites.

Walter Benjamin pondering mechanical reproduction (just a conjecture)

I was thinking tonight in class that Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" was a nice, simplistic way of grounding Derrida's repetitive abstractions in Of Grammatology. My professor was a little underwhelmed at the idea of simplifying things, and wanted to talk about Paradise Lost instead, but…the impossibility of an original piece of artwork having its aura of originality without the existence of its lithographs is a really concrete example of the endless reciprocity of the relationship between signifier and signified.

It's so simple. This my problem with Derrida. His concepts are all so logical and intuitive that it seems like they should've gone unsaid (and the man said a good deal about these things). Maybe his legacy on the academic consciousness has rendered reading him virtually unnecessary. Maybe Nietzche said it all a heck of a lot more elegantly.

But the Benjamin essay is a little easier to have fun with. I haven't read it in a few years, but I have to wonder what some media studies Ph.D. candidates might dreaming up by combining Benjamin with internet memes. Links to a blog post on other blogs are signifiers that add a similar aura of the original to the post to which they link, yes?

But then, Mona Lisa doesn't have a hunk of technorati javascript listing all known lithographs underneath her frame at the Louvre.

title page of Robert Greene's Groatsworth of Witte

A colleague of mine recently alerted me to the wonderous Latin phrase Johannes factotum, meaning a Jack of all trades with the bonus connotation of "would-be universal genius" that the phrase "Jack of all trades" most certainly lacks. The OED Online entry for factotum elaborates:

a. In L. phrases: Dominus factotum, used for 'one who controls everything,' a ruler with uncontrolled power; Johannes factotum, a Jack of all trades, a would-be universal genius. Also fig.
b. One who meddles with everything, a busybody.
c. In mod. sense: A man of all-work; also, a servant who has the entire management of his master's affairs.

Gotta love how the OED's idea of a "modern" sense of a word can include the concept of servant and master.

Anyway, the first instance of Johannes factotum in the English (according to the OED anyway) is in Robert Greene's (doubtfully attributed) pamphlet, Groatsworth of Wit, in which he calls Shakespeare "an absolute Johannes fac totum, [who] is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey." Shake-scene. Heh.

By the way, since I didn't know what the heck groatsworth meant, the OED defines it as "As much as is bought or sold for a groat"—noting off-handedly that the figurative use of such would be "a very small amount." Thanks, OED. Until tomorrow.

So here's a cool MosNews article about how Vladimir Odoevsky, a 19th-century Russian prince, predicted blogging in his novel Year 4338. An interesting excerpt from an unidentified translation of the novel:

The job of publishing such a journal daily or weekly is carried out by the butler. It is done very simply: receiving an order from the masters, he makes a notice of what they tell him, then make copies by camera obscura and sends them to the acquaintances.

Hey, if I had a butler to blog for me, maybe I'd have a life.

But, um, not only is that quotation completely unreferenced by MosNews…so is the blog that they supposedly found it in. They claim that the information was blogged by one "Ivan Dezhurny, a Russian poet and singer" who is "generally fond of futuristic literature" but they don't provide a link to his post or his blog.

What year is this, MosNews? Link, people! Link to your sources! That is what hypertext is here for. Even if it's an incomprehensible Russian-language silly-willy LiveJournal. We are curious and we want to see the original right-now-this-very-second live-and-on-our-computer-screen. This is why we're using the internet rather than a reference book.

But what's really disturbing here is that this "Ivan Dezhurny" character is completely ungoogleable outside of the MosNews article and (as of the time stamp of this post) one referencing site with identical text. Whoever heard of an ungoogleable blogger? Sure, the Wired article hints at the possibility of blogging anonymously or under an assumed name, but then, er, wouldn't MosNews be calling him his blog name or "an anonymous blogger"?

Very mysterious indeed.

обновление—I think that means "update" in Russian.

Well, it's been a veritable tempest of Russian visitors and information-providers. First of all, I want to provide some html-ified links to Ivan Dezhurney's original post and an English-language page about Prince Odoevsky, both of which Sergei Rublëv kindly provided in my html-stunted comments.

I'm trying to decipher Sergei's recent post with this rather spiffy online translation app and I think what I'm gathering is that he wrote this Russian article about Odoevsky (quite properly linking to Ivan's post) for the lenta.ru news site. I know absolutely nothing about lenta.ru, but, hey, they're doing a better job of writing for the web than MosNews.

What I'm really digging, though, is the text that Sergei used to link to my Odoevsky post: это. My online translator renders this back to English as "it" and provides "кенспекл" as the Russian for "kenspeckle." Wonder what made him choose это.

So after doodling hearts around the words "google reader" in my date book the whole train ride home, I finally got a chance to import my bloglines subscriptions and really play around with it. I'm in ajax heaven! Gmail autosave has been discarded like an old, broken toy for my new flame.

The ability to star posts of interest instead of marking them as unread is really making my heart go pitter-pat. I don't use that function in gmail enough, though if I did maybe I'd remember to email people back more often.

Once there's search feed capabilities in this thing I'm gonna be practicing my signature as Mrs. Lauren Google Reader.

The new google rss reader is really, really slow right now, and its import subscriptions feature doesn't seem to work, but when google puts more bandwidth behind it it's going to totally wipe the floor with bloglines' UI. Finally! I'm especially loving the "gmail this" feature.

sketch of Bryant Park skating rink

An outdoor ice skating rink is opening for the first time this year in Bryant Park—and it's going to have free admission! This is huge, considering that a few hours of outdoor skating at Wollman Rink in Central Park costs $11 and runs from $13 to $17 at Rockefeller Center (not to mention that boring old indoor skating costs $10 at the incredibly inaccessible Chelsea Piers rink).

Too bad it's going to be incredibly crowded—just think of the lines people make at Rockefeller and Wollman for the opportunity to pay those high admissions fees. If only they were going to hold cheap freestyle sessions for the ice time-starved figure skaters of New York.