Blogging Player of the Week: What a schmuck!

The first blogger I knew didn’t call himself a blogger, because the word hadn’t yet been invented. Once, in the dawn of internet time, Roy Blumenthal was at the helm of “a hare-brained art prank” called Dirty Laundry, in which he created a web page asking people to send their dirty laundry to him for an exhibition in time for the millennium; he received no laundry, and turned his back on the internet forever. Or at least, for a few hours.

Somewhere around 1998, I had recently escaped from the clutches of the Mail & Guardian and launched my own online magazine. I knew a certain hare-brained artist who had a passion for technology, and conned him into editing Gadget, which became a hobby for both of us but didn’t pay the bills then, and still doesn’t now, long after Roy has moved on (perhaps because it is only updated when the blogging is done, which means rarely).

At the time, however, instead of treating Gadget with the respect it deserved — that is, by writing product reviews of the latest in gadgetry — Roy treated it like a blog: with no respect at all and writing on any topic that struck his fancy at any time. Just like in any blog. These topics included a review of a laundromat, which also failed to inspire anyone to send him any dirty laundry.

His most infamous review, however, was of the shop window of a computer store in Rosebank, Johannesburg, called Businessland (in the spot where a Greek restaurant now resides). The manager of the store responded with an angry letter accusing the writer of irresponsible journalism, illogical and inappropriate IT coverage and malicious slander. Since this was an accurate description of the article, and the first acknowledgement from the industry that we existed, we were delighted. Dale Imerman, then our web master and now a fellow blogger on Thought Leader, insisted that we give Roy a raise, which he instantly invested in a more expensive class of coffee shop in which to avoid work.

Roy takes up his own story:

“I was originally a Pixie subscriber. That was a bulletin board system (BBS). It later became PiX. Which then became Digitec. Which then became MWeb. I bought a book called Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours. And learnt it in 12 hours. And put together the Barefoot Press website, writing it entirely in the Microsoft text editor, Notepad. Then suddenly, MWeb started offering a precursor to the blogging tools we know and love today. I think they called them ‘Homesites’. I used their online forms to make a site. I needed to do this because I was on the radio every week, speaking to Tony Lankester at SAfm on his show The Computer Gig (later anchored by Jon Gericke). I had to review something geeky every week. And I thought the MWeb initiative was worth exploring.

“I was stuck for a topic, so I recalled a terrrrrrrible experience the day before at TriBeCa coffee shop, which used to be downstairs at Cinema Nouveau in Rosebank. It’s mystified me to this day that TriBeCa stayed alive as long as it did.”

Roy has since migrated that original post over to a Blogger account, but it was originally web-based, in “nasty HTML. Very little control. Unbelievably long upload times because of the slow modems and poor Telkom lines in those days”.

That posting evolved into the blog called Coffee-Shop Schmuck, making Roy still the only blogger who officially refers to himself as a schmuck.

Prior to becoming a schmuck, Roy also created South Africa’s first poetry blog, or what was then, in the “pre-Web 1.0” days, referred to as “South Africa’s first dedicated poetry website”, called Barefoot Press.

“The post I have had the most fun with was when I performed poetry at the US consulate general’s house and asked him to ask the American people to impeach George Bush.” Read the post here …

Roy has a wide range of web-based projects (which don’t obey any numbering system, so don’t ask if they are Web 1.0 or 2.0) under his belt, including:

The Virtual Surf Report with Jon Gericke on SAfm — a guide to his on-air guide;

Coffee-Shop Schmuck — the coffee-shop blog;

Visual Facilitation — how he makes a living;

Illustrations — his art;

Voice contortionist and throat for hire — his voice (also at Voicebank);

Schmucknews’s Podcast — his stories; and

Roy’s button badges — how he thinks he makes a living

He’s a big Facebook fan, because it “ties everything together for me … networking, my blog, my Flickr gallery, my online artwork portfolios, Twitter, Google reader; but Gmail changed my life for the better with all the storage and access to my mail from anywhere. I’ve recently started Twittering. Which is really just blogging in 140 characters with no pictures, and for a limited audience … my friends.”

Why does he do it?

“The web and Web 2.0 in particular keeps me connected, interested, stimulated; and I’ve made numerous business connections because of Flickr alone.”

Obviously, for someone with an unhealthy interest in laundry and coffee, this is not his entire life.

“My life at the moment is my tablet pc, a tired old Toshiba Tecra M4. I make all of my art on it, doing live paintings in boardrooms for serious amounts of money. It has a 3G card attached so I can hunt for reference material when I need it. And I’m loving it. For me, it combines the best of analogue (I use a wooden artist’s easel) and virtual (the stylus ‘feels’ just like a real paintbrush when I’m in the flow).

“Right now, I’ve scored 75% for the first module of a digital arts master’s at Wits. So I’ll be taking that further. And offline entirely, I also love Augusto Boal’s ‘Forum Theatre’, a tool for generating empowered conversations. I write and direct industrial theatre using Boal’s methods.”

Roy also worked at SABC3 for a long time: “Three years — for me, that’s a very long time. I was a promo producer there. That meant that I would create teaser ‘commercials’ for shows like Survivor, Dark Angel, Amazing Race, and try to addict viewers to the box. The station succeeded if I succeeded.”

But then Web 2.0 came along, “and the world is a different place”:

“Because now there’s the possibility of a community of viewers, rather than the old-fashioned ‘viewer’. Digital set-top recording means that the old-style television revenue model is finished. Dead. Fast-forwarding live TV means that the channels have to reinvent themselves as more compelling entertainment deliverers than things like YouTube.

“Sadly, I think the SABC lacks the necessary vision to even understand the new paradigm, let alone take measures to stay compelling. The only joy I get out of this is that the propaganda potential of South African television is plummeting. Its life as an organ of government control is being snuffed out by vaster technologies.”

Finally, like any self-disrespecting blogger, Roy falls for that old trick question: Will blogging replace traditional journalism?

“It has already replaced traditional journalism. For me, at any rate. I read almost all of my news via my Google reader. I aggregate about 80 blogs there. Robert Scoble, who used to be Microsoft’s evangelist, aggregates around 800 feeds. That’s thousands of stories a day. With skilful ears and eyes picking out the great stuff.

“Journalism actually died the day Princess Diana died. On that day, the world’s journalists proved that they have no objectivity, that they serve the gluttonous appetite of public taste. They don’t serve news. They serve entertainment. And they have no self-reflexivity. They cannot turn the cameras or observing eye upon themselves. They’re manufacturers.

“Blogging exposes the manufacturing industry that journalism has become. When a journalist says something, several million people around the world, including better-placed people than the journalist, are able to analyse and pick apart the errors — philosophical and factual. And give readers a new truth. A new way of perceiving the very notion of truth.”

Please send me your nominations for blogging player of the week. It doesn’t have to be someone well-known. The more interesting the project, or the better the blog, the better