i don’t know if there is much to be made of it, or if it is just another example of myself twisting obscure facts to prove that the world truly revolves around me, but last night i noticed that google has dropped out of the business of digitizing old newspapers. i never understood their business model with that endeavor, but the generosity of the contribution was notable. i regarded their endeavor with both interest and trepidation, not because i am any kind of competitor of theirs, not even on a micro-level, but because i did expect them to come along and scan the old magazines upon which i have built a web project and spent considerable time and money. i expected either google or archive.org to do the honors of rendering my project moot, and trivial. alas, the magazines i use are not of enough significance, it seems, to marshal the resources of those entities. or perhaps the elusiveness of those magazines contributes to these archivists taking a pass on them. i don’t know, but that while i never crafted my little project as any kind of competitor to those guys i am still kind of inspired in my pursuit of the project to know that at least google won’t run me over on it. my plan for this was never to be a mini archive or google, but to provide the value-added level of organization and context-specific searchability, among other nuances.
the project has gone into overdrive this week, and the withdrawal of google from the old newspapers space proves what i have believed all along: that this sort of commercialization of public domain content is better left to the little guy, to the enthusiast and the niche-content groupie, rather than assembly-line operations.
or rather, the value-add type of stuff (a term that i perhaps self-indulgantly or self-satisfyingly assign to my pursuit) is better left to the lone coder, the lone web monkey. otherwise there is just not enough money in it. there is a lot of useful data sitting around like this, languishing in government databases and spreadsheets, considered of no particular use beyond its mere existence to its maintainers or collectors, but which could be made abundantly useful and entertaining in the hands of an enthusiast or underemployed web wonk.
or maybe google’s withdrawal from the space proves nothing, nothing relevant to me, at least. they did scan one copy of the magazine that i have been building a site on, and as best as i can tell my version of that magazine’s content ranks higher on google’s search than theirs. which might seem strange if one assumes that google’s digitization efforts would somehow be granted primacy over any other version of the same content. evidently it does not wokr like that, nad if i know that level of google the way i think i know that level of google, it is not surprising. google books scanned something, i scanned the same thing, and i rank higher on their search product then does their google books project, because google search is separate from google books, and their search rankings should never favor an in-house product except on its merits, backlinks, and the same esoterica that swirls around its general search rankings.
archive.org may still come along and stomp all over my little dog and pony show, which is, like all things i do, a work in progress. it is more fun this week than it has been in a long time, though. i got tired of the content re-creation thing. i felt more useful creating content, versus re-creating it, and so i dropped out of the project for a while. but it is fun again, not so much on the content but on account of the content management system jiggerypokery.
…..
it was the first decent-weather day in weeks, so i naturally wandered over to the cemetery. that place, so familiar to me now, makes almost no impression on me any more. i mean, there are interesting things, and beautiful things, but there are interesting and beautiful things everywhere. the mystery of Review Avenue took a new twist today when i spotted some teenage boys skateboarding across that wide and weekend-empty street. nothing is too mysterious about that, save for the relative isolation of the street, and its desertion on weekends. but the mystery arose from the SUV parked nearby, stuffed to the gills with hot babes, and i mean hot hot hawt babes, either watching the kids skateboard or maybe chapperoning them. they were resplenadnt, though. the barf of perfume smell was a cloud over the street, the desolate and sometimes creepy street, where i found the coins i placed on a stone last year. i placed some coins on a certain stone on the giant wall of stones on Review Avenue, and the coins are still there. i said i placed them last year but i think i may have actually placed them 2 years ago. now the vines and foliage are enveloping the stone, and the coins might fall off. they survived the worst winter in recent memory, and they stayed in place after a wind storm of 70mph gusts, but i am once again skepticla that they will survive the encroaching foliage.
God but the sun felt good today. there was only a little of it to be had, but my face and arms drank it up like an oasis.
i wandered over Section 8 at Calvary, but they have not finished mowing the grass there. i guess they do it in a grid format, and the spaces between the tombstones were mostly unkempt. this made it hard to just walk up the section the way i like to do. the graves in Section 8 are about as tall as myself, and i had a scary experience there some years ago. in a rush to find a grave site (i was hired to photograph it, but i couldn’t get there until close to the closing time of the cemetery, so i was rushing around, dodging the too-tall tombstones that seemed to be moving toward me whilst it was, of course, i rushing toward them) i more or less knew where i was going but was stopped dead (haha) in my tracks by the shocking site of a freshly-dug grave, inches in front of me, the dirt from the lip of the grave trickling down under my feet as i gaped and barely maintained my balance on the cliff of death. the grave had been dug in a pre-existing plot. i could see the coffins piled around and under the fresh grave. actually i don’t remember now if there was a coffin *under* the freshly dug site, but the coffins were piled up to its right. old family. i didn’t care about the relationships, i just didn’t want to fall in. i hhhaad a cell phone but calling 911 to report that i was stuck at the bottom of a freshly dug grave would have borne publicity that i would not need or appreciate.
i managed not to fall in to the grave that day. that is my memory of Section 8. that is one of my memories of Section 8. i have others.
