ot: is this something new the internet is doing or have books always done this...

[Fairlight]

Only Brian K. White would say something like:
> This is off topic and sad and I apologize for both.

I'm still mourning Bill's passing, so...  It's just another one of those
little reminders that he's gone.  His son actually pointed out that it's
been like a year now.  It seems like only a couple months, I swear.

> Is it a new facet of life that the internet, and specifically easily 
> accessible and searcheable archives of what was once ephemera, is 
> providing, or have books always done this just to a lesser degree but 
> not significantly different in kind?

I think that it's basically lowered the threshhold of accessibility.  It
always happened, but you had to be subject to either peer review in the
case of journals, or deemed worth publishing by an agent and/or publisher
in the past.

Now, anyone can do it.  Well, anyone that had something going for them
(college or advanced placement high school student, military personnel, or
someone successful to be very well off) could have done before 1995, when
the ISP boom hit for the masses.  Bill contributed to several communities
well before then.  Since then, and especially since several parties
introduced the vast archives of USENET that had been accumulated over the
years, and now with blogging and other interactive communities, it's just a
lot easier for the "common man" to have access to that particular brand of
immortality, per se.

I mean, it's not like Bill was your common man, either.  He knew his
stuff.  He did a lot of things.  Sometimes I think the man lived three or
so lives inside the span of just one.  He was well known in several fields,
including audio engineering (he engineered on Judas Priest's breakout album
, for instance), on-air broadcasting (he was well loved and respected from
his radio days, and influenced the course of several hits--actually making
some of them as popular as they were), etc.  But he was a humble guy, as
well.  He had a few metric tonnes of anecdotes, but I never knew him to
brag.  He was really down-to-earth.

> The thing I'm talking about is, for one example: I just recently got a 
> little interested in laserdiscs & laserdisc players, and half the time 
> when I google something about them, I run into some old post on some 
> audio/video forum from Bill Vermillion.

Bill knew more about storage media than pretty much any person I can think
of, ranging from ancient to modern to theoretical (I remember an email from
him regarding a "holographic" disc capable of storing 400GB worth of data a
couple years back.  Which is -really good- for removable storage.).

> In one sense I'm happy that in this odd unexpected way someone ends up 
> leaving more of a mark. Not only do they get remembered, but in a weird 
> way you even get to continue discourse with them. Before last week my 
> interests didn't intersect with other areas of Bills life enough to 
> cause me to converse directly with him on those topics or run into old 
> posts or articles. And now even though he's gone, it's still possible 
> for that intersection to occur partially and for new discussion to take 
> place, at least for me. I know he was big on pay-it-forward so the 
> one-way nature of all further contact probably wouldn't bother him at 
> all. Especially for all people after this point where, now that the 
> first people have written stuff into the racial store, from that point 
> on everyone will be on both sides of those one-way contacts at some point.

Well, after Bill passed on, I actually had an idea for a site for...well,
living obituaries was more or less the way I thought of it.  An idea I had
to basically be multi-purpose:  1) let people know how you feel about them
-before- they're gone, while they can still appreciate the sentiment, and
2) where people could sort of read up about people and get to know them
before they were gone--before it was too late.

There are probably a bunch of people out there worth knowing.  But as you
found out, how often do we miss meeting those people or interacting with
them in time?

MySpace and all that lot don't really serve the purpose.  That's more
self-aggrandisement than anything else.  I'm talking about a site where
people can make it clear that someone -else- has touched their lives, and
hey, it might be worth your while to talk to them, learn from them, etc.,
while you have the chance, 

Plus, going back to point #1, I don't see the point in waiting until after
someone's gone to recognise them or pay your respects.  It doesn't do them
any good after they're gone.

> Before this point, well there have always been books & letters, but that 
> seems different enough in degree as to functionally be a difference in 
> kind. You couldn't be interested in just any random thing, however 
> focused or obscure, and google up tons of personal casual conversation 
> from other people who are or were similarly interested and hear their 
> thoughts or observations. If it warranted a published book or article , 
> and if you were lucky enough to have access to the right library, you 
> might find something, and that would still be an official and formulated 
> writing, not a casual conversation.

Well, like I said, the availability of the medium has lowered the
threshhold for accessibility.  It's also lowered the threshhold for
relevance, in a way.  As you say, only the Really Important[tm] things that
people might write articles or books about were previously covered.
Nowadays, people's views on damned near anything can be and are recorded
for posterity--whether they like it or not.  (Never put anything out there
you don't want seen...nothing really vanishes anymore; something I expect
to see in the future will be a "cleanup company" that takes a fee to remove
all traces of you from various sources net-wide, and I expect there to be a
large row about it between whoever takes on the job and places like
Google.)

The problem in the future won't actually be storage capacity, nor will it
be relevance.  The problem in the future will be a multiplication of what
we face now with searche engines--intelligent results from searches.  If
someone's archiving Twitter and such, there's a lot of crud out there,
much of it disjointed.  At some future date, I expect search results to
require far better engines, or searching will become meaningless.  It's
already hard enough to get decent results from Google, and that's largely
down to volume of data and lack of prioritisation.  At some point, that
relevance scale will need to naturally re-implement itself, methinks.  It
can't keep growing like this forever with the current access mechanisms
and remain useful.  Funnily enough, there was a line in "Caprica" that
described the problem quite succinctly:  "The problem isn't storing that
much information, it's in how to access it."

> look for and what it means when this or that happens, etc... and you go 
> "hey this guy makes a lot of sense, who is he?" and scroll up to the 
> header and realize it's Bill or someone else you knew and respected and 
> admired. It's very nice and yet very sad to run in to these posts this way.

It's sadder still when you knew them and were close. :/ But I wouldn't
trade having known him for anything.  He was a good man--great, even.

mark->
-- 
"I'm not subtle. I'm not pretty, and I'll piss off a lot of people along
the way. But I'll get the job done" --Captain Matthew Gideon, "Crusade"