The years 2001-2007, approximately, on the web were the crazy years. The patchwork years. The years the web was massively and chaotically pumped full of Stuff. 1995-2001 were pretty crazy, of course, but they were checked by connection speed and the limitations of personal publishing. By 2002, broadband was happening over a broader swathe of the world, and blogging had bitten in. Followed by the takeup of bit torrent, YouTube, podcasting, and every other damn thing.

One of the few sane responses to this explosion of production was to assume the role of curator. (Other sane responses include moving to the woods and considering a completion of the work Ted Kaczynski started.) The two most famous examples of same are Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom (est. 1997) — Barger is said to have coined the term "weblog" — and Mark Frauenfelder’s Boing Boing (est. 2000 as a weblog, previously a print magazine est. 1988), co-produced for much of its life by Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, and Xeni Jardin. The latter, in particular, has spawned countless imitators, all deeply involved in doing the web-work of 2001-2007 — sorting out all the weird crap that’s out there and re-presenting it in some kind of ordered and aesthetically or politically filtered manner for our consideration.

My own filter, on the site diepunyhumans.com from 2002-2004 before I moved that side of things to warrenellis.com, was simply gathering research material. It had occurred to me that if I gathered my internet-based research on to a searchable database — something as simple as a blog — I’d have access to it anywhere I could get an internet connection. Which, for someone who usually travels with mobile devices, was kind of a big deal. And so I’ve found myself calling up reference through a Web TV five thousand miles from home while writing on a Treo handheld device and foldout keyboard in order to meet a deadline, before now.

In the shift from there to warrenellis.com, I’ve taken great pleasure in reporting the doings of my network of mad and beautiful acquaintances, further personalising the curation process. But it is, regardless, a curation process.

Anyway. That’s been the job of half the web, for the last several years — collating links from the other half of the web. Last year, I started getting a little itchy about this.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could stand up now and say, okay, these are the post-curation years? The world does not need another linkblog. What is required, frankly, is what we’re supposed to call “content” these days. When I were a lad, back in the age of steam, we called this “original material.” Put another way: we like it when Cory and Xeni are the copy/paste editors for the internet, but we like it better when Cory writes a book and Xeni makes an episode of BoingBoingTV.

(In fact, if you read any of the abhorrent comments threads on BoingBoing, you could be forgiven for coming away with the notion that its readership would be happy if it shut down tomorrow.)

(It’s also notable, I think, that my favourite “new” groupblogs — Ectomo, Coilhouse, Inferior4+1 — don’t just link and go. But anyway.)

And, frankly, no-one’s going to do a better job of being the internet’s copy/paste editors than the BB crew anyway. They have the time, they have the money, they have the setup, they have the audience and they have the momentum of nearly a decade in the job. Nobody needs another linkblog like that. There are already thousands of them. The job of curation is being taken care of. Look ahead.

The weblog has evolved to the point where, today, it’s possibly the most effective way of transmitting material that any of us could have imagined. Look at Tumblr. It’s the easiest thing in the world for writers to use — and also artists, photographers, videographers, spoken-word artists, musicians and a dozen other things. Imagine a jewellery maker, a laptop musician, a performance artist, a cartoonist and a short-story writer getting together on a single Tumblr to make themselves an internet channel. The tools are all there, baked right into the site for free. Not groupblogging so much as groupcasting.

And with a million people all madly curating the web — in many cases, trying to put your link in their curational record before someone else does — getting linked up isn’t exactly hard any more. These aren’t the days of begging for space on someone’s jumpstation anymore.

The above is, as Simon Reynolds puts it, “not fully baked.” I want to come back to this once I’ve cleared this flu out of my system — which is why I have this bottle of whisky — and cleared out some of the work backlog.

DOCUMENTAL is an exhibition by four emerging photographers, including two good friends of mine, Irene Kaoru Malatesta and Sarah Sharp. Exhibition ends with a live gig, apparently. If you’re in NYC on the 11th, please do go and see them. Details in the link, obviously.

There is no nihilism in pushing the frontiers of comics, no budgets but our imaginations, no reason to stop trying.

PULPHOPE: KARIMBAH

Harlan Ellison turned 74 years of age the other week. And so I dug out my copies of THE GLASS TEAT and THE OTHER GLASS TEAT, the collections of his columns on television written circa 1969-1971, and began to re-read them, as I do every couple of years. The thing you need to know about the GLASS TEAT books is that, for all the wrong reasons, they’re timeless. The states of American network tv, dissent and education have not notably changed since he wrote those columns in his mid-thirties. (I’ve been re-reading those books since I was 20 or so, and it’s a shock to realise I’m finally older than he was when he wrote them. And I don’t want to think about how long it’s been since I first picked up a volume of his short stories in Rayleigh Library. With my dad making approving noises behind me: "Harlan Ellison. Good writer.’’)

I met him once. I’d made a crack somewhere online about Harlan’s heart being held together with garden twine and Lego, I think as part of a larger piece about dealing with anger as a writer. One of his fans — not representative of his constituency as a whole, I think — suffered a major reading comprehension failure, fired a foul note off to me and put it in front of Harlan as a ’’let’s you and him fight’’ kind of deal. From which I received a very nice email from Harlan, assuring me that no gardening supplies were required to hold him together and actually addressing the substance of the piece rather than the misreading placed before him. It was nice, he said, that it turned out we each liked the other’s work.

There’s a peculiar artist’s fear, that rides very low in the gut and mostly goes unspoken. Though few of us would cop to having ’’heroes,’’ debased term that it is, the fear does run along the lines of ’’don’t meet your heroes.’’ The man or woman who wrote the things that helped form you as a creator is not necessarily as loveable as the work. This is something I’ve been lucky in, but I will admit to passing on meeting Hunter Thompson a couple of times, and friends of mine have not had my luck. I know writers who now cannot read their heroes’ work. The books are tainted by the experience.

I met Harlan some months later, at a convention. Our signing tables were side by side. Harlan arrived later than I did (I think the signings were staggered), spotted me and yelled "Warren Ellis! Let me give you a manly hug!’’ So I stood up. Harlan’s about five and a half feet tall. I’m six foot tall barefoot, and I was wearing heavy boots. He looked up at me and exclaimed, "Jesus, you’re HUGE!"

I don’t have "heroes," but there are writers I admire greatly, who were influential in my becoming a writer, and I am grateful to have met Harlan Ellison and remain able to take pleasure in his work. Better: now I can hear his voice, and recall the great personal warmth with which he welcomed me on every occasion we met during that convention.

All of which, wishing him a belated happy birthday and talking about how generations of writers deal with each other and so forth, is really just preface to my discovery last night that the fine ebook purveyor Webscription is now offering eight Harlan Ellison books.

A preliminary study of my friend Lenora Claire by Olivia Berardinis:

• Catch-up lunch with Lili #
• My kid is too much like me: “I was supposed to go on a trip to France, but had to get up at 4.30am, so, you know, no chance…” #
• You know what? I should be the next Doctor Who. And anyone who says otherwise gets a screwdriver in the gums. And not a sonic one, either. #
• Huh. Says here that I shouldn’t be combining these three medications. #
• With whisky. #
• Oh dear. Looks like Papa Wrongbrain is going to be thrashing the bare rump of the internet tonight, children. #

* Saturday Night Open Mic.

* Lots of people complaining about tonight’s DOCTOR WHO.

* Next Generation Comics Teaching.

* People talking about the first issue of my new X-Men comic.

* And the July edition of The Whitechapel Book Club.

1. Obama girl, 2. KARIMBAH, 3. bottlerockets, 4. paper, 5. Hauling heavenward [8830], 6. Jacen Burrows

• I guess it’s Independence Day over the pond tomorrow. I trust you’ll all be doing your “solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.” Right? #
• 12 people reply with exactly the same thing:”No, we’re going to blow shit up!” Ah, Americans, the world’s little helpers. With explosives. #
• @tikistitch : Guy Fawkes Night is where we burn an effigy of Fawkes to annually humiliate his name for failing to blow up Parliament. #
• FREAKANGELS 0019: http://www.freakangels.com/?p=44 #
• Also, happy 21st birthday to my cowgirl, @laurennmcc #
• @laurennmcc that’s because you look and work better at 40 than most people do at 21. July 4 is always Laurenn McCubbin Day to me. #
• @laurennmcc : also, I promise to stop telling people that you’re @mckelvie ’s mother, Soon. #
• July 4 - I now have 5111 silent stalkers — I mean “followers” — on Twitter. Soon I will issue the Secret Command Signal. Be patient. #
• @kellysue - in 1997, the only person I saw dress up for the Eisner Awards was George Perez, resplendent in tuxedo and vivid cummerbund. #
• Dear old George did, of course, stand out like a Maharajah at a convention for people who drink paint stripper recreationally. #

Babe, Terror is a band (or maybe a single guy?) out of Sao Paulo who appear to be fashioning their recordings in a tumbledown Portuguese church somewhere off the ninth circle of Hell. It has the same feel as the earliest Sigur Ros, but significantly more lo-fi, Satanic and loveless.

Their demo is up on PureVolume — I’m listening to "Nasa Goodbye" right now.