They say they are "free". Don't believe them! They steal your downloading time with unnecessary b.s. that you don't look for and don't want, they steal your attention from what you wanted to find, and they drown it. In my opinion, it's cheaper, in human terms, to pay for a web space, learn a little basic html programming (it's very easy! - and don't fall for the temptation to use templates and presets, they seem easy but they just fill the pages with too much unnecessary crap information) and make your own design. Keep private communication private. Decide yourself what you want to show, and don't bury yourself in the billboards from commercial and religious parasites!

And don't choose .com to end your domain name. Is "commercial" all you are? Or maybe you mean communist in a coma, comedy combat, comfort comb, commitment comment, common communication, compact companion, competent, completely competing complex compost, comprehensive computer? I chose .org because I like to be organized. Or you can call me an organic, orgiastic organ.

They also force you to accept their concept of time. Write what you have to write when you want to, and publish it when you want. Choose your own level of importance in highlighting your texts.

I hate blogs, because they trap you in their concept of chronology as the most important element of presentation. You never know where to find the essentials. The pages are too long, and the wonderful hypertext idea of the internet has been destroyed by blogs. It's like regressing back to the paper roll as a means of communication - but read backwards!

Myspace and youtube lets you put out music and film "for free" - but only on their own conditions. I understand people use it because they don't need to bother about coding and paying - don't be deceived though! Myspace (and lastfm, e.g. - equally ugly and stupid by the way) provides no possibility to embed the music in your own web page - if you really want to use a free service use archive.org, where you can choose your own level of copyright or "creative commons" for your material, and there's NO advertisement. You can then embed it on your own web page, as a list or as individual pieces, without necessarily advertising for them and choose your level of quality of the sound. No limitations of numbers and sizes.

(I also checked out soundcloud.com - but they demand your copyright away. You can embed, but only with their ugly design and advertisement for them. Ubu.com and sonus.ca are great resources, but they have limitations in what they accept and how. They don't have embedding possibilities - but if you want to have any of their sounds on your web site you can always use the link to the sound player and make it appear in a frame window, it will look like part of your own web site. You can't change the appearance more than that because the source code is hidden, to make downloading more difficult, I suppose?)

Of course, the easiest thing is to put all your media on your own/your web host's server, but the problem you might get with that is that your web host might have limitations in bandwidth (the number of GBs per week that people are allowed to see of your site), so the more media you have to stream, the more afraid you would get to hit the ceiling, and then they will shut your web site down until you pay more (which happened to me). So that's why I began to look for other places to put the largest files: sound and film clips.

I hate youtube because they force you to keep the 10 minutes limit, they force irrelevant ideas on you of what more films you should see, and they force their logo on top of your films. You can embed it - and I did with some film clips that other people put out - see how ugly it looks, but that's the best thing you can do. Also look here. And unless you have windows, you can only upload 100 MB at a time.

As a better solution (so far) I found vimeo, it doesn't have the time limit that fragments films into small bits, and it doesn't have the logo pasted on top of the film, only on the toolbar, which you're not forced to see when you view the film (like youtube does, at least for a while). When you embed a film from vimeo, it looks like this. Archive.org also accepts film, but I haven't checked out how that works yet. At least it's a non-commercial service, dedicated to research.

If you have better ideas, feel free to tell me! But you can only send me a private email, or call, I have no public forum as you might understand by now!

26th of December 2008.

PS. OK. I changed my mind, a little bit, about blogs. I dicovered the RSS function and that makes sense to me, as a kind of newsletter that you can subscribe and unsubscribe to as you please. In this sense, blogs are good as public diaries (whatever the point of that may be) and a news service. I started to subscribe to a number of skeptical, surrealist, musical, entertaining etc blogs (although I hardly have time to read them) in the same way as I already enthusiastically subscribe to a number of skeptical, musical and scientific podcasts. Maybe I'll start one myself some day... maybe even a blog ... but I maintain that they are no good as web sites for information. And they're usually ugly!

17th of March 2009.

PPS. OK. I changed my mind again. Or maybe not. I admit that I was embarrassingly defeated and succumbed to the social pressure. While maintaining the opinions above, I joined all kinds of shit: facebook, myspace [updated address sep -09] and twitter. The reason is to promote gigs and such, because it seems that many people prefer this kind of communication to ordinary emails. I'll try to keep the fiddling and bs to a minimum and direct people away from there as soon as possible. My web site will remain the main source of information.