Notes from the Metaverse, the WordPress edition

Notes from the Metaverse is the mostly technology-related weblog of Mike McCallister. The subject matter has three broad themes:

• Working: where I write about the working life, and on rare occasions call to your attention fights for justice, or against injustice. There used to be more of this here, but I try not to talk about politics or my consulting clients anymore.
• Writing: where I write about writing generally, writing technical articles and books more specifically, and more often these days about writing for and about the web and the blogosphere. Did I mention that openSUSE Linux Unleashed is now in better bookstores everywhere?
• Open Source: The mainstay of Notes topics. I work with open source software for hours every day, and I try to share my experiences, good and bad, here. You’ll read a lot about Linux (openSUSE and Kubuntu are the preferred distros in this household, but your mileage may vary), the KDE desktop, Firefox, OpenOffice.org and whatever else is striking my fancy on a particular day. Want my opinion on something in particular? Feel free to leave a comment here, or on any post.

You’ll see other tags and topics here from time to time. I work hard to provide interesting and relevant links in every posting too. The blog is also syndicated at PlanetSUSE.org.
Frequency: I truly wish I had the time to write a cogent post every day, but it just doesn’t seem to happen, and I don’t want to just write one- or two-line posts just to generate traffic. That just wastes everyone’s time. In an ideal world, there would be at least one post per week, but postings seem to come in bunches for me. Please be patient. I hope you’ll find what does appear here of interest.

About the Title: Notes from the Metaverse began as a newspaper column in Milwaukee’s alternative weekly, the Shepherd Express (celebrating 25 years in business now). It was 1995, and I’d had an Internet account for a year or so. I think I’d just read Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Community, and wanted to share some of my experiences with readers. So I had this great idea of covering Usenet newsgroups and listservs related to the news of the day. My friend and editor at the Shepherd, Doug Hissom, thought it might be worth something, so I started writing a few of these columns. But what to call it? Well, besides Rheingold, I’d also recently read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. As you may know, most of this terrific cyberpunk novel takes place in a virtual reality/community/game called the Metaverse. Well, that certainly sounded cooler than “the Internet,” no? And so it began.

Then my head got too big. I wanted to take the idea to other alt-weeklies, so I wrote editors at every member of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies pitching the idea–and got nowhere. My dream died, and my enthusiasm for the column died with it. I don’t think Doug has forgiven me yet.

Some years later, I heard about this “blogging” thing, and decided to take a shot at it. But what to call it? Guess what, it still works as a title, and no one else was actually using it! So here we are.

Sorry to disappoint (at least for now) those who might come here looking for news about Second Life and other would-be Metaverses. To date, I haven’t had time to play much over there. Perhaps someday…