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I watched an interesting movie recently that made me think about language, poetry, writing and the modern-day poet.

I love language. It’s part of the reason that I became a journalist initially. Language is the media that portrays a message, evokes an emotion, tells a story and more literally allows us to communicate with one another. However I have forgotten how to enjoy my obsession with language in the last four years or so. I went to varsity and language became a means to an end not the end result.

What I mean by this is simple, poets make language their result. Yes the message exists but it is enhanced through the language they use, the words they choose and the sorts of construction that they decide to make use of.

If you don’t know anything about poetry and wondered what all the high-faluted hype was about do yourself a favour and read up about poetry a bit. Then go and read Frost, Thomas, Cummings, Blake and Eliot for a start. These are the greats of the past and the definitive poets of “our time”. The reason I say “our time” is that these poets are not part of my time, my era or existence.

Here are snippets of some of my favourite poet’s writings:

The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

And another:

why must itself up every of a park
by E. E. Cummings

why must itself up every of a park

anus stick some quote statue unquote to

prove that a hero equals any jerk

who was afraid to dare to answer “no”?

Now tell me something. Who are the the poets of my era? Who wrote the great words of my time? Who told the stories that would define the present-day history?

I would like to suggest that musicians today have become the poets of yesteryear.

Here are some examples:

There’s always somebody taller with more of a wit
And he’s equipped to enthrall her and her friends think he’s fit
And you just can’t measure up though, you don’t have a prayer
Wishing that you’d made the most of her when she was there

They’ve got engaged there’s no intention of a wedding
He’s pinched ya bird and he’d probably kick your head in

Bigger boys and stolen sweethearts
Oh, you’re better off without her anyway
You said you wasn’t sad to see her go
Yeah, but I know you were though

Now you don’t know what she’s up to you can only assume
If she’s not in the front of the shops then they’ve gone to his room
Bet she’s gone ’round in her school stuff, bet that’s what he likes
I know you thought she were different and you thought she were nice

But she’s not nice, she’s pretty fucking far from nice
She’s looking at you funny rarely looking at you twice

That is a band I love, the Arctic Monkeys. The writing above, without the music, is poetry to me. It might not be an iambic pentameter. But Poetry, it is.

The next example is from Greenday, one of the definitive bands of my era and I think one of the definitive poetry sources of my time.

I’m the son of rage and love
The Jesus of Suburbia
From the bible of none of the above
On a steady diet of soda pop and Ritalin
No one ever died for my sins in hell
As far as I can tell
At least the ones I got away with

And there’s nothing wrong with me
This is how I’m supposed to be
In a land of make believe
That don’t believe in me

Get my television fix sitting on my crucifix
The living room or my private womb
While the moms and brads are away
To fall in love and fall in debt
To alcohol and cigarettes and Mary Jane
To keep me insane and doing someone else’s cocaine

And there’s nothing wrong with me
This is how I’m supposed to be
In a land of make believe
That don’t believe in me

Above is part 1 of “Jesus of Suburbia”.

Next is one of my favourite songs from the last 5 years, The Foo Fighters and “Best of You”:

I’ve got another confession to make
I’m your fool
Everyone’s got their chains to break
Holdin’ you

Were you born to resist or be abused?
Is someone getting the best, the best, the best, the best of you?
Is someone getting the best, the best, the best, the best of you?
Are you gone and onto someone new?

I needed somewhere to hang my head
Without your noose
You gave me something that I didn’t have
But had no use
I was too weak to give in
Too strong to lose
My heart is under arrest again
But I break loose
My head is giving me life or death
But I can’t choose
I swear I’ll never give in
No, I refuse

Is someone getting the best, the best, the best, the best of you?
Is someone getting the best, the best, the best, the best of you?
Has someone taken your faith?
Its real, the pain you feel
Your trust, you must
Confess

So to answer my own question, where are the poets of today, the modern-day writers that define our present-day history, they are in music, in the popular form of communication today. Poetry is no longer in the mainstream as it was back in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, today it is music and the musicians, songwriters and definitive minds might just exist in our music.

For more poets of today I suggest reading:
Lennon
Dylan
Marley
Stevens
Matthews
Apple
Taylor
King
Nirvana (Kurt Cobain)
Oasis
Tupac Shakur
Chapman

Who would you consider poets of your era? Which poets do you read? What would you classify as poetry?

I just received a very interesting email.

Here it is:

Hi Nic,

Thought this might of interest to you. If you access the Internet via your
mobile, and you are a Vodacom subscriber, I’m sure you’ve run into some
difficulty especially with sites like Twitter.

The Internet Society of South Africa released a statement strongly
condemning Vodacom’s actions. The full statement is below.

Let me know if you need some additional info. ISOC-ZA’s past chairman Alan
Levin is the official spokesperson for ISOC-ZA on this, and his contact
details are below if you want to chat with him.

Hope you have a great weekend!

Cheers,

Sentient Communications CC

ISOC-ZA strongly condemns Vodacom behaviour

On Wednesday, June 25, 2008 Vodacom claimed to revolutionise Internet
on the cellphone. They falsely claimed that millions of Vodacom
customers now (effectively) have the same experience of the Internet
on their cellphones as they do on a PC. In reality Vodacom have broken
the Internet for these millions of customers. This came without any
warning and ISOC-ZA is united against this sort of behaviour.

Various applications that include instant messaging, banking,
specialised mobile applications such as email, Youtube, Twitter, Fring
and at least a dozen others, are no longer working. In technical terms,
Vodacom installed a proxy service that was not sufficiently tested.
As one blogger so correctly pointed out: “Vodacom is essentially using the
public as subjects for an alpha test of their technology” (Flint.za 25 June)

The technology that Vodacom is using is not standards compliant and,
considering Vodacom¹s position as a dominant ISP, it should behave in a more
responsible fashion. Furthermore, some of our members have claimed that
Vodacom block many applications that it feels may threaten its business.
While we have no direct evidence of this, we appeal to Vodacom to disclose
what it blocks and intercepts on its networks.

Happily, some users have worked out how to bypass the new Vodacom changes
and ISOC-ZA urges all mobile Internet users to make use of this should they
too be unhappy with Vodacom¹s actions.

There are a number of bypasses freely available on the Internet, and are
simple to affect.

For example: If you use a Nokia phone then the following should work:
Access:

Tools
Settings
Connection
Access points
Vodacom
Options
Advanced Settings
Remove the Proxy server address

About ISOC
The Internet Society is a global not-for-profit membership organisation
founded in 1991 to provide leadership in the management of Internet
related standards, educational, and policy development issues. It has
chapters in over 90 countries around the world. Through its current
initiatives in support of education and training, Internet standards
and protocol, and public policy, ISOC has played a critical role in
ensuring that the Internet has developed in a stable and open manner.
It is the organizational home of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Internet
Engineering Steering Group (IESG) and other Internet-related bodies.

I’ve removed names until I can do a bit more background research and chat to a few more people. But I just tried to access twitter mobile…it didn’t work. This doesn’t look promising for Vodacom and their mobile internet tactics.

There has been a bit of a buzz surrounding Google Trends and their alleged intention to take on Alexa in the tracking, trends and statistics game.

I’ve chatted to Vincent about this and he seemed underwhelmed by the entire concept.

I have a different perspective. I am quote excited about the comparative search terms and vague unique visitors per month.

From what I can gather, the basic premise is that you can compare what users are searching for and visiting with one website as the focus.

The graph below is a comparison of four news websites in South Africa. News24.com, IOL, Mail & Guardian Online and The Times Online.

click to enlarge

Using the above graph as an example, Mail & Guardian Online is the focus of the graph and data you are able to see the graph, regions, also visited and also searched for. The key to these comparative graphs is the colours. Note the colours carefully and pay attention because they are important.

Mail & Guardian Online is clearly blue and the little button says that the statistics are ranked by/according to Mail & Guardian Online.

I can see that people who visited Mail and Guardian Online also visited The Times, searched for vuyo mokoena and South African newspapers.

I think this is useful information.

What can you do with information like this? It’s habitual I think. You can know what your target audiences habits might be. I say might be because there are never any certainties. But we can know with a greater sense of surety (read confusion) than previously. This means targeting. Targeted advertising, targeted content, themes, links, relevance.

To me, this is potentially more important than knowing what your users are clicking on in your own site. Why? Because things are different and evolving online, especially in the online news media market. Mail & Guardian Online have implemented a system of cross referencing and external linking. These links directly provide our potential opposition websites with links taking users out of the Mail & Guardian Online in to a different news organisations website. Now if we know which opposition our users prefer, how frequently they visit and what search terms took them in to or out of our websites and our oppositions then the chance exists that the word “opposition” is being used unnecessarily.

It could be possible down the line that news is customised by the organisations, users, competitors, advertisers and anyone else in such a way that the flow of information suits each individual in a broader context.

Thanks Stii!! Now I just need to get my head around that XFN stuff and I’m golden.

Have a look at the pictures below. I have seen pictures of the digging, burying, building and more at the Gautrain sites but I have yet to see images of the actual train that people will be using.

Here they are: