talkmagic.co.uk

something that was said in another topic, got me thinking...

Ted wrote:

Allen Tipton wrote:User Generated Content vehicles are all very well; and I am extremely fond of Talk MF, BUT in 50 plus, years time, or less, are these going to be available to any student, collector or lover of Magic's History??

I doubt it and I share your concern.

now, I'm not saying in the next month or anything - but at some point soonish, TM may very well not exist...the way of communicating may change and move on...

servers have been known to crash y'know, all kinds of things could possible make TM no longer exist...and all our reviews, "knowledge" and obviously finely honed opinions will cease to exist...lost forever...

so, with that in mind - think back on your time on TM, and wonder this...

what are the positives and negatives to these kinds of forums? what do you get out of them? what do you put back in? and lets even change the question a little...

say in 15 years time, some old server is found and coughed into life for a moment, and TM is downloaded and re-read by people...what kind of legacy do you think TM has left, and what, if anything have you contributed to that?

*opens can of worms*

That's a deep question

Life will undoubtedly change but two things will remain in my opinion, one is the written word and the other is music. Both have been around for generations and I can't see that changing.

What I think will change and continue to develop is the medium that we use to experience both of them.

I remember watching Tomorrows World some 20 years ago when the CD was first invented and you would have never even envisaged the iPod back in those days. I also recall the dawn of the computer when 16Mb (yes, that's megabytes) of RAM cost close to £800 and likewise, if you had said that you'd have 4Gb onboard a laptop then you'd have been laughed out of IBM.

What we will perhaps get is something like an iPod NANO that records, uploads, downloads and then dictates at the command of your voice.

16MB 16MB??!? When I was a child my computer had 128Kb of memory! (Really)

As long as people are using TM, then TM will always be here. If there's a server crash, then TM will move (where to will depend on the technology available at the time, of course. For example, there's a TM Facebook group. But I expect another instance of phpbb will be installed somewhere)

As IAIN says though, the biggest loss will be the data, such as reviews. This is a growing concern to web developers since more and more stuff is being stored on the internet (I don't mean personal information here, I mean small things such as forum posts and tweets), and developers are relying on external services such as twitter, google apps, third party apis more and more

It's hard to guess what the internet will be like in even 5 years, never mind 20 or so. Development in the industry is staggering, personally I still can't get over how twitter got big literally overnight, and there are new developments happening almost every week that make me astonished

But at the end of the day, as long as the data (posts) are safe and in a database, it can be read somehow. Just like the printed word can be read hundreds of years later

The on board computer used for navigating the Gemini rocket only had 4k of memory. My phones got more than that and it's a piece of s*** by today's standard.

And think about Star Trek, in 1966 mobile phones were science fiction.

Jean Eugene Roberts wrote: in 1966 mobile phones were science fiction.

Interesting thought is that the kids who grew up on Star Trek are now the people designing mobile phones (or at least they were 10 years or so ago). How much did the memory of the Star Trek communicator drive on the design of mobile phones? So science fiction imagined it, and then science fact plays catch up to make it so (as Captain Piquard once said). One of the space shuttles was called Enterprise.

I did have a point but I'm darned if the bloomin' thing hasn't run off and deserted me...

To answer the question....

I suppose to me the positives have been the contacts i have made, the amount of opportunity it has opened and just having a chuckle...

Although i do feel that the board at times just goes round in a circle and you as a person get stuck in a rut where the same old things get posted and it all seems rather dull...
Its not unique to here but anywhere similar, i guess thats why people flit from space to space...

As for what have i contributed, hmmmmm well i like to hope i bring a small smile or chuckle to someones face (oh dont bingo that !!) some days and i like to think of myself as helping others not necessarily with knowledge, but encouragement etc... Im a big PM fan lol...

F x

Once the electricity runs out, places like TM will disappear and the data with it - unless someone's printed it all out for posterity - so make the most of it while you can . As for limited memory processors, how about the ZX80 and 81? There's probably more memory and computing power in a cheapo digital watch these days but at the time those Sinclair items were considered cutting edge.

But the data should be safe; we certainly were on a weekly backup a while ago so I assume we still are.

What use that would be when the electricity runs out I dont' know unless someone with a small magnet, a steady hand and a pressing desire to waste their time fancies decoding it all.

This reminds me of something I read a couple of years back. In the 80s, the BBC ran a 20th century Domesday Book project. I think it might have been 1,000 years since the original. The data was stored on discs for the BBC (no relation) microcomputer, which was the machine favoured by the Beeb's computer show.

The trouble is that the machine has been obsolete for many years, and relatively soon the data will be unreadable, when the last BBC computer stops working.

Anyway, back on point. I think the problem (if there is one) is that a forum is much closer to a meeting at a magic society than a book or magazine. Yes, it happens to be in a written format, but the content is in many ways more like a conversation.

So, rather than thinking about how transient the words on the internet are, we could see it as a much more long-lived form of oral discussion!

I'll try and answer Iain's questions at some point.

Part-Timer wrote:This reminds me of something I read a couple of years back. In the 80s, the BBC ran a 20th century Domesday Book project. I think it might have been 1,000 years since the original. The data was stored on discs for the BBC (no relation) microcomputer, which was the machine favoured by the Beeb's computer show.

The trouble is that the machine has been obsolete for many years, and relatively soon the data will be unreadable, when the last BBC computer stops working.

Well, I've got a BBC emulator program for my old Amiga, and that's still working. And on my PC I've got an Amiga emulator, which should be able to run the BBC emulator... Whew.

what i see in the future of talkmagic is virtual life tm, you'll wander around a magical landscape interacting with fellow members showing your skills via motion capture that will be built into your computer, probably by blue-ray or even pink n fluffy ray.
all acomplished by a snazzy headband that controls your computer by brainwaves, we had something virtual going with a pond and everything in the eairly days of tm before the doves head was... well the doves head, in our minds of cause but in the future our imaginations could wellbe part of the internet and owned by facebook.

I love the fact that forums are ephemeral. Most of what appears here is just conversation, and while it is fascinating while it is taking place, it is ultimately of little lasting value.
I don't have access to the secret forums, but I believe that what appears on the public sections can be allowed to fade away. Let the magicians in 100 years time hold their own conversations.
But perhaps that's just me. I have a holy horror of being remembered. My will specifies that my final resting place not be marked. While I would love to be a world famous magician, with the bank balance that implies, I dread leaving a legacy.

The most important thing about TM for me and what's helped me most with my magic is being able to read other peoples opinions on things. While it is all mostly conversation, some of that conversation can be very interesting and not just the ones that are current. I was just reading a few mentalism debates from a couple of years ago that were talking about the very issues that I'm thinking about now. While there is alot on the public forums that could be let fade away, there's also alot of very good and useful information scattered there too.

I've not go access to the main secret forum, only the mentalist forum but that's full of brilliant information and half worked thoughts, I'm always trawling back over old posts looking for things that'll get the creative juices flowing.

The strange thing about the web is that information that's constantly being updated is lost, but the stuff that's laid down and forgotten is still there for all to see years later. So, I wouldn't worry about it. Maybe in ten years or so TM will have transformed itself into something else or perhaps even disappeared completely, but at the moment everything we type is recorded and searchable, just like any other forum, and in theory, Google's cache copy of each page in the public section should be around for a lot longer than that.

I think they'd say that, that man thought to much lol

and by that point TM-4 the musical will have probably been a massive hit..with Zac effrons son playing me