I'm a blot, this is a place for writers. I'm at home..


scribble net
JULY-AUGUST 1999

 

WORDS TO CHANGE A CORNER OF THE WORLD
Six new poems by an Award Winning  Playwright, Essayist and 'generation X'  poet have appeared in Scribble international. 
MARK ANTONY ROSSI
has become, as he puts it, 'part of our poetic family'. 


One night Loadstar sent me a note and said 'Take a look at this, I think you'ld like this one." or words to that effect. 'This' was the web site of Mark Antony Rossi. 
I can understand her need to share. On my first reading I found myself remembering a line from Terry's  'Phonic Allergy' which says it better than I can - the work 'plucked my heart, affixed it quivering'. 
In itself the work is keenly intelligent. Far from emotive, it rather causes intense response within the reader. . I'll include the link later, so you can have the astonishing experience of reading 'Apprentice' for yourselves. Look for 'Empty Girl' and 'The Fix' also, and if you can stop there I'll be intensely surprised.   These poems, like the six we are fortunate enough to feature in Scribble International are clean, elegant, and tautly expressed. Each of them has what I would describe as an  undislodgeable barb. Something which will not go away. 

 Antony Rossi says : Do not be afraid to speak your mind and help change your little corner of the world. His own work does just that. From the delicate, relentless and illuminating 'Her Sanctuary', which transforms so many different aspects of human relationship in a single, telling line, to the singing resonance of 'Mallory Street Mantra' or the the dissonant clarity  of 'Nasty Elements' we have here in our own small collection something to be proud of, and to take courage from. Like 'Singing in the Rage'.  Something uniquely representative of a very fine poet indeed. Something of the inescapable scalpel on the presuppositions which most of us call thought.
Yet he says: 

all the critics may heap                                    mountains of perfumed praise
      on this poet
but then again all the critics
possess blankets and bread.
The undislogeable barb, which irrevocably changes the value of the blanket and the poet for all time. I forgo the praise then, here are the poems, go read for yourselves.

coming soon
MORE MARK ANTONY ROSSI 

meanwhile, visit his own web site
THE POETRY OF MARK ANTONY ROSSI

 

 

NETSCAPE AWARD
Netscape Cool Site Award !
EDITOR'S CHOICE
       
FYI: Your site chosen as an Open Directory Cool Site

 
Dear Editor
You have done a fine service to include poetry works from writers throughout the English-speaking world. Please accept this award on behalf of Open Directory Project.

Blessings.

Paul Seward
Editor, Open Directory Project

 
MORE

STATISTICS, DAMN STATISTICS !

    "The Extreme Tracking system is misleading"  our resident aficionado declared today. After some research over the past few weeks and two months worth of reports and comparisons between the server access logs and the tracker data, Terry Bowden comes to the conclusion that "Scribble is getting about 500 visits per month to the front page, and about 200 per month to the reader.html page". This is in no way a criticism of The Extreme Tracker, by the way, for that is not only subject to my programming, but it calculates the hits on only one page. On one particularly 'low hit day' the tracker server was down. 
    "For all that, the official Tracker results are interesting, and reasonably satisfying", Alys Thorpe says with an attempt at British Reserve.  As this article is being written the Counter stands at 2122.  Prior to August our highest day had been the day of official opening, and the record, stood at seventeen visitors for a long while. It was reached several times in the last month. Two days running the magic 'seventeen visitors' hit the index page, and the third day was looking good too, till the Extreme Tracker went down. 
     Terry's log access figures for the week in question show 126 hits on the /scribble site. 

INTERNATIONALLY SPEAKING
The Extreme Tracker shows that our major audience is still from New Zealand and the United States, though the Australian  and Canadian proportion is increasing steadily and rapidly. So is interest from what used to be known as The Far East. Japan leads the way, with Singapore and Malaysia close behind. The United Kingdom leads the European visitors. Russian, Scandinavia, South Africa and India have also shown interest. 

WE ARE ALSO LISTED WITH
AAA Matilda Australia
DirectFind's 
Arts_and_Humanities.
Poetry category.

 WHAT VISITORS USE
The overwhelming proportion of visitors use some form of Netscape Browser,  59.91%  -  Internet Explorer is way behind at 37.17%  -  Others, of whom the most significant are Opera Users and Web TV users stand at 2.90% Windows 95 and 98 between them cover the significant OS of visitors, though again, Web TV makes a showing, as does MacIntosh. Windows NT has a significant contribution and believe it or not Windows 3.1 is also still alive and on the Internet. 
Extreme tells us that some visitors to the site are using a screen resolution of 1600x1200 - the majority however is 640x480, with 800x600 and 1024x768 in close proportional range. We know from experience that a page made for the higher resolutions looks perfectly horrible in most lower resolutions. In this case we aim for the majority users and have found that the results are to some degree, aesthetically pleasing in the higher resolutions. 

REFERRERS
Yahoo is still providing us with the greatest search engine hit proportion. New Zealand referrers show significant life. We have a total of 92 referrers (Thank you Terry) who keep us all buzzing with life and visitation. 

CONCLUSIONS
So what does all this mean? Why are are we so interested in these breakdowns of facts and figures ? 
Quite simply it means that we, the poets,  are being read and revisited. Our voices, and our thoughts, are being accessed from all over the world . 
The figures tell us, not just that our audience is here, but tell us what they are using and how we may best tackle layout and publishing so as to bring them back. We can tell for example, what interests them, and how a page will look to them when they are viewing it.  So long as those proportions hold up across the new figures for the hit rate, they'll always be valuable to us. Terry's server access log figures tell us just how great that value may well be. 
 

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