As the web evolved, there were some very significant changes from my perspective as an online poet. In particular, the Way–Back Machine which is the US’s Library Of Congress Internet Archive, and the google search engine’s cache, both mean that a site, if indexed, can be found and explored long after it’s been taken down. Once a poem is on the net, it is there for anyone to see, forever (unless you go through the American courts and take out the appropriate injunction). You cannot “unpublish” your poetry just by taking a site down. The web is not ephemeral.
Well, this isn’t quite true. I’m not sure how long Google keeps it’s cache, but I don’t believe it’s forever. The Way–Back machine got overwhelmed by the growth of the web, and now restricts itself to US sites, and reputedly misses much. Other national internet archives are apparently in various stages of construction (2007: the British Library are, I believe, archiving this site, though I haven’t spoken to them about it for sometime).
If a site is potentially available to everyone forever, it’s daft to pretend otherwise. If I put my poetry up on my website, and the site gets indexed or archived, then I’ve lost control of the unavailability of my work. What do I lose by doing this? Well, I’m not exactly an overwhelmingly published poet. Even if I were published, I doubt, somehow, I would gain exceptional riches from the privilege (please, please tell me I’m wrong). So, actually, I don’t really lose anything.
So what I’ve done is copylefted all I can of my work here, using a Creative Commons Licence. This gives other people the right to copy my work, and to make derivatives of it, provided they preserve these rights and attribute me as appropriate. I do have deeper reasons for doing this, such as hinted in my poem Copyleft. It’s akin to an artistic version of GNU’s GPL, the licence that pins the ethos of Linux, and the Internet’s software infrastructure. I do wonder whether this licence, and it’s implied opportunity for uncontrolled collaboration and derivation, might have interesting consequences—the GPL certainly did. I’d like to explore this more.
Having said all this, it’s not the poetry that gets the hits on my site. I’ve committed photography in the past, including erotica, so I expected those photographs to dominate traffic. They did once. But no longer.
Many years ago, I knocked out some music, on a Commodore Amiga. I’ve put those tracks up too. They are technically poor quality—I’m not commenting on their artistic value—so I couldn’t charge for them. But they are dominating my site traffic. This has rather surprised me. But, I’ll be honest, I’m getting sufficient traffic now, without any promotion, to make me wonder whether I should have another go at making music.