I really hate my blog. I’ve always struggled with my online identity. Should I be funny? Should I be serious? Who knows. Guess it’s a little bit like real life.
Not that I don’t like blogging. No, on the contrary, one thing I can tell you is that blogging can really help you out.
The best advice I’ve ever heard is to try to take your feelings and put them into words. Whether you share them publicly is your choice or not, but it’s nice to struggle through a complicated thought and come out on the other side with a better sense of clarity. A blog can be your ally in doing that. Depending on your situation, it can really help you solve a difficult issue. I’m a firm believer in the format. It’s good promotion, too, assuming you are careful about what you express.
I guess what I’m saying is, I’d like a real bona fide thing that says, “this is who I am,” that isn’t vulnerable to some opportunistic rant that could show up in the Google cache some years later.
The age of the homepage seems to have died. It used to be you’d get an angelfire or geocities account and build some crappy circa-1994 thing and push it out there and tell people that’s your homepage. Now it’s blog, blog, blog, which is cool, but doesn’t provide that biographical feeling (and can really catch you at an awkward moment without the context of who you are).
After working 11 days in a row (mostly by my own choice), through my somewhat bleary eyes and short-tempered stupor, I feel like maybe this is a good time to give it some thought. What would my ideal online home look like? What would it have?
Would there be a text area? Video? News? Something interactive? What would I want to put there?
I almost feel like my ideal blogging situation would be a bit like Twitter or the Facebook feed … you know, there’s various kinds of activities. There’s the things you’re reading, the things you take pictures of, the things you write in 140 characters or less … oh, hey, there’s Tumblr for that. I think my big gripe with Facebook is it’s kind of ugly. It is, however, highly reliable. No fail whales there, Zuck.
So look for some updates to come as I hash out my thoughts. Chances are, I’ll be putting them into words right here.
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I’ve been feeling the same way lately. And by “lately” I mean “for quite a while, but I haven’t had the time or energy to take definitive action.”
I deactivated my Facebook early on Tuesday morning because it became clear that people only use that because it’s the “it” thing to use. The term “friend” has become so diluted as to be meaningless. I was spending hours leaving comments or reading things or being generally helpful while at the same time I was being generally ignored.
My LiveJournal (and before, that, my actual website) were places where I used to rant to my heart’s content. I’ve found that you can’t go home(page) again (and anyway, LJ has been a ghost town for years). Twitter is okay, but banal. I set up a Tumblr account last night, and I’m not really impressed there either.
I remember when the internet was charming. I was so proud of my crappy circa-1998 GeoCities page (and I remember the whole URL and everything! How I miss you, http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/1551!) when it went live. Registering my first domain was a milestone, just as having it stolen from me haunts me to this day. “Web 2.0” seemed mysterious and exciting…until we were told it was social networking and we’d been doing it for five years. >_<
What I think all of my rambling is leading to is that you're having a desire to express yourself with tools that don't exist yet. There's a strange dichotomy in that no one is impressed if you have a Facebook, but by god, you better have a Facebook! As long as the content is there, I’d say just muddle through until The Next Big Thing™ comes along. My guess is that it will involve (realtime?) video, where YouTube and camera phones combine to make typing a thing of the past.
Yeah, I guess so. The tools I’d like don’t really exist yet. I’d like to invent them, but I don’t know how, and I suck at computer programming — and I’ve tried to learn it repeatedly.
I think it really speaks to a problem with computing overall: For most people, it’s just too complicated to do anything beyond the obvious.
Programming languages are too arcane, so much so as to thwart any attempts I make at trying to learn them. If you’re lucky enough to have a technical mind, which I kind of do but only to a point, you’re OK, but what about the rest of us?
Why can’t things be simpler? Why can’t building a database be like making an Excel spreadsheet? (OK, I take that back …) Uh, maybe a word document. Why can’t you just build a logic structure? Why can’t programming look like a flow chart, or a list of steps to execute? Why don’t we have better framework for web design? I’m sure that backward compatibility is an issue there, but the best answer we have right now is Flash and HTML 5.0. Once again, too darned complicated.
Fantasy world, someday you will be mine. I think there’s another post to come on this, but that’s the basics of it. Over and out.