Tuesday, March 30, 2010

On the Impermanence and Distraction of the Blog and Social Network

This is a topic I've been thinking on a lot since December when I was doing my initial research on multitouch technology.

When I started on the web, posting a web site was complicated. Finding a spot (a web host), learning a language like HTML and CSS, creating, uploading, debugging. Yeah, it was a lot of work. But the effort we put into getting the site online, we tried to make the effort of the actual work worth the time, too.

I understand having a hard-coded list of sites, paragraphs, links, seems a little authoritative. But that's initially what a domain was, your section of the web. Your thoughts, your feelings, your motivations. Thought out, planned, executed.

I absolutely loved many of the blog posts I came upon during my weeks of research. But there were also a lot of blog posts that were complete nonsense. Had making the post been more complicated, most people wouldn't have gone to the trouble of making a nonsense post.

I'm not arguing that posting online should be more complicated. What I'm arguing is that we should really leave the blogs to actual thoughts, and leave the quick-fast-nonsense to Twitter and social networks. Posting to those, thank goodness, is significantly less time-consuming than posting to a blog, as it should be.

On a semi-related note, I launched a web site called caffeinerevelation.com to post my thoughts, feelings, and motivations.

Enjoy.