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.

1 comment:

  1. I agree. My blog has grown over the years. I started on livejournal, then myspace on to Facebook and now Blogger. Wordpress was the absolute coolest as far as things you can do with it, but way too complicated. I finally pulled all of my posts together on Blogger where they now reside. I'm more interested in the visual and content than the nuts and bolts of putting it all together. I now satisfy my "complete nonsense" with FB status updates. Props on kicking the cancer and all of your accomplishments!

    ReplyDelete