It's about one a.m. on Saturday night/Sunday morning, a normal time for me to be up on any night really, but especially on a weekend. Sadly there's so much nothing to do around here I contemplated going to bed a couple hours ago but got sucked into flickr and last.fm, which brought me to updating the blog. I was talking to my sister recently about the horrendously named "web 2.0", which is the phenomenon of web community networking sites, wikis, etc. Blogs fit in to the category, so does Wikipedia (natch), as does flickr, my love of loves, last.fm, the facebook, del.icio.us, and any one of the ten or twenty of these sorts of things I use or hear about every day. Even things with a strong real-world component, like Netflix, buy into web 2.0 and hype their "friends" feature, which I've been using recently with sick fascination to either denigrate or be impressed with the movie choices of my friends. I didn't realize quite how plugged in I was to all this networking technology until I reached the low of trying to get my completely anti-book sister to join Shelfari, a (really cool) site dedicated to sharing and exploring reading habits. After she told me to go and peddle my zeal for literature elsewhere, a message which was delivered via facebook, I think I hit a social networking wall.
I frequently try to get my friends and family members to join me on websites I find particularly cool, especially if it's related to something they are really interested in already. However, no matter how much some friends love their digital cameras, I can't seem to get them on flickr. Same goes with music lovers and last.fm (or any other music site, pick your poison.) It seems that my interests, which include technology, music, lit, writing, photography, film- all the things to which these sites cater- match all of my friend's interests but one important one. The technology one. While I have a few friends who participate in each site, with the exception of facebook, that be all, end all of social networking sites, it seems like there is some idea of "trouble" or "work" built into the idea of doing things online. I'm not sure where this comes from exactly, but there must be some kind of critical mass at which people say, I'm done with new technology for the moment. For a lot of people, that catalyst may have been the iTunes-iPod combo of death, which controls the experience with such a heavy hand that the more freeform method of some networking sites may indeed seem like a lot of work. But I really think that the benefits are worth the five minutes of clicks it may take to figure something out.
Last.fm, for instance. Could I like it more? I don't know. Jonesing for some new music? Hate the radio? Just plain bored of hearing the same songs every hour? Yeah, me too. Know what bands you already like? Fantastic. Type it in a box, they play you bands kinda like that one. Hate a song? Skip it. Love it? Tell 'em. Get a custom radio station of all music you actually like. Imagine that. Make friends with people who like music you do and get some recs. Been listening to music like Ben Folds and feel like some music like Gnarls Barkley instead? No problem. So why the heck are people like, yeah, that sounds cool, but it's too much work to do it. ?!?! Same rules apply with flickr, the photo sharing site that stole my camera-happy little heart way back when it began, and has since even made a paying member out of me.
My bottom line: web 2.0, while possibly the lamest name ever coined, has brought us some damned cool websites, and I'm tired of everyone's lazy excuses for not joining them. While I can 100% see why not everyone might take it upon themselves to write a blog (you may be asking yourself why I do, as do I at times like this), if you have even slightly more than a passing interest in music, join the ranks of last.fm users and find your new favorite band. Or, allow me to peddle my zeal for literature and suggest a visit to Shelfari.com-it's new, it's got teensy books on a virtual shelf, it can help you settle that pesky problem of forgetting what books you want to read, and it will allow you to become a proud participant of the web 2.0 "revolution". And come on, don't tell me you never wanted to be part of a revolution.
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Can you do this full-time? You really are a good blogger. So many things:
ReplyDeleteFirst, you write too well not to write.
Second, hell yeah the internet. While not as site-saavy as you are, I really did invest a part of my life into it, and France took that away. I'm not kidding, France, either give that part back or give me semi-regular access to half-decent internet, or we're going to have problems.
Third, would you ever consider selling your photography? My parents surprised me over Xmas break by printing 30some of my pictures from this summer and putting them around my room, and now I'm all giddy on the idea of having first-hand pictures as decorations, a la 99% of your flickr albLum(s), on my walls. That's hott.
Fourth, could you maybe talk to blogger about maybe thinking up some more half-decent templates for these blogs? Not that having everyone on 'simple black' isn't cool, but it's not, and I don't know anything, in the anything sense, about html to do something about it.
I think that's it. In short, great blog! Come live in Europe! And cheers. Because I'm in London, and all conversations seem to end that way.