Ruminate

[tags]linklog[/tags]

The rush to the Twittersphere is provoking interesting thoughts amongst the bloggerati (I’m trying to squeeze in as many horrific coinages as possible here). The most amusing one, to me, is the clarion call to arms by some bloggers. Don’t forget the blog, they say (and twit and blog), where contemplation and thought win out over the ephemeral and impulsive! I agree that we should always be questioning our types and forms of discourse, but casting the blog as a practically traditional force is kind of funny. Wasn’t it just a few years ago that blogs were being singled out because they were too ephemeral and constant complaints being aired about the lack of thought that went into such easy publishing? And before that wasn’t it the death of the essay and long form news? What about epic poems? Where is our Homer (and I don’t mean Homer Simpson)?

I question the basic assumption that posting to Twitter is robbing blogs of their vigor. More specifically, I would suggest that the attraction to Twittering that seems to be replacing blogging is not necessarily a matter of people putting in less intellectual effort, as some of the worrying implies, but is a sign that some of the conversation that was being forced into the blog form is more suited to tools like Twitter, which are more analagous to “real” conversation with its fits and starts, dead ends and resumptions, meanders and razor sharp retorts.

I’m blogging less than I did before Twitter, but that’s because Twitter most often allows me to express what I want to express. I don’t need to puff thoughts up into entries suitable for the blogging form (as it has come to be understood), reserving this space for incredibly intellectual and compelling posts like this one…

I heard a story on NPR yesterday about the increasingly common experience of being confronted with information from the past thanks to the Internet. It was the usual rundown of how past blog posts, discussion forum entries, email and other pieces of writing were stored in various net nooks and crannies and could reappear at inconvenient times. True enough. The “expert” who was being interviewed posited that it is nearly impossible to prevent this from happening and that as a culture we are coming to terms with these technological changes. Essentially, her message went, we are becoming more and more accustomed to these reminders and will eventually stop paying significant attention to them.

I think there’s a more important possibility– perhaps not being able to lose all of these old words and thoughts should lead to more attention. Perhaps it would be a good thing if more of us would remember who we were and not just accept the inherently flawed assumption that losing touch with those passionate feelings and reckless outbursts is a good thing. Maybe the real tragedy is that those days are not prolonged and we are so eager to forget our youthful enthusiasm and impetuousness.

At least sometimes…

[tags]linklog[/tags]

[tags]linklog[/tags]

[tags]linklog[/tags]

[tags]linklog[/tags]

A snippet from the Wikipedia entry on Donnie Darko:

In the film, Donnie refers to “Married with Children” (1987) and, more specifically, Christina Applegate during conversations about sex with his therapist. The script initially called for Donnie’s fantasies to be about Alyssa Milano. This had to be changed however when Kelly was denied the legal rights to reference her in this manner.

Does it strike anyone else as just a wee bit ridiculous that we live in a society where the right to have a fictional character refer to an actress who portrayed another fictional television character can be denied at all?

It seems that Scott has jumped ship from Twitter to Jaiku and intends to foment a one-man revolution (amongst the edtech people at least). I don’t intend to follow… yet.

The important thing about any social network service is the people– to some degree it trumps even stability. If it didn’t, none of the popular apps would have any users anymore! I remember when del.icio.us and flickr, to choose a couple of Web 2.0 poster-children, had the exact same kind of problems as the number of users scaled up and various lessons were learned by technology development teams who suddenly had to deal with the consequences of getting that tiger by the tail.

Any service that is intended to support a constant, nearly real-time stream of input will, of course, make its instability known more regularly. So flickr downtime is less frustrating than del.icio.us downtime, which is less frustrating than Twitter downtime. And, of course, the user who is already skeptical about the value of the activity may be the quickest of all to move on. But I’m not ready to jump ship yet– I mean, how long have most people been actively Twittering– three months or so at the outside? Is it really time to panic, to decide its unworkable, or even speak of Twitter’s “historic” problems?

I am a pragmatist… if enough people I want to interact with decide to flee, then I will too. If I could find a less annoying way to participate in both areas, I would… but I don’t use Furl or Magnolia or Photobucket or Zooomr, despite each having an arguably greater feature set and in some cases more reliable services because the people just aren’t there and trying to maintain multiple presences is an exercise in frustration.

[tags]linklog[/tags]