Stumbleupon, Zite, Read It Later.
Three iPad Apps and I feel myself being drawn closer to the people and content that defines and makes me.
Sharing for further discussion on Linkedin, some to the wind on Twitter and occasionally irritating or intriguing family and freinds on Facebook.
This site had the right idea 11 1/2 years ago.
Has everyone else been copying? A decade ago this was a novel way of doing things, where you all joined in, read each other's stuff.
It is striking that so much of this has the attitude of Web 2.0 an expression that was coined until 2001 or 2002.
In this community pairing up with a designer was de riguer. There wasn't the expectation that someone would have the mindset and desire both to write and design. This form of participation has been lost with the development of free templates picked from galleries. You don't have a relationship with the designer for a start ... discussing what you would like and their suggesting what they can do.
And most profoundly of all, and better than anything I've come across since, you create and control your 'buddy list' and learn who, most importantly, is posting on a regular basis. Bird of a Feather do flock together ... the most important criteria of all is that those who write want to be with others who write.
You learn to spend as much time reading and commenting on the diaries of others. You also learn to respond when they post, which you can do here.
I thought I was doing well to reach 10,000 entries. There are some who have 20,000. A group I established had some ground rules: minimum entry 1,000 words. This was to distinguish us from those who thought keeping a blog was about posting a single line.
Web 2.0 in 1999?
It has the hallmarks.
The profound shift we writers had to make was to stop posting copyright notices on every word we posted. How often I've been plagiarised is another matter. Posting story ideas ... then not writing the story may be daft.
Join. Still free. Still there. Still loads of fun. Inventive. Open. Extraordinary.
And one of the few orginal online diary platforms around. Live Journal and Word Press followed some years after.
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‘The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, failed communications, failed communions. This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters, meetings, introductions which might contain the seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked. This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a great amount of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.
Nin (1946)
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My obsession of the last decade has been my life on-line. My life in words. My life with people I have never met and will never meet.
I found the above in a journal entry I wrote in 1992; I am regurgitating it on-line, in bite-size form, elsewhere - the 2,000 words or more I would write not right for this on-line sheet of OU soft paper on a roll that tears about where people get bored with my say and want to get a word in edge ways.
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REFERENCE
Nin, A. (1946) Vol 4, Journals, May 1946.
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So here's the edge of the paper -
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