social networking
There was a time when you could almost be a part of most of the networking things on the net that made sense. All you had to do was focus in on whatever your hobby happened to be, follow a few websites, subscribe to a few Mailing Lists (remember those?) and follow the appropriate newsgroups (again, remember those?). These days, the ways that information and the way people who access that information are connected (usually creating more content in the process) is a little mind boggling. I myself have really just been sitting here quietly creating content, in my own small way, for the past six years, and have not spent a lot of time interacting with the exponential growth of net content the way the rest of the internet has. Blogging, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Podcasts… it’s enough to make your head hurt.
For me, i often take a look at some of the social networking stuff thats comes across my screen and try to determine if there is anything there that i can really use to make my life easier. Usually, i just see something that if i spent tons of time using and devoted myself to it might be interesting, but casual unfocused use would be more of a headache and a waste of time more than any actual use. It doesn’t mean i’m not tempted to try sometimes.
This morning i created a del.icio.us account to give it a try. I have a pretty static set of bookmarks, but i do often find myself hitting sites and things that i’d like to save but not really sure where to put them (one of the best firefox ad-ons is ’save bookmark here’ btw) With the extension plug in, del.icio.us looks pretty easy to use, and after some poking i am getting some sense of ways it can be used. Not sure if it’ll be something i’ll continue to use or not, but what the heck, i’m willing to give it a try.
September 18th, 2006 at 10:46 am
I guess my aggravation with all the tools is that I end up having to *re-enter* data over and over and over and over…. (even my damn cellphones don’t play nice).
I’d like to be able to keep all my e-data is some universal format file and be able to pump what I want into the myspace/blog/cellphone/pda/webpit of choice. There is a such a format of course, but no one uses it
September 18th, 2006 at 11:11 am
That, of course, is the trouble with data. In order to keep it useful, it needs to be in formats that can be parsed in different ways. And, of course, everything is somewhat proprietary. The biggest worry with any kind of stabilization of data into some sort of formal set that is this ‘wad’ that we just take from format to format is that it becomes a peice of ourselves that may say more about ourselves than we want.
I’m not worried so much about stalkers and identity theft, mind you, but i do worry about just what all these corporate companies do with that info. It’s bad enough that they can parse a huge amounts of things about us already, making everything universal will just make it easier to collect, i guess.
so… maybe the day when we go to use some new system or social network thing and find that it’s already set up and all our info is already there for us to use… that’s when we should be scared.
September 18th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
While I do participate in a lot of the social networking stuff, I do find a lot of it anoying and difficult.
I pretty much only have things on MySpace for exposure since it seems to have been adopted quickly as a way for people to listen to underground music. The amount of porn spam I get on that site, though, is quite sick.
Most of the forums I read and post to are fairly technical in the way of the recording/music industry. There is a lot of great info out there that has helped me many times. The sad part is that there is a lot of snobbery out there and quite a few unfriendly people. I guess it’s not much different from real life in that respect.
September 19th, 2006 at 8:46 am
One way around this is something like this software:
http://www.brim-project.org/
However, you must have a web server that you can put it on. This way you can put all your stuff in a ‘virtual desktop’ like area and access it from anywhere. Also, because it is on your server you know it is safe from the prying eyes of data mining companies. Plus, since it is a web portal it can be accessed from a variety of portable devices (pda, phone, psp…) as long as they have web access.
Jay