State of the Web Address, 2005
Hello friends, neighbors, countrymen: lend me your monitors.
I feel no need to be completist about this address (such is blogging), but I did want to share a few ideas this morning.
Having started mindmined.com in 1998, and being that technology moves so fast in the web space, I am forced now in 2005 to step back and evaluate. Are my websites serving their intended purposes effectively? Have the intended purposes evolved, or should they, in new directions?
I have always been the first and most active user of my own applications, because they are first designed for me. It is only as an afterthought that they are opened up to other users.
Still, I find that developing things I find useful is the easiest way to turn a personal tool into a service. Often, people don’t even know what they want or need until you present it to them. Instead of “we need a hammer,” down from the sky falls a strange and oblong object, a wooden handle with an heavy iron head on the end. What are we going to do with it?
Enough of that. I received an email about an upcoming playwrighting contest. They wanted three bound copies of the play as submission.
I’m also thinking of ways to keep my RSS work abstract, to be used in various places without too much customizing. I realize I often end doing my own programming for extremely picky reasons. For instance, there are services in existence (Feedburner comes to mind) that will take the url to your mp3 and some metadata and convert it to a deliverable xml-formatted podcast. I could just use that, but I want to build services that I own and maintain so I know they will be available as long as I need them. Plus, I can build custom features that might be useful only to me.
The state of the web in 2005 is an environment of increasingly dynamic models for sharing information and encouraging participation. For the small operations like mine, things are just as exciting as ever. I think most of us are happy as clams contributing to that Long Tail, and as long as creativity permits, there will be new ways to diversify our output all the time. I do think we are heading to a sort of network-imposed socialism, one that will clash violently with capitalist and other fascist governments. I think it might be important that the online community organize early, and state our political positions on network behaviours in authoratative tones before Big Brother moves in more confidently. I think there will be a lot of interesting and dangerous battles ahead, and that online skills may become more necessary for survival than they are today.
None of this sounds the least prophetic, as everyone is saying it. I should call this fucking blog Garden of Parrot. Marcus out.