Someone mentioned to me that mine was the first blog they'd ever read. It made me think of why I even started the blog. It wasn't like a pair of 1990's rave pants that some people felt they had to have because they had flashy colours. It was just a gesture of good manners - that is, not getting into someone's face with a mass mail.
It was a simpler affair back then. A few templates and mainly text, as photos were only possible if one had them hosted on an external site and linked to them manually. There was no RSS feed, Twittersphere or Facebook, seeing how many "likes" or "lolz" or "re-tweets" you could get.
Not that there's anything wrong with increased functionality. The only issue is that with all these birdies flying around is that they are also prone to make poo-poo. Just like some ravers were prone to wash down "ekkies" with a drink or two and regurgitate onto a pavement.
Here are some gripes from the last 8 years:
- The "keep me signed in" option. Fantastic for public machines in net cafes, etc.
- Somehow related to the above, people who keep themselves eternally "available" online, but in fact aren't available at all because their iPhone is logged in and it's at the bottom of their bag.
- Myspace followed by Facebook - has miraculously led to a 90% drop in interactions with people over the internet as fewer people bother to spend the 10-15 minutes required to communicate via email. At least the former allowed kids HTML so that they could modify the look of their page.
- What these organisations do with your private data, communications, etc.
I sometimes wonder what happened to all those people in raver pants. I guess they just went away somewhere together with Myspace. Let's hope that their virtual equivalents also leave.
