16 May 2008
i wonder how you never knew – you’re the margaret weis to my tracy hickman
so as possibly alluded to in my previous post, much like my esteemed hermano jsmg, i’ve been wary of becoming a cranky old man in the wide world of social networking and the internet version 2.0.
there’s a constant tension between the present and the past. on the one hand i like to hold on to my old school street cred. you know, the use of pine (an improvement over elm!) and remembering manually putting together multipart mime downloads from usenet using tin. hell, at one point over a decade ago i had a .sig file for usenet posting. i gophered into wisc.edu to download .voc and .mod files. long before wow, when blizzard was just that quirky company that made warcraft: orcs and humans, i was off on bbs’ playing majormud. i used telix and wrote salt scripts to level me up. old school.
funnily enough, that sort of thing doesn’t count for much in the modern era. yes, i have vast quantities of street credit, but internet inflation is even worse than that in the real world. what was sufficient to buy me adulation a decade ago now only pays its dividends in derision. (just because pine’s quoting breaks gmail that doesn’t make pine bad.)
anyhow, in addition to making an awesome podcast, you can also find me on your favorite social networking sites. by which i mean facebook. technically i’m on myspace although i never log on anymore. having more than 5 friends on myspace is a liability because the odds increase exponentially that one f them is going to get hacked and spam your comments, bulletins, and messages with crazy advertisements and invitations to their secret nude webcam.
i’ve also started messing around with twitter though i confess that i can’t quite work up the will to have 140 characters of wit every twenty minutes. i am following some pretty smart (and funny people) though that show how the medium can be manipulated well: r. stevens, of diesel sweeties; lore sjoberg, of wired alt text and formerly brunching shuttlecocks; and john hodgman, of everything awesome in the last five years (but especially his book, the daily show, and being bruce campbell’s literary agent). like my pownce account, however, i’m guessing that i’ll largely be a data consumer and produce very little.
for a slightly nerdier thing that i’ve been working with, i’ve also set up my own openid provider. unfortunately, it seems like everything is an openid provider – i think even your safeway club card provides openid now. unfortunately nobody accepts the damn things, and even those that do seem to do it in this janky, half-assed way. not quite the promise of easy access to a million systems with just one secure login, is it now?
the last new technology that i’ve been playing with is actually an entire company, doing no evil into my life nearly constantly. i’ve googleized my life in a dozen ways: it started with dropping bloglines like a bad habit and switching to google reader – if only for it’s integrated friends lists. similarly i’ve got a couple google calendars, a bunch of files in google docs & spreadsheets, and my very own appspot hello world application.
meanwhile, i’m hopefully contributing to web 3.0, the personalized, decentralized, peer-to-peer world by creating a decentralized social networking application. it’ll be done eventually, although at the current coding rate it’s been… slow going.
maybe i’m still slightly hip.