Monday, 2 July 2007

Lost in the datastream...

It's always been hard to find what you are looking for on the internet. That is because there is no definitive list of what is out there... and nobody know exactly how many pages there are, what they cover, who owns them, who writes them... etc. etc.

It's even harder to keep up these days as the internet evolves, practically exponentially (or so it seems). Just when you think that you've joined all the sites you ought to have joined and signed up to the latest trend you find that, actually, it is already so yesterday!

Before I start writing everyday I always check out any new blogs listed on the front page of Blogger as 'Blogs of Note'. Usually I then scroll back through recent entries to see if I've found a blog to read regularly. Today I was reading Unit Structures which had a very interesting article titled "In-between Places". I had thought I was quite cutting edge recently signing up to Facebook (and earlier in the year MySpace) and assumed that I had now covered all the sites for social identity (etc.) on the Internet (having also had brief acquaintance with digg, del.icio.us and technorati). Wrong! There are more of them out there... so many more. I am now feeling very lost on the Internet again... I feel that they should bring back the 'Information Superhighway' as I think I'm a rabbit stuck in the middle!

Apparently now the thing is not to Blog... but to Micro-blog or Tumblelog. No!!! No more... I shan't have time to stop soon, if I have to visit all these different places. I think, for now, I'm sticking with what I've got. The idea of these other Blog type things is to be shorter, briefer and more relevant (?!). You can text... you can share photos, links, etc. etc. Basically they want to turn everything into a 'stream of consciousness' type experience. Please, no. I never was one for that type of writing, even in literature... and certainly not all over the Internet.

Already the internet is barely recongnizable from the way it was when I was first on line (some dozen years ago)... and I'm wondering what the internet will be like when I come back to read this post a dozen years down the line!