Reassuringly Expensive
My Twitter chum Michael McGarrity has released another great mix entitled Home Two. Slightly longer and darker than the original Home Mix, and it’s another great piece of music for working or reading to. Highly recommended.
As before my iTunes OCD has driven me to design my own cover art; I’ve continued with the style of the first, but made it darker like the mix.
Ideas of March is a great initiative from Chris Shiflett to resurrect the blog.
I agree with Chris when he attributes the demise of blogging to the rise of Twitter. Personally I know there are many things I tweet that would have been the basis of a blog post in the past. You’d be forgiven for thinking that by Twitter allowing us all to easily, and quickly gets things of our chest Twitter would work to separate the wheat from the chaff; leaving us with perhaps less frequent but higher quality blog posts. Instead Twitter just seems to have robbed many of us of impetus to publish.
In Elliott Jay Stock’s Ideas of March post he talks of not having posted for over three months, and here my blog has become little more than a repository for videos I like.
I’m hoping that Ideas of March combined with my new blog design (don’t ask) will give me the impetus to start writing proper blog posts again.
Chris proposes we write about what we like about blog posts – so what do I like?
Over the years I’ve been reading blogs it has changed as blogging, and blogs have changed. I’ve enjoyed learning from blog posts with subjects ranging from the Hipster PDA to the existence of Chap Hop. These days what I enjoy are blogs that are a closer to journals and show more of the writers personality, interests and opinions. I tend to stay away from the more ‘technical’ blog posts I once read.
Blogs and blogging happened at a key time for me. A time when my love of the web had been sorely tested by working for too many years in large Corporations that continued to not understand the web or only wanted to ‘monetize’ it – of how I hate that word but oh how I enjoy spelling the American way.
But I digress.
I’ve said before that the rise of the blog, and the first @Media conference in 2005 were the events that rekindled my love of the web. Blogging was to me a realisation of what the web had been envisioned as by it’s creators: a read/write environment. After years of read the ease of blogging, via services such as Blogger where I started my first blog, brought write to the majority of web users. Anybody with access to the web could share their thoughts and ideas with the whole world in a matter of moments. It is for this reason I love the blog, and it is for this reason that I hope that not only do we manage to stop the slow decline of the blog but perhaps spark a blogging renaissance.
Here’s to the Ideas of March.
Why yes, I do like Underworld.
In recent years I have been fortunate to be able to attend all of the major web conferences: @Media, Future of Web Apps, Future of Web Design and more. However this year with our credit being crunched, and a new cost conscious employer I’m only able to attend one, and for a varierty of reasons, some sentimental, I’ve chosen to attend @Media later this week.
When Future of Web Design took place a few weeks ago I must admit I started to doubt my choice; the buzz on Twitter was huge and very, very positive. It was oddly fun experiencing the conference vicariously via the Tweets, but it made me wish I was there all the more.
A request via Twitter to ‘crash’ the Future of Web Design party turned into an invitation to have dinner with Jon Hicks which, as is the way with web conferences, turned into dinner with Dan Cederholm, Mike Kus, Aral Balkan, Katie Atkinson and Ryan Carson of Carsonified - the organisers of Future of Web Design. I’d met Dan at @Media a couple of years back so it was good to see him again and it was a huge pleasure to meet Aral and Katie for the first time. This is the one of the many things I love about web conferences; the opportunity to meet your web design heroes who are all friendly, open, modest and very happy to chat.
I made it along to the conference party with Jon, and it was fascinating to watch the attendees with the slight detachment of not being one myself. They were literally buzzing with excitement at the day, the sessions and the chance to meet design greats in the Design Clinics, that were part of the conference, and at the party itself.
Over dinner Ryan talked about the Carsonified conferences, and it was clear that he is committed to creating great conferences that are as affordable as possible. Yes they are a business, but his top priorities are quality and affordability for the attendees. I love that Ryan always builds in great opportunities for socialising and ‘networking’; I feel this aspect of conferences is as valuable as the event itself.
If you can attend Future of Web Design I highly recommend it; I know I’ll be there next year.
I wrote a while ago about a friend taking a Twitter vacation, another leaving altogether and my resultant thoughts and feelings about Twitter. Now I have decided to do the same; as of today I’m starting a one week ‘leave of absence’ from Twitter.
Whilst this week is an experiment to see how I, a one time Twitter addict, get on; I don’t have any specific reasons for deciding to take a break and possibly turning my back on Twitter. It’s a combination of things that has led to a rising sense of “meh?”
I’ll report back in week about how it’s gone or is going.