There’s a thoughtful post by Jeffrey Zeldman (along with many equally thoughtful comments) about how the growth of social networking sites like del.icio.us, flickr, and twitter have led to an identity crisis of sorts for the traditional personal home page.
I have similar feelings. As more and more of my digital snail trail winds up “out there”, it’s less clear what should live on my own home page, and also less clear that others will want to visit it, given how much else is now “out there”. I started a personal web site seanboisen.com, because i got tired of having bits of personal identity scattered around. I wanted to have one place that i controlled where i could link to my own information (without getting trapped inside one of the many walled gardens like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.). But it takes work (so it’s not complete), and i’m not completely happy with the result (but haven’t found the time to make it better). And despite my own semantic neatnik tendencies to ensure everything has a proper URI for reference, if you want to know something about me, you’re just as likely to use some variant of googling my name, and just as likely to find what you want that way.
My blog is where i share more transient thoughts: but, as noted in several comments to Zeldman’s post, blog fatigue sets in after a while, and it’s hard to keep up the pace. I still occasionally post things to SemanticBible that i hope will have lasting value, though these days that’s mostly slides from presentations. I haven’t gotten into Twitter (though Patrick keeps encouraging me) because i’m not sure i’m ready for that velocity or volume of activity. If anything, i’d like to turn down the volume and slow down the pace, not jack it up. As the Preacher said
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing. (Eccl 1:8, ESV)
Every new involvement with a social networking site raises these issues again: where does my digital identity live? (the latest for me is Twine: i have some beta invitations, email me if you want one)
What I’ve noticed recently about my blog is that those transient thoughts get stale, to the point that I don’t even know what I wrote up on my site. I’m thinking that those should roll over, maybe even a feed from somewhere else like Twitter. Trying to focus the site as much as possible on articles that could have some value down the road.
Thanks for the link, I shall read over Zeldman’s article.
– nathan
I have definitely suffered from blog fatigue, many a time. I think web fatgue in general. I definitely understand the idea of turning the volume down with the web. Most days I feel like I can’t keep up.
5 to 10 years ago, the personal site was fun, exciting, you never knew what to expect. Now days it feels like everything is the same. Your site has been a refreshing change. I like to see scripture quotes related to life on the web.
Nichthus did an interesting presentation a while back arguing that projects like Mahara would enable us to pull in material from the different social networking sites blogs etc. to create one (updated live) central collection/mashup of our online presence.
I’m also interested in the slow down comment – but how does one do it?
These days, i find my most successful “slowing down” happens at the beginning, where i deliberately choose
a) not to get involved in something interesting, because i can\’t manage the extra involvement, or it doesn’t cross the threshold of “important enough”
b) to carefully understand the purpose of a project and when it will be done (= exit conditions) before undertaking it. I’ve found frameworks like Getting Things Done and the Heilmeyer Catechism (no, not that kind of catechism) helpful in this regard, and now i go through this process for most new projects at work, just to “begin with the end in mind” (Stephen Covey’s phrase).
This is clearly a modern spin on an old discipleship challenge: choosing how we focus our energies so our time advances the kingdom rather than simply keeping us busy.
Sean, great post and great comments. I’ve also recently hit the same point and have started looking to the potential of SPARQL queries to, as it were, pull myself together. A few people have put together SparqlPress, a WordPress plugin, that might be useful.