I got sent a link today from a work colleague to www.vox.com — Six Apart‘s latest offering. The email described the site as MySpace for ‘thinking people’, which I couldn’t help be amused by. I visited Vox, and lo and behold, it looks exactly like that: another promising Web 2.0 social networking site, complete with snazzy pastels and rounded corners.
And that’s where the anxiety kicked in. I felt it coming. Then I heard a voice from within my head: “Oh no, not another site to figure out and keep up with”.
Keeping my photostream up to date on Flickr is like a second job for me. I take a lot of photos, and a lot of candid stuff now I have a camera phone. It takes hours to select the best photos, upload them, give them a title and description, tag them, and if you can be bothered, send them to a few groups to try and get some comments, making the whole thing worth while. I have lots of friends and family back home as well who I feel indebted to keep feeding photos too, showing what’s happening in old blighty. Yes, we’re only talking a few hours a week here, but after work and getting home and doing other ‘life’ things (such as eating and washing dishes etc.), it does start to feel like a real chore.
Bandwidth, hardware, interface — none of these are a problem. With 24mbps broadband (and wi-fi to boot) at home, along with Flickr’s great interface, it’s all so easy to get the photos up, but it’s the human side of things that takes so long. But that’s the catch of the whole social semantic web: it just craves human input. And it’s addictive.
A few months ago I was lucky enough to hear a talk from Linda Stone on these sorts of issues. The talk was based on one she did at an O’Reilly conference last year called ‘Attention‘, and it’s really an excellent read: I highly recommend it.
We’re in the middle of a bubble at the moment, which really can’t last. What happens when the 2.0 bubble bursts is anyone’s guess — who’ll survive, who won’t — but all I can say is that I hope Web 3.0 involves me sitting on a couch, relaxing, while I watch some good old totally non-interactive television. Because sometimes, you just want to turn off — and that’s getting really hard in the 2.0 realm.
codehesive.com : interaction design, ux, data visualisation, gaming & miscellany
Disconnection
I got sent a link today from a work colleague to www.vox.com — Six Apart‘s latest offering. The email described the site as MySpace for ‘thinking people’, which I couldn’t help be amused by. I visited Vox, and lo and behold, it looks exactly like that: another promising Web 2.0 social networking site, complete with snazzy pastels and rounded corners.
And that’s where the anxiety kicked in. I felt it coming. Then I heard a voice from within my head: “Oh no, not another site to figure out and keep up with”.
Keeping my photostream up to date on Flickr is like a second job for me. I take a lot of photos, and a lot of candid stuff now I have a camera phone. It takes hours to select the best photos, upload them, give them a title and description, tag them, and if you can be bothered, send them to a few groups to try and get some comments, making the whole thing worth while. I have lots of friends and family back home as well who I feel indebted to keep feeding photos too, showing what’s happening in old blighty. Yes, we’re only talking a few hours a week here, but after work and getting home and doing other ‘life’ things (such as eating and washing dishes etc.), it does start to feel like a real chore.
Bandwidth, hardware, interface — none of these are a problem. With 24mbps broadband (and wi-fi to boot) at home, along with Flickr’s great interface, it’s all so easy to get the photos up, but it’s the human side of things that takes so long. But that’s the catch of the whole social semantic web: it just craves human input. And it’s addictive.
A few months ago I was lucky enough to hear a talk from Linda Stone on these sorts of issues. The talk was based on one she did at an O’Reilly conference last year called ‘Attention‘, and it’s really an excellent read: I highly recommend it.
We’re in the middle of a bubble at the moment, which really can’t last. What happens when the 2.0 bubble bursts is anyone’s guess — who’ll survive, who won’t — but all I can say is that I hope Web 3.0 involves me sitting on a couch, relaxing, while I watch some good old totally non-interactive television. Because sometimes, you just want to turn off — and that’s getting really hard in the 2.0 realm.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 3:54 am and is filed under Web - General, Flickr, Photography, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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