ADDoD

Yesterday in the office, we helped to push back the boundaries of human medical knowledge by identifying a new condition that appears to be rife amongst some of our staff - Attention Deficit Disorder on Demand. The symptoms are largely verbal – phrases like “I’m bored with you – you’re out” and “I expect you are still under the misguided belief that I’m still listening to what you are saying”.

You may well be familiar with the concept of a Personal Firewall – this is an area of the human brain that acts very much like a firewall in computing terms – it blocks out content and sensory attacks that are unwanted and may cause harm. Our current theory suggests that ADDoD is a filter plug-in for your Personal Firewall. If a conversation that you are involved in is becoming boring or tedious, then ADDoD kicks in, and you find that your attention is switching to something more interesting- like counting ceiling tiles or speculating as to the meaning of the oscillations in a nearby flagpole.

Our society is increasing becoming an “on-demand” culture. We expect everything to be delivered to us, in the format that we want it, at the time that we want it. It is true of food, movies, software, music – it is symptomatic of the connected society, but also a wider shift in our expectations. It was only a matter of time before ADD became available on demand.

I'm bored with this - goodbye.

RFC (Request for Comment)

I bet you knew that without me putting it in brackets, right?

I promise that, for the time being at least, this will be my last bit of naval-gazing speculation on the nature of Blog. But I was thinking - which is an annoying and dangerous thing. There have now been some Comments. There is some indication that some people are reading this stuff that I am writing. Jon now has Keith's Two Minutes delivered to his newsreader and he's happy. There has been an assurance that Big Brother is, in fact, watching.

So I have an audience - of at least two. Possibily others. So - I'm asking you - if you're reading this, I am talking directly to YOU now - tell me what you are getting out of this. WHY are you reading this? How did you find this Blog of mine?

I have talked about my feelings and perceptions on the nature of Blog writing - Blog from my perspective. Now I want to hear about my Blog from YOUR perspective. Come on then - Comment me to death - I dare you - I double-dare you! Do the Anonymous thing if you're shy (like Jon) - but talk to me...

Two minutes is up - I'm outta here.

On the Nature of Blog, Part 1 Reloaded

"Reloaded" has become the new "continued" ;)

So far, this is not an interactive experience - posting currently feels like talking to myself – but having seen Chantel’s Blog, I know that hers is very different – so this may just be early days. I think I might like it better if I could view page-view statistics on my posts, like I can on my profile. I’m not actually that bothered who looks at my profile, but I think it would be good feedback to know if anyone at all is actually reading my posts, or if I am just keeping a diary for myself.

The context of a hobby or craft or interest is different. On Chantel’s Blog, she talks of her ideas, posts photos, gets feedback, etc. That is very healthy and very interactive – very different from the essentially isolated stuff that you are now reading – again – may just be early days.

Another thought I had was about newspaper editorial columns. I think this might be quite a good point of comparison for what are essentially “personal” or non-specific-interest Blogs. But the point is that for an editorial column in a newspaper to be read, demanded, liked, wanted – it has to be GOOD – it has to be INTERESTING to a number of people. With Blog, there is no quality control! :)

One could argue that the crap I might write is of no interest to anyone else (doesn’t pass the “so what?” test), and to 99,9% of readers, that may well be the case. But then you come back to the population of the Internet and how many people 0.1% of the population is. You never know – it might be more than the circulation of a small local newspaper! If that is true – if I were to start writing about the price of property in my native Hitchin, it might be that 10-20 might actually find that interesting. And 187 million people wouldn’t!! In that context, it is like talking about LOCAL issues in a GLOBAL newspaper! In theory at least – ceramic art, or azaleas – are globally interesting – Hitchin property prices aren’t! I don’t know – go figure!

On the Nature of Blog, Part 1

Ship's Blog, Stardate 200409.3: Mister Robertson reporting: Tricorder readings indicate that there are some 187 million ACTIVE users of Hotmail accounts on the web. That is Jon's piece of trivia for the day - and it is a sobering thought.

But it is not the subject of this two minutes. This two minutes is my FIRST reflection as to the nature of Blog. Over time, I may very well look back on this and think "what a load of rubbish" - someone might even comment to me "what a load of rubbish". We'll see. Only time will tell. 20/20 hindsight etc.

Blog. Web Log. A log on the web. A matter of record. I was thinking of a suitable non-web analog. A diary. A diary is usually private. Up until the point you die, or you publish it as memoirs, or you inadvertently leave it on the dining room table and your annoying sibling finds it and insists on reading it out to anyone who'll listen.

So whilst you can use it to, on a daily basis, record your thoughts and the happenings in your life, it is not quite a diary. It is more like published memoirs - only it happens instantly -and also globally.

Everything that goes in here is inherently PUBLIC. There is no permissions model that I have yet seen - although I could be wrong about this. I know that this system is not the only one in town either - there's www.blog.com, for example.

This is also a piece of supporting infrastructure that essentially delivers a blank canvas on which we can draw. What I mean is - at the moment, this Blog of mine is aimless, directionless, and random. It has no unified purpose or theme. Yet. Perhaps it will. Perhaps what Jon actually meant when I started this is that it should be a repository for common sense and sanity that pertains to our day-job, and the hopeless, feckless muppets that we sometimes encounter.

Sometimes, a Blog can capture and articulate a passion or hobby. One of my friends has an absolutely superb Blog - especially if you have an interest in ceramic art. If you want a case-study on how to use Blog to follow a theme and give life and public visibility to an artistic hobby, you really should check out Chantel's Blog here - http://www.blog.mweb.co.za/users/ceramicartist. Apart from anything else, Chantel shows how effectively photos can bring a Blog to life.

Is what you show here who you really are? Do you spill out your soul here? If 187 million of us have active Hotmail accounts, then what does that tell you about the "population" of the web? Is it 300-500 million people? A tenth of that? Double that? Who knows. The point is that, potentially, a lot of people could be reading that. And here I draw a comparison to presenting. Presenting to one person is easy - it is a "private conversation". Presenting to three people - especially when you are selling yourself - is quite hard. Presenting to 3-30 people can be challenging and daunting or easy - depends on the context. But presenting to 100+ people, in an auditorium, in the dark, with a microphone and spotlight - isn't so bad. I've done all these things, and the lesson is that presenting to a large group is completely impersonal. You don't get to make eye contact, there is very little chance of questions - you just do your thing. In that sense, it's easy. Here, I am presenting to a very large potential audience - or zero - which is probably closer to the mark! ;)

I could start pouring my heart out and revealing my inner soul, but I still think that it is largely in a vacuum and therefore impersonal. Could be completely wrong about this. Perhaps COMMENTS are the thing I've overlooked. I'll let you know when I get one! ;)

Two minutes are up - I'm outta here. Have a good one.

Why am I here?

This is not the deep, meaningful, causal, existential "why am I here?". Sorry. Although - that might come later. This is the more mundane expansion on the text to the left.

Jon's powers of persuasion are not THAT great.

I am here - doing this - because I am forever curious about the Internet. As an entity or a phenomena. I have been online and doing things involving the Internet for about the last ten years, and it has always fascinated me. The way I view the Internet today is as a demographic. It is a country - a virtual place.

The Internet has everything that any other country has - a timezone, a population, an ethnic profile, a GDP, a crime rate - you name it. The Internet is a country - and we (if you are reading this, by definition) are all citizens of it.

Social changes, and the social impact of the Internet are particularly interesting. Here - online - we each have our own abstraction of who we are in "real-life". Some people - like me - choose or try to make that abstraction a genuine reflection of who we really are. Others use the Internet to be someone they are not quite like in "real-life" - which can be OK, but also dangerous.

So Blog is something else that is a manifestation of the social aspects of the Internet - who writes them, who reads them, etc. I am curious about this - and I want to know more about. It will shape my thinking - there you go - there's some causality.

It's Friday. It's the weekend tomorrow. Have a good day and weekend!

First Post

As opposed to Last Post. Which hopefully this won't be. I've been seeing quite a few "Police Accident" signs lately. The police clearly aren't very good drivers. If they keep having accidents. They even have the lights and sirens so we get out of their way, and they STILL manage to have all these accidents! I think they drive too fast - speed kills. I think they probably had less accidents when more of them had bicycles...