On Party Hats…

Just getting my thoughts out there:

I’m building a simple web app I’ve codenamed Party Hats. I’m calling it a conversation tool, I guess. No anonymity. Everyone must be approved to join the conversation. Each day is a separate conversation (to preserve ephemerality). Users should have the option to customize their posts in some fashion (like colors). It’ll have links on one side, so you can link to people’s blogs and stuff. All the links will be on the main page, not in an individual profile. In fact, there are no profiles.

(Basically, I saw metaverse and wanted to build some type of Ruby on Rails clone.)

On the Oldness of the Web…

Currently reading Scott Rosenberg’s Say Everything, which is a history of blogging. I’m reading the first chapter and what strikes me is the newness of the web when it first came out. Publishing was made easy. It was revolutionary.

I remember being excited about the web before too. Now, though, I’m hostile towards the web. I’m an addicted man pulling the lever of a slot machine (check e-mail, check twitter). I’m just looking for the next hit and the variable rewards keep me addicted. The web is rewiring my brain into a superficial mess. It’s all rather depressing.

More unorganized thoughts:

My next tool after Party Hats will be an anti-CMS. I don’t want to manage content. I want to fucking write. Some tools have gotten out of hand; they’re too feature-laden, too complicated. I’m glad Tumblr is easy enough.

On reblogging and blockquotes:

Blockquotes bug me. I noticed it when I wrote that blog post with the links at the bottom. I get extremely annoyed when students quote something and don’t explain it. Yet on the web, that’s what I’m doing all the time. When I didn’t have the crutch of the link, I had to provide context for what I wrote. It makes for less sloppy thinking. Without context, the reader can infer what he wants to infer. There is no communication. So it’s just rant + disconnected blockquote. It’s bad writing.

Reblogging bugs me even more. Why think when you can just post something someone else wrote? Sorry if you, dear reader, feel as if I’m attacking you. I don’t think reblogging is all terrible. It’s just that it circumvents what I find exciting about the internet: There’s no creation going on. If there’s intent and purpose, it can be okay to consciously remix items via reblogging. Okay, what’s really bugging me is that we had one student who seemed super excited about blogging, but I never see her thoughts, just her haphazard reblogging. (I doubt she’s reading this now, but if you are, I would love to see your thoughts in text. [bad grammarz don’t care])

On being raw…

I’ve had a tendency to complain that my writing on my blog isn’t polished enough. I want to go in the completely opposite direction. I want to write when I’m inspired and just post it here. Who cares who sees it? Who cares how bad it is? I just want to write it all down first. Even if I don’t rewrite a particular post, I still revisit the ideas a million times anyway. It’ll all get polished somehow, I think.

Certainly, this approach is more exciting to me. It will be a nice experiment.