21st century personal websites
Why blog? Why wiki? A while ago, Greg on Airbag called personal web design dead. And he’s right. An old post dug up on a thread on 43 Folders points some really remarkable insight on the subject:
The role of the new interface is to provide access to all information we record in a transparent manner. When you have 10-20 files you can name them all. If you have 10,000 pieces of information will you name them all?
We seek to organize memories like photographs, moving pictures and sounds.
We seek to organize our finances and our lives
We seek to analyze data
We do not seek to organize “files”
The author, “rm -rf /etc”, wrote this sometime in 2001.
Blogging and using wikis is just like that—an step towards simplifying the way we work with our personal sites so that we can focus on just the pieces we care about: photos, bookmarks, thoughts, etc. Blogs were always around: our first pages when the web was born was nothing but paragraphs of text and links. The difference was that we did them by hand. At some point, content and changes overwhelm the time the craft entails, and automating the process is the only way to respond. Hence “blogging”—the poor man’s CMS.
Not to mention, creating visual experiences on a personal site takes time. When my personal site was nothing but shockwave/flash/audio/graphics/etc. it took a lot of work to get a concepts built out. For others, perhaps visual communication is something they’re not comfortable with publishing, depending on their Photoshop skills or how far they feel talented artistically. At the same time, we didn’t demand much back from the system. I’m talking ‘97–‘99 here, and the collaborative power of internet just wasn’t that accessible to the average user. Businesses like Amazon was building it for their stores, but no one created systems that could feedback directly to users, like the oft-cited Flickr and de.licio.us -like services. In a Catch-22, it seems as though blogs themselves helped lead these drive behind these new services. Or perhaps we all hit information overload at the same time and realized “crap, I gotta simplify things now before my brain explodes.”
As the mysterious author concluded, “Simplicity is in taking the elegant path. It is also a conscious choice— to achieve simplicity one must eschew complexity. Simple things must be simple.”
We just want the web to be simpler.
