Manila Anniversary
Thursday, March 1, 2001
Manila has been running on my machine, interactive4, since 3/10/00, so I'm coming up on my first anniversary.
Maybe tomorrow I'll write more about what I've learned from blogging as it relates to our work.
The first site on interactive4:8000 was /cashley. I posted some writing, notes, and images there. One piece of writing, work related and a little too frank, actually got me in some momentary hot water. I won't elaborate or print it here. But that was my first slap in the face that even unknown corners of the web are public. I shouldn've known this, because I've was publishing a classroom web site and teacher training stuff since Mosaic. I made /cashley private. Now no one can read it but me. I haven't used it in awhile. (BTW, here's an image sitting on /cashley that has followed me around for about six years or so, since I first started using Photoshop. In fact I made this while learning to use layers and trying to make seamless collages. What's wrong with this picture?)
In the spring of 2000 I made the JHMeatWatch site. It was a gag, an excuse to learn ways of learning about building and using a daily blog. That site had an intended life of about a month only. It was a spoof, surreptitously reporting daily on whether or not a coworker had eaten meat each day. It was an inside joke.
I started /xyz in October, fully public. I wrote about all kinds of things- work, teaching, music, some art, posted table art, a few images. I took a break from that in late January when I looked at my stats and didn't like the flow of traffic I saw to my postings from a variety of Google searches. I was not happy about this and decided to discontinue that blog and start a new one. It was not the audience I had in my head while writing. That's a topic for a future post- who do I picture when I blog?
I am no longer running Manila on interactive4. Haven't moved it to another server yet. I want to render some sites first.
This is the first full post I made on /xyz on 11/7/00 right after creating the site (we all know how the events of this day turned out):
Tense
I'm tense. At work I'm scanning sites for news. Yahoo, CNN, any of the new sites, the special sites set up for the election. I want a clear indication that I won't wake up tomorrow morning knowing my new president is that guy from TX.
Other than that, the only other thing on my mind is that we should be looking beyond K-12 DLM models to those in any other subject area. Here are just a few good examples:
Some non-K12 examples of DLMs (it seems we ought to look beyond K-12 for good models of digital learning materials. Fore example:
- Guitar Main
PRIMITIVE, INTERMEDIATE AND JAZZ BLUES
- From Quackery to Bacteriology:
The Emergence of Modern Medicine in 19th Century America
- The Valley of the Shadow
Lesson Plans for Social Studies Classes Grades 7 - 12
- NCSA's A Beginner's Guide to HTML
- whatis?com: The IT-Specific encyclopedia
Tonight- we're watching the networks, CNN, looking for news that Gore will pull this off. Yet on the network maps so many states are red, that is, belong to Bush, rather than blue for Bush. It's like 1980 all over again. We can't believe we live in a country in which someone as obviously unqualified and clueless can be elected to the highest office in this country. It's stunning, and depressing. Tomorrow, when I get up and look at the newspaper headlines, look at web headlines, will there be some change?
And here is the last post on /xyz:
On Top of Ol' Bloggy, All Covered With Cheese...
Quad wrote yesterday about his feelings around potential loss from EditThisPage going down:
Weblogs have become another friend, you know, one of those friends that are always there, rain or shine, even on holidays. It has taken over my daily routine and my bookmarks list... When my weblog started acting up last night, I became worried. It was like me--my presence in this virtual world--was fading. When I awoke the next morning, I was in an even greater state of dispair. Editthispage had gone down. It was like my connection to my friends had been severed or reduced to snail mail. I hate to say that I've sort of grown dependent on weblogging, but, in a way, I have.
Lloyd wrote more about the community and value of weblogging:
The online world and what it means to our evolution as social beings can no more be ignored than can any other marvelous artifact of our highly technological civilization.
This kind of instant technology is and will be more and more a seamless part of our lives, there's no doubt about that. In most ways it is a good thing. The world is denser, but technology can help maintain a social group. We don't live in small villages. We live in big, spread out, dense places, and keeping connected with each other is difficult. Technology also helps this by saving time. It can be logistically difficult to regularly meet face to face. Technology like this though is really useful for more than just socializing. Imagine a networked heart pacemaker or a computer in my car that talks to parking meters and my mechanic, or tells the cars around me that I'm speeding and only use my turn signals 27% of the turns I make. Wouldn't that be helpful?
Interesting twist about the potential loss of blog content: do you back up a weblog? Well, yes, I'm sure EditThisPage does regular backups, but they're only as current as the last backup, not necessarily your last flip. Sounds relatively safe, I suppose. But what if something terrible happened to their server, or backup, or the company suddenly folded, or the server was confiscated, or...?
Dave Winer has this concern of his own, only about another free service that they are using: Scary thought. We really depend on eGroups/Yahoo. They take care of a nasty job and do it really well. We pay them nothing. At some point we're either going to have to pay or lose the data we're accumulating. The responsible thing is to work with them to figure out how to make it work financially.
If Dave is worried about this, shouldn't we worry about what Dave's providing for free, too? You do know that Dave is Mr. EditThisPage, right? Question: how much would you pay for your weblog? Would you pay $5.00 a month? Would you pay $100 a year? If your weblog is important to you, and many in this community have said it is, then what's it worth to you dollar-wise?
Related to this: I think it's a good idea to use technology as needed, as a tool, and not just as a thing in itself, as much as possible. Sure, technology for its own sake is fun, and has its place. But if you've ever asked yourself the question, "Am I doing this too much?" then the answer could quite possibly be, "Well yes!" The answer, though, doesn't have to be to stop using the technology. Maybe instead it's a good idea to take the day off, go for a hike, read a book, talk to some friends, listen to or play some music, shoot some hoops, clean a closet, learn how to buy stocks, draw, bake a cake, meditate, rake leaves, ride a bike... unplug.
Goodbye interactive4:8000.
doodling...
Say...
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