Clever website ideas ☀
When tumblr was new, I felt like we were all swimming in one pool. We all were doing our own thing with the tool and enjoying each other for what were were doing. I don’t feel that anymore. In fact I feel widely unpopular as I see people reblogging mean-spirited captioned photos I was tired of looking at years ago and getting huge amounts of reblogs when a carefully worded well-thought-out post of my own that comes from my heart gets none.
But that’s okay. I’ll post it anyway. I just won’t link it to my facebook.
The facebook people don’t get off facebook. Just like the MySpace people they used to be never got off MySpace. I post “real” things on tumblr where no one’s looking. Not that I don’t want anyone to see it. I wouldn’t post it at all if that were the case.
I don’t have any sites FOR anything. I used to have tons. Seems pointless now. These big sites have taken over. Youtube and facebook and whatever. I mean its not pointless at all if you are a business or an artist of some kind, to have your own “real” website. But its pointless for me to invest my time and energy on any of the old projects I was doing, because they’ve become outdated in some way, and because I think so has the idea of ‘starting a website’ for some clever idea.
Cause everyones on facebook starting groups and its all governed by facebook rules, which no one seems to mind, even though its not that much harder to do your own thing online. Just its harder to get the people to click off facebook and participate in anything.
Yes, I believe blogging and social network platforms like Facebook (and even Tumblr) have snuffed a great bit of the creative aura of the early internet age. Channeling and funneling content into a structured sandbox where one must command and navigate to ensure potential viewership from a wider public audience, that seldom ventures off those domains unless it is a sensational, outrageous or glittering link enticement. Paradoxically, this is happening in an age of ubiquitous web access for all.
Silly photos will always elicit more attention than well-thought-out posts, by an immense magnitude. But this is true of any medium — TV Guide sales dwarf those of Scientific American, “reality” television shows draw an enormous audience compared to the tidings of PBS, the mindless stupefying Transformers 3 sets box office records and tallies twenty to thirty times more total gross than The Tree of Life, Twilight novels versus literature classics, etc.…
But I think it is more that the whole web thing is not that new and fresh any more. I still vividly recall 1997, desiring so strongly to be a web creator, teaching myself HTML, Unix, Perl, and casting off on a course that had me depart the corporate world of software development for building web sites and web applications. The internet then was an untamed frontier, with site authors each crafting their own unique style and voice. I eagerly embraced web projects, even taking many on for free, just so I could get to work with the technology. Now, I scoff at most proposed ventures, even when cash money is waved in my face.
However, I do not give credence to the idea that “starting a website for some clever idea” has become “outdated”. It just will take a little more imagination.
