I think this blog is gonna be one of my more tech centered themes then one about writting but I think I’ll wrap back to the topics of writing towards the end if only because I’ve been listening to brad and scott debate about the concept of writters block, and I’ve got some comment. I can probably link these two ideas somehow, using the power of akward transitions!
Theres been a lot of buzz on the internet recently about a growing trend that I, as an anti-social hermit, really am happy to see. Theres a growing trend of at least amoung the super web savy, about stoping this crazy out of control love for social networking, and pulling things back home where you can own it. The idea being that participation in these things is great, but at the end of the day, why should strangers control your online identity. STRANGER DANGER! Mostly this has been kicked off by that massive DDOS attack on a bunch of social networking sites after ONE GUY pissed someone off. Personally I never wanted to give up that control but, everyone else already had and I want to participate in the online society so I did what I had to. But now I can start hoarding all my data again and be seen as cool. thats what we in the conflict management business call a win/win (win, because the negotiator also wins).
The question then becomes how to I aggregate all my data back here then? I’ve already got friend feed set up as my agreggator of all of what I do online, but I really don’t want to trust them now that there future is uncertian post buy out from Facebook, a company I personally don’t like.
The hardest problem I guess is twitter. The easy solution is to just have it pull in all my tweets as a big infinite list. but thats pretty worthless so why bother? Honestly so few of my tweets really need to be archived that its probably not worth doing. but I wanna. I just don’t know how it should look yet and once I figure that out how to make that work is still a mystery.
Then theres a second class of content to figure out, things like my delicious bookmarks and the shared items from google reader. feeds that say things that Im finding thats cool that I dont really have a lot to say about (sometimes I do but thats an extreme exception)
I guess what it all comes to is that I want my blog to not be “just another wordpress blog”. Man I hate that stock tag line. why dont you just kick my creativity in the nuts wordpress team? I want to make this more then a blog, without losing the good stuff of blogging. I want it to be a place to facilitate my creativity, and let me have conversations around it. I want it to let me start weird projects and see where they lead. Setting up a tag for the project doesn’t quite do enough, theres a lot of metadata about a project that is hard to surface. I still am trying to solve this issue. what normally happens is that the metaness of the project site being a project makes the whole thing collapse.
I do like talking about creativity, even more then actually being creative sometimes. Which is why I really enjoyed Scott’s new podcast “Surviving Creativity” If I were to do a podcast (unlikely) it would be on that subject. though I’d have to rope you in nikki, cause that would give me the edge on the competition. Instead of having a bunch of dudes say hey if only a woman was here we wouldn’t have to dance around this issue about what a womans perspective might be. What a pathetic conversation to have nerds. Just take a break for 5 minutes and talk to a girl and then come back. -_-
But I digress, and after I made such a clean segway too. On the first episode of the podcast, which was about writers block, Scott brought up this ladys talk from TED. I’m too lazy to find the talk but essentially her advice is that you HAVE to externalize the creative whatchacallit unless you want to go insane and end up in a looney bin. I found her talk incredibly annoying, personally. The idea that you’ve got to create an imaginary friend in order to not go insane is RETARDED. I don’t give a shit if thats what the greeks believed, thats not proof its a good idea. If you are going to invent an imaginary person to blame when things suck, then that means they get the credit when things go well. So who needs you at all? You made yourself irrelevant to the creative process. why not go get a normal job and enter numbers into a database. Its such a shame because her underlying points were actually compelling but thats not the discussion that comes out of her talk. Instead everyone talks about how super cool there magic fairy is.
Meanwhile the interesting things to discuss get ignored. That being 1. don’t worry about losing this precious magic idea. You’ll have another that’s equally good later when you can do something with it. and 2. don’t wait to be inspired to do work, do the work until the inspiration comes.
I don’t pretend to understand the Greeks very well, but from what I’ve read about them, if they knew what we know they wouldn’t believe in “geniuses” or whatever you want to call the magic elves that make your art good. They weren’t so knowledgeable about the way the world worked by just thinking that people from thousands of years ago were the real smart people and everyone after them was stupid and got everything wrong.
