Design
Friends & Family
Geekery
Outdoors
School
The Space Between: Miscellany
Travel
Friends & Family
Geekery
Outdoors
School
The Space Between: Miscellany
Travel
DAILY
Kottke
New York Times
Slashdot
TECH / DESIGN
Siracusa's FatBits
DrunkenBlog
LukeW's FF
Signal vs. Noise
Stopdesign
Kottke
New York Times
Slashdot
TECH / DESIGN
Siracusa's FatBits
DrunkenBlog
LukeW's FF
Signal vs. Noise
Stopdesign
Blog vs. Job
Monday, 18 April 2005 at 08:39PM
Or is it the other way around? The real question is, how do you use a website (blog, site, LiveJournal, whatever) to communicate with friends while keeping it fit for public and Googleable consumption?
I've seen some writers damn the torpedoes and go full steam ahead. Only yesterday we got to share in the intimate details of Dooce's postpartum poops, all seven in a row in the bathtub after seven days of serious cloggage. Over the past couple of years, amongst the regular drone of loveable craziness, she has shared some intensely personal highs and lows. I can't do her writing justice here, so if you haven't already, check out Dooce.
Others, like Megnut, have gone from to a much more self-aware tone paralleling an exponential increase in popularity and traffic. Compare Feburary 2000 to April 2005 — granted they are a microscopic slice of bigger pies, but I think they're fairly representative of the slow leaching of personality from the site.
The problem of personal vs. public is particularly salient for folks who work with the web itself; the cobbler whose proverbial kids too often go unshod, so to speak. On one hand, I want to record and share the wonderful, strange, human things that happen around me daily — whether because the world is a crazy place or because I see it through funny-colored rigid gas permeable contact lenses. On the other, I am lucky enough to really geek out over my major and the possible jobs that I can enter, and I want to corral all that ADHD-driven clickery and musing into something more coherent that not only help me grow, but show my growth as a real, live, grownup of twenty-two years.
The point of all this rambling was that I think Dirk Knemeyer's Heart/Mind division (best articulated in D. Keith Robinson's PDF page description document, in the "notes" section at right) is a truly insightful way to tease some nuance out of that paradox — which I'd like to do with this site later in the year. And that the Design Eye gang came up with, and presented the process for, a redesign at this year's SXSW Interactive. Not that I was there. I think I'll leave that one for the cool kids, at least for now. I just read the blogs.
I've seen some writers damn the torpedoes and go full steam ahead. Only yesterday we got to share in the intimate details of Dooce's postpartum poops, all seven in a row in the bathtub after seven days of serious cloggage. Over the past couple of years, amongst the regular drone of loveable craziness, she has shared some intensely personal highs and lows. I can't do her writing justice here, so if you haven't already, check out Dooce.
Others, like Megnut, have gone from to a much more self-aware tone paralleling an exponential increase in popularity and traffic. Compare Feburary 2000 to April 2005 — granted they are a microscopic slice of bigger pies, but I think they're fairly representative of the slow leaching of personality from the site.
The problem of personal vs. public is particularly salient for folks who work with the web itself; the cobbler whose proverbial kids too often go unshod, so to speak. On one hand, I want to record and share the wonderful, strange, human things that happen around me daily — whether because the world is a crazy place or because I see it through funny-colored rigid gas permeable contact lenses. On the other, I am lucky enough to really geek out over my major and the possible jobs that I can enter, and I want to corral all that ADHD-driven clickery and musing into something more coherent that not only help me grow, but show my growth as a real, live, grownup of twenty-two years.
The point of all this rambling was that I think Dirk Knemeyer's Heart/Mind division (best articulated in D. Keith Robinson's PDF page description document, in the "notes" section at right) is a truly insightful way to tease some nuance out of that paradox — which I'd like to do with this site later in the year. And that the Design Eye gang came up with, and presented the process for, a redesign at this year's SXSW Interactive. Not that I was there. I think I'll leave that one for the cool kids, at least for now. I just read the blogs.
Filed under: Geekery.
Comments
it's still amazes me to stumble into a blog-world. like they're so seemingly enclosed. it's like walking into your kitchen to cook some fabulously difficult dish and then finding a book club discussing sartre in the pantry instead of white truffle oil. you sorta have to go Huh?
ok bad analogy. i'm trying to redesign the old cobwebby attic of my site and have trouble finding interesting graphics cuz i sure as hell can't draw and i am not wading through clipart sites. any ideas?
word, jan. only the other day i realized that one of my ultimate teammates who just moved here from NYC for grad school is friends with some of the bloggers i regularly read. i'd never really thought they could be real people.
the Veer catalog is always inspiring when it shows up in my PO box, even though i won't be rich enough to buy anything from it for quite a while. you may not be able to sketch portraits, but i remember some awesome cards and letters and envelopes in my mailbox in the past... maybe a neat idea would be to scissor-and-rubber-cement it up, and scan those tidbits for graphics for your site? i'm a big convert to starting in the analog whenever possible.
Your turn...