Nollind Whachell

Hmm, I’m already stumped. I thought categorizing my entries would be easy to do to create separate “streams” but it isn’t. Why? Because I’m finding that everything is connected in my entries. For example, I could be talking about playing the World of Warcraft. So you might think that’s easy, just categorize the subject of the entry as “Gaming” or something like that. But it’s not that easy, because often times my inspiration comes from the most unlikely of places. For example, when I’m playing online, I’m continually thinking about communities and the cultures within them. Therefore, do I add those categories as well thus making it now “Gaming”, “Communities”, and “Culture”? As I said before a while back in a previous post, the more categories I add the more absurd things seem to get, so I’d rather not have “subject” categories at all.

If anything though, I find it easier instead to categories things by type. For example, categorizing entries as “Books”, “Movies”, or “Music” is really straightforward, since if you click on that category you’ll see a listing of the books I have read. Yet if I do this, then what do I call my regular entries that aren’t books, music, or movies? Do I just categorize them as just “Blog” entries? Seems weird, yet at the same time how do I separate my content in these “streams”? Or should I really be worried about this? Yet if all of my content is merged together, I find this a detriment because it makes it more difficult for people to follow a specific “aspect” or “facet” of my life. Instead they have to see everything I talk about (although they have the choice to read it or not).

Again is this a bad thing though? Hehe, for some reason the song “All of Me” by Frank Sinatra is playing in my head now.

“All of me
Why not take all of me”

This is just a little background on what I meant by “I think I’ve found a ‘structure’ I can live with” that I mentioned in my last post.

For the longest time, I’ve been frustrated with blog formats (which is why I drive people nuts with changing my site so much because I like exploring and experimenting with different things). Therefore instead of the typical blog format, I’ve instead been searching for a format that focused more on a “spaces” approach (i.e. rooms, etc) because different spaces allowed for different forms of social interaction. In effect, each room or environment that we step into in the real world, changes how we socially interact with others. In a business environment, we may be speak professionally, not letting our emotions show. Yet in the back corner of a quite cafe, we may express our deepest emotions to a good friend. And even more so, in a night club environment we may speak and behave wildly different with others, as we let go of a lot of the things that may hold us back from expressing ourselves fully. Therefore each environment provides a different social context to interact within and will change how we outwardly express ourselves.

Now here’s what I just realized though. My website here is not so much a “space” but instead is more an extension of myself. Specifically an extension of my thoughts and interests. As others like Dave Winer have pointed out, it is more like a conversation “river”. Yet within this river are streams of focused conversations on specific topics of interest. That is the approach that I’ve finally decided upon and will go forward with. One of the main benefits of this approach is that it will allow me to feel like a “whole” person because my one conversation “river” will switch from various stream topic categories. Therefore I might talk about technology one post, culture another, and then computer gaming in the next. In effect, this allows me to relay my full identity, not just a single fragment or facet of it.

And yet the greatest strength of this approach, its wholeness, is also possibly its greatest weakness. A lot of people today are not interested in knowing everything about a person which is why most bloggers recommend having a very focused topic niche for your blog. Instead they recommend creating different sites. I, for some reason, just can’t do this. I’ve tried and I keep feel like I’m fragmenting myself so that people only see certain sides of me to the point of being stereotyped. In addition, I find separate sites a really complex approach for maintaining my conversations, as I’d rather have everything in one location. Therefore, at the very least, if I provide “categories” for my journal, or as I like to call them “topic streams”, people can then so choose to follow only a single conversation stream instead of having to listen to everything I have to say.

Of course, in closing, the hilarious thing here is that the format I’ve now chosen is very similar to the default blogging format that many people use today. In a sense, I’ve come full circle. Believe me though, I still don’t think it’s perfect. I’ve got a few other ideas that I’d like to experiment with but due to the approach I’ll be taking, this experimentation “shouldn’t” alter my current structure but hopefully will instead work with it.

I’m back but with a new direction.

First off, just a quick note to let everyone know that I’m no longer working at Squarespace. In addition, I want to thank Anthony for giving me the opportunity to work with him at Squarespace and letting me see the inner workings of such a great web publishing service such as Squarespace. It was a wonderful opportunity.

With regards to work, I’ve got some of my own ideas that I’m going to be pursuing over the next little while (that still relate to Squarespace though) and you’ll see these appear on my site in the days ahead. In addition, I’ll probably be adding a “Services” page sometimes soon that will explain what I’ll be offering.

“Where’s my journal?” you might also be wondering. I took it down, as I don’t see a need for it right now. Depending upon how things go, I might add it back in the future but I’ll have to see how things go. Instead, I’ve just created this “News” page that will just relay occasional news and updates relating to my site. If you want to get a hold of me and chat though, feel free to give me a shout via my Contact page.

UPDATE: Journal is back up. Think I’ve found a “structure” I can live with.

A very simple article entitled Living Without The Internet on Design Observer seems to have sparked a very heated conversation in its comments about how people use the Internet and does it make them feel connected to others or not.

Personally the Internet itself as a technology does not make me feel connected to others. For me, it is more the people I interact with and the stories that are shared that make me feel connected to people on this planet. The Internet is just helping to make this interaction a little easier than previous methods of communication.

Do I “feel” disconnected from people when I’m off the Internet? No, not at all. As I’ve stated before, I actually feel more connected to the world and the billions of people on it when I’m alone in nature then when I’m online. But could this be because I don’t have very many meaningful relationships online? I mean I have various meaningful relationships offline but I barely can think of even a few online. Maybe this is why I don’t feel disconnected when I’m offline because I’m not truly connected meaningfully to people online. And I guess the next question is should I be?

Or should I taking advantage of the ability to search globally with the Web to help me find more meaningful relationships locally within the city in which I live, similar to what Marko Savic mentioned in the comments of this article.

Perhaps because I’m younger and grew up on the internet my prespective is different, but, the internet is our social landscape. I moved to Toronto for school 2 years ago, and knew nobody. Through the wonders of LiveJournal I “met” many new friends. Ironically, these people are the ones when I met in person, became best friends with, and eventually moved in with. All the people I met “in person” at “social functions” were all friends of circumstance than any true bond. We aren’t in touch any more.

Even more so, should I start using the Web in different ways than I normally think. I’ve been touting that Web 2.0 is more a change of thinking than a change of technology. Maybe I need to listen to my own words? Should I be creating different journals as different ‘spaces” to help maintain relationships with people I already know in real life and possibly even foster new relationships with people who come across them? For example, one journal could be focused towards the public with regards to my research and work. Another could be focused towards family and friends, relayings what going on in my daily life. Another could be a very private journal that I only share with a select group of people and so on. Interesting. Now that I think about this, I had actually thought of this before with my “rooms” approach in terms of structuring content. This takes it step farther though. In effect, each space / room / journal is like a different social environment with different rules of social conduct (with your journal settings effectly helping to set the environment).

In closing, I’d like to finish off this train of thought with a few more words by Marko Savic again.

Between first and second years, my internet friends (I’d met them at this point) and I all moved to our respective home towns, and one of us went to Europe. We used LiveJournal to keep up with the events of eachothers lives while we were apart for 5 months, its like we were with eachother the whole time. We actually orchestrated renting a house between Windsor, London, Kitchener (Ontario) and Scotland from a landlord who lived in New York. He gave us the place over another group after he stumbled upon my blog and decided he liked my character.

And finally, I’ve moved out on my own and purposely didn’t have the internet for the first month, so I would go explore my community. I just ended up reading a lot of books instead. I was overpowered with feelings of loneliness, very disconnected from the world. It’s a strange feeling, but just seeing someone else is online – on MSN or Skype, a LiveJournal post or flickr update, its like they’re sitting in the room with you. Perhaps its a bad metaphor. Sometimes we can’t meet in person, and the internet bridges that gap.

This video by Coudal Partners is hilarious! When it comes down to marketing a product, it doesn’t matter how much money you have for an ad campaign, if the product can’t stand on it’s own two feet, then nothing you can say can really make a difference once you let it out into the “real world” on its own.

That’s because there’s a huge separation from the fictitious make believe world of TV and what we actually experience in real life. I personally don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to walk into a fast food restaurant and say “Can I have a sandwich that looks EXACTLY like that one in the picture there?!” as I point at a picture of their product behind them. Yet what you get from them is a far cry from what is advertised by them. I stopped going to Subway a long time ago because I got tired of the compost heap that was being served to me as a “sandwich”. Sandwich Artists? How about Sandwich Sanitation Engineers?  🙂

The Agency.com video was sickenly hilarious in a sad sort of way as well (if you can persevere watching it all). The “will sell soul for money” feeling just seemed to be so smothered over the video, it was almost as though they were trying to make some kind of sandwich themselves (of what kind I couldn’t be sure). The sad thing is that they were supposed to be pitching a product, yet most of the video all they talked about was themselves. “We rule! We’re passionate about marketing anything, as long you give us lots of money! Hire us!”

I’ve been looking for a while for an RSS to XML-RPC routing service that would in effect relay content from one site to another. If anyone has seen such a service please let me know.

Basically you’d log into the service, add in RSS feeds (mix multiple ones together even) and then select an XML-RPC method (such as MetaWeblog API) to relay and post these feeds onto another site. The amazing thing is that this service would really only need to relay the feed content, not store it.

Why am I looking for this? Because it would alleviate the need for blogging services to include feed aggregation within their services itself.

How would I use this? To create my Connected Communities idea. In effect, allowing many individual local sites to collaborate together on a collective effort through the sharing of information.

I believe I caught a bug this last Thursday because ever since then I’ve been feeling like crap (i.e. exhausted, minor sore throat, nauseous, slight occasional dizziness, etc). Sunday I went to bed just before 11 PM and woke up late for work yesterday at 9:20 AM (I usually start around 9 AM). Feeling like crap again, I decided to hit the bed early last night just before 10 PM. I’ve now been up almost an hour since just after midnight, tossing and turning, feeling like I’m going to throw up at any minute. Of course during this hour, thoughts have been tossing and turning around in my head as well, so I thought I’d at least get something out of me (and thus hopefully prevent the “other” from happening).

The last hour I’ve been thinking about my Exploring Squarespace site and already I’m having second thoughts about creating it. Don’t get me wrong though. One thing you have to realize about me is that I love helping people. Yet while my Exploring Squarespace site is a great outlet to let me share my knowledge of Squarespace with others, it isn’t my passion. Ever since the Katrina disaster of last year, I’ve stated that I want to start focusing on changing the world to make it a better place. For some people, this may seem like idle dreams but for me I’m dead serious about it. Actually ever since I landed up in the hospital on New Year’s Day at the start of 2003 (with stomach pains that reminded me of the Alien movies), my mortality has constantly been on my mind. Life is precious to me, mine own and others, and I’d rather not waste a single moment of it. “Don’t save time, savour it” is a little expression I’ve created to help remind me of this.

Therefore, ever since the Katrina disaster, I’ve been trying to research various ways we as a people can utilize the Web to help connect our various communities (online and off), to foster a better culture within them, and most importantly of all, to allow us in times of need to unify all of these communities together in one focused global effort (like aiding people in a large disaster situation like Katrina) by each of them working collectively on a local level. And actually when Anthony approached me to work at Squarespace, I was ecstatic because it was the perfect job situation, as I only needed to work a six hour day which would give me plenty of time to pursue my passion on the side. Or so I thought. Of course, once I started working on Squarespace, I started getting all of these ideas relating to the service and my Exploring Squarespace site is a culmination of a lot of those ideas that I’ve spent my time on. And yet even though I’m enjoying sharing this knowledge with others, at the same time I’m very upset with myself that I’ve deviated so much from my initial path that I had started on.

So what happens now? Well, I obviously want to get back on track in spending most of my free time focused on my research as I had done before. Yet I obviously don’t want to throw all of my work on my Exploring Squarespace site out the window or stop sharing this information with people either. For now, I’ll probably just let things ride and see where they take me. My primary concern though is the feedback on my Exploring Squarespace site. I feel bad about it but I honestly don’t have the time to respond to these additional queries. In effect, I can share the basic examples with people to get them going in the right direction, but people will need to help one another if they have problems figuring out how to apply the examples to their own site. As I said, for now I’ll let things go as they are but down the road, who knows, I may have to close off comments and possibly even the forums I just opened on the site as well. Or at the very least I suppose, ensure that everyone is fully aware that I’m just sharing the basic information and I can’t provide much more support than that. As I said, I feel bad about it but at the same time, I have greater goals and passions that I need to pursue in my life and they’ll need to take precedence, as my time is a precious commodity to me.

I think one thing that a lot of people need to realize is that many bloggers don’t blog for others but instead blog for themselves. Dave Winer is one such person who has always stated this time and time again, and I myself have always felt the same way. I don’t think of my blog as a stage act where I’m putting on a show to an audience (and thus need new material daily to keep the show running and me tapping my feet) but instead I think of it as a personal journal that I can record my thoughts and remember them in the future when I forget life lessons I’ve learnt in the past. Today is no less of example of this.

While digging around on the Web last night, trying to discover those who have pointed to my site in the past (which is a great way to find new and interesting people), I came across an article by Elran Oded entitled Good Design Will Set You Free: Moment of Zen that I actually had read a long time ago. Why I was glad I found it again though was because Elran helped to remind me of something very important that I had learnt but forgotten when he said the following.

“The Myth of Perfect Web Design” by D. Keith Robinson was originally written on August 4th, 2003. But it couldn’t be more significant in today’s climate of redesign madness. The rules are all being rewritten before our very eyes, and it is sheer genius for him to have reposted this article the other day in this current context. A testament to the power of truly good writing. Anyway, it seemed to lift me up a little because it appeared to confirm earlier statements regarding overdesign (and trying to be the coolest), prioritizing (choose your battles), and sacrifices (in design). i especially liked the comment made by Nollind Whachell, which in my mind, perfectly characterizes the Myth article. Simply put, “Perfect equals rigid”. so true.

When I read what I had written back then I basically gave myself a mental slap to the head. How could I have been so stupid! This was something that I’d learnt in the past but had totally forgotten. What made me think I had forgotten it? Because my Exploring Squarespace site is a great example of this “perfect rigidity”. In my mind, I had this “perfect vision” of what it would be, that being a digital magazine that I’d publishing “frequently”. The problem though is that producing a magazine is a hell of a lot of work because you need to create all of your content first before you can publish your “issue”.

When I looked at what I was doing I laughed at myself. What an idiot I was! In trying to create this “perfect” vision of what I wanted to achieve, instead of sharing this information with others, I instead ended up building a dam that not only blocked the flow of information to those who really wanted it but also built up my stress and frustrations as well, since I was trying to produce something “perfect”. When I saw what I was doing, I immediately said the following to myself.

Stop trying to be perfect.
Don’t let thing build.
Let things flow.

And as soon as I said that, I knew exactly what I needed to do. I needed to start unplugging the dam’s I’ve built and start letting things just flow which in turn would help release the pressure that had been building up. Things don’t need to be perfect. They just need to usable. Design isn’t about achieving perfection and holding it there up on a pedestal for all to see for all eternity. Design is about working at something daily to make it better than the day before.

Design your relationships.
Design your life.
Design you.

In closing, I just want to relay two more little things that I learnt from this experience.

Small changes daily
make a big difference over time.

Stories help us to
remind us of our culture,
of who we are
and of what we value.

That a company would actually put out promotional material like this and be dead serious about it just makes my skin crawl. Ya carbon dioxide is a natural element of life and so is water. But if the entire planet got submerged under water, would they still be singing the same tune? I mean give me a break. You’d almost expect this company to start marketing CO₂ “enriched” water or something. It’s amazing how seriously screwed up people can get when it comes to money. At least some people are trying to show how absurd these ads really are (parody starts about 30 seconds in) but not sure if it is enough, as I could see some people actually believing that excessive amounts of carbon dioxide are a “good thing”.

“What’s that orange color over the city Mommy?”
“That’s called carbon dioxide honey. Don’t worry it’s a good thing and a natural part of life. Now hurry up and finish your McDonald’s cheeseburger and lets go. Mommy’s got to pick up her new SUV.”

Jeff Jarvis talks about what companies can do to compete against Google in untapped areas. I couldn’t agree more on his comments on social networks.

* Social connections: I think there is a big opportunity to map social connections that already exist online. MySpace is really Rupert’s space. The internet is our space. It is, once again, already a social network. So look at it that way and make connections among the people here. Make it a way to find people. Make it a way to measure the quality of relationships: authority (as in Technorati), trust, leadership.

“It is, once again, already a social network.” Exactly! This is another reason why I left Flickr. Yes, it does a great job at creating social networks but those networks are confined to Flickr itself. MySpace does the same thing. We need to start creating social networks that are open and accessible, that can easily grab, share, and utilize the existing content on our sites already, no matter which software or service they are created with.