Lifestream? Blog? Tension
My brother recently started another website (his 4th?). Aside from ribbing each other about him using Wordpress again and my still using Drupal, it did bubble up an idea about what it is we are doing with our sites, what we want to do with our sites and just keeping a site in general.
I've been seeing more and more websites recently where the author/owner has recently made the decision to move from blogging to pretty much just presenting the owner's lifestream, in a stream of locations, tweet-like updates, pictures, link dumps and sometimes, video.
Gone from these sites is the in depth commentary that probably drew people to the site.
Don't take the previous statement to mean I think this is a bad thing. A person has the right to present their site in whatever way they want. It's your personal brand, play it as you will.
But is there really a difference between the columnist-style blog and the naked lifestream?
I think I've written before that one of my problems with maintaining a blog is that I'm writing too much like a columnist. I'm not a writer. I find that I do have a little more training than some of the people I know. But, honestly, I find I'm better as an editor than a author. And even that statement may be selling short the work of real professional editors.
While I do get and even enjoy following the various lifestreams, Twitter and Facebook (and a number of other social network, web 2.0, lifestream sites) feeds, I think it best makes content for the margins of SysMango.com, not the main part of the page.
Since my first awareness of what an individual could actually do on the Internet, there has always been this tension around the types of content and ways of presenting and consuming the content.
Forums have always been something I have been less than thrilled about (density versus signal:noise). The first web logs bothered me a bit because the narrative was presented in the opposite order (most to least recent) from how it was presented on the page (top to bottom).
As steeped in information as I sometimes appear to be, I really have no use for a lot of the products, services and applications I try and use.
And this gets met thinking about what it is I want to do with this site.
The conversation with Brian about WP v Drupal ended with me saying what I really thought on the subject: it doesn't really matter.
