Posts Tagged ‘social networks’

Blogging is a real-time strategy game

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Anna watched me Twitter over my shoulder for a while, and then announced: “I get it. It’s a video game where you compete for attention from strangers on the internet.” She’s completely correct. Having a web presence is a real-world immersive internet game where the scoreboard is your stats page or follower list. Like any good iPhone game, Twitter even has a built-in global leaderboard. Blogging scratches the same itch in me as SimCity or Civilization, except instead of building a virtual terrarium I’m building social connections.

This is not to knock SimCity and Civilization at all. They’re a ton of fun, and they’re brilliant teaching tools for computer science and the concept of emergence. Blogging is a better real-time strategy game, though, because it brings me some non-hypothetical real-world benefits.

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Visual outlining with Flickr

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

I love everything about Flickr except its name. First of all, creative misspelling is so five minutes ago. Second of all, the word ‘flicker’ has no conceptual connection to a photo-sharing social network that I can think of, except, I guess, in the very literal sense that a computer image flickers thirty times a second to produce the illusion of motion. And there my griping ends. Once you’re past the name, Flickr is everything you could want in an image site and more.

As I develop my book, I gather a lot of images. I’m a visual thinker with an art background, and through playing with Flickr, I stumbled on the idea of a visual outline to complement the written one. (more…)

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Social bookmarking is delicious

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

The most practically useful thing on the whole entire social web is Delicious. Its original point was to store your web browser bookmarks online. That’s reason enough to use it. But the real value of Delicious is how it connects the thoughts in your head to the thoughts in the heads of innumerable internet strangers. Even more useful is the way it stores, reorganizes and reflects your own thoughts back to you. Delicious feels less like a web site I look at and more like a new module of my brain. It’s also like a slow-paced but highly absorbing text-based computer game, a loosely organized internet scavenger hunt. (more…)

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