Jonesieblog

As a blogging, feed reading facebooking twitterer, I do, of course, recognise the benefits of all this stuff, but today, as I reached for my laptop and fired up Firefox, I felt a pang of nostalgia for the days when I would be presented with the blank canvas of Google’s homepage.  No feeds to check, no twits to watch, no facebook games to play - just a blank search box and the question “I wonder what’s out there?” floating in my mind.

It feels harder to get into that frame of mind these days - there’s so much new stuff being thrown at me from familiar places that it’s hard to find the time to go exploring for new places.   I can tap into other peoples’ explorations via del.icio.us but that isn’t quite the same.

Other people must have spoken about this before - star prize for a link to the oldest blog post to do so

Anyhoo, what do I care, I’m away now until Saturday night.  I’m not going snowboarding, no sir no, because the conditions up North are definitely rubbish.  Don’t even think about going up, especially not to Glenshee which is even worse than the other resorts.  And if  you’re not going up then I won’t see you up there ‘cos neither am I!

Stumble it!

This morning I received by invitation to the beta phase of Lifestrea.ms.

Lifestrea.ms is supposed to pull together all your different online activities into one place - I’m writing this blog post from within Lifestrea.ms, and I just posted to twitter from here too.

There’s lots more to Lifestrea.ms - openID integration, cool attention stuff, rss reading and so on.  I’ll post some more once I’ve played around

Stumble it!

Google recently announced OpenSocial - an Open API for developers to create apps that will work on Bebo, Myspace and many other social networking sites. This is huge, and everyone is wondering what Facebook’s next move will be.

Here’s a good introduction on the official Google blog.

Stumble it!

I enjoyed this tirade against Facebook:

I hope you’re beginning to see the light. This is your life, and it’s ending one click at a time. Facebook brings out the worst in people. You put so much time and energy into something that makes you a worse person. Do you WANT this? I’m surprised you’ve made it this far into the article without changing tabs to check if someone wrote on your wall…

Reading things like this makes me feel immensely glad to be past the intensely social years of my youth.  Not that I’m a recluse exactly, nor do I have one foot in the grave, but folk in long-term relationships in their forties don’t really have the same frenetic drive to socialise as single folk in their twenties!  I have plenty of good friends, and not enough time to see them all regularly enough, so the expansion of my social circle is not a high priority for me (not that I am averse to making new friends!).  Nor do I care so much about what people think about me.

The construction of a social identity for one’s self has always been a potentially fraught journey (but also potentially exciting and fun!) - it seems to me that it might be more fraught now than ever, and I’m glad to be past it

This post makes me sound like a tedious old sod - am I bothered?

Stumble it!

Via Doug Belshaw and del.icio.us/popular I read this fascinating article about British youth. It does not make for cheery reading. There’s one aspect I’d like to pick up on:

On the whole, British children were more disconnected from their families, with nearly half of 15-year-old boys spending most nights out with friends, compared to just 17 percent of their French counterparts.

Our kids are also spending more and more time on computers talking to each other rather than with their parents. In the light of this statistic, would it be heretical of me to suggest that this is not such a great thing? I know that Bebo sometimes looks to me like a virtual Lord of the Flies.

As a society we lose the plot when we lose sight of the simplicity of our needs. In order to flourish, children need a secure, loving home environment and the time and attention of adults that care about them. These needs may not be sufficient, but they are certainly necessary. Web 2.0 does not provide anything that children need.

A child born today could reach the age of 18 without ever touching a computer or seeing a TV, and go on to lead a happy, successful life. Kids need the time and involvement of their parents, not the technological artifacts we have bought whilst working longer and longer hours away from them.

If children are already getting what they need, then these virtual adventures are great, but it appears that many of them are not. And in that case time spent online is just so much more lost opportunity to engage in the nurturing face to face interaction with adults that they so desperately need.

Stumble it!