Anil Dash Writes About The Web We Lost [en]

[fr] Le web qu'on a perdu. Nostalgie.

Yes, there are people who have been blogging for longer than me. Quite a few of them, actually. Anil Dash is one. You should read him.

His most recent article (found thanks to danah, who has also been blogging for longer than me, and whom you should also read) is titled The Web We Lost. It hits right on the nostalgia that has been creeping up on me these last years, expressed for example in A Story About Tags, and Technorati, and Tags or Ye Olde-School Blogs Are Still Around.

Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and Pinterest are all great, but they tend to suck us in, and I feel we are all collectively high on real-time content and interaction. I miss the slower days. I miss the sense of “community” I felt with other bloggers in the old days, as I mention in the wrap-up post to my “Back to Blogging” challenge. I feel that on Twitter and Facebook community has been replaced with network. Networking is great. I love spending time with my network. But it’s not the same thing.

Most of all, the timeline we now live in is made up of transient content. It’s there and gone. It’s the world of orality, of the spoken word which evaporates once pronounced, even though we are typing. We are going back to an oral tradition. Blogs and wikis, however, are still part of the written tradition. We are losing searchability. We are also using content portability due to the lack of RSS feeds on certain platforms, and increasingly restrictive API access. APIs seem to be the promise for more holes in our buckets, but they seem more and more to be a way to control tightly what happens to the content locked in a given platform.

That’s sad. That’s not the way I hoped things would go.

There is more. Go and read Anil’s piece. And leave a comment there through Facebook.

Similar Posts:

2 thoughts on “Anil Dash Writes About The Web We Lost [en]”

  1. Hi Stephanie,

    Rather than be nostaglic for the old days of a decade ago, I have decided in the last month that it is time to revamp my blog, so that I feel it is new and shiny, and then get back to regular daily blogging.

    I think that those of us who value blogging and its community should commit to blogging regularly, finding and reading others who have made the same commitment and then comment on their blogs.

    In my case, I would love to comment on Anil’s post, but I am not on Facebook anymore.

    Thanks for the post.

  2. I’ll be restarting my personal blog, after a very long hiatus, for the Apocalypse on December 21st. I want to go back to blogging as a personal satisfaction – I have blogged for many (good) reasons those past three years and a half, and have somehow lost the taste of blogging in a more personal manner. Wish me luck! 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *