This makes me downright giddy:

2015
The Web continues to evolve from a world ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? Encouraged by Web-enabled sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music albums were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14 million blogs launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating. A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph.

Now I know I have no life, but this is what it’s all about. This is where my sometimes nutty brain feels things are headed as well. Think of what this means for teachers and schools. And, before we miss it, let’s really think about this moment and what we are a part of.

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don’t.

I do…every day. I know I am really out there with this, but I still get butterflies when I read and think and participate with this new Web. It’s the power of ideas and conversations and contribution. And it’s very cool.
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Alan says that he’s moved from Furl to del.icio.us and I guess that means I’m going to have to snag his new RSS feed (though it’s kicking out an error right now.) But the ironic thing is I’ve been moving away from Furl as well, but to Jots instead, not del.icio.us. Still not sure exactly why, and in all honestly, Jots does not seem to be gaining a lot of tracking if the slow increase in URLs linked is any indication. But there is something about the look of the page that just appeals to me, and something about del.icio.us’s that I bump up against. I’ve been thinking of adding the RSS to my Jots account as a link blog feed, and, actually, I just went ahead and did it. (Thanks to Alan’s Feed2JS.)

I think at some point, you just kind of latch on to what “feels” right, sometimes at the expense of a larger community. Alan is definitely tapping into the bigger database, but then again, I’ve never gone too far down the social road of these tools anyway, save the subscribe to someone else’s feed or search feed path. And maybe that’s enough. But I do know there is a whole day’s worth of thinking and writing I need to do regarding the folksonomy stuff that’s been bubbling up lately. Organization has never been my strength…

This is all good stuff that I wish I had time to blog about…

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So the bad news is that after more delays and groundings, I finally got home at about 1:30 a.m. yesterday morning. Oy. The good (?) news was that I got to sit next to 16-year old girl blogger from Seattle on the first leg of my flight and we had a really interesting talk about the state of adolescent journaling online. In a word, it seems she and her friends are “addicted” to their Myspace sites. Seems they spend more time than they should reading and commenting to each other, even though they’ve just seen each other at school. And she told me stories of her friends putting all sorts of private information and pictures online, even though she said she didn’t do that. And it seems they’re not doing a heck of a lot of blogging (v.), that most of what they do is just basically IM each other on their sites. I asked her if they used blogs at her school and she kind of chuckled. “Not really. I mean we read blogs sometimes; we use them for research.” I pressed her on how that worked, but she was vague on the details. At one point I was tempted to pull out my iPod and capture the conversation digitally, but I resisted. Would have been interesting. She was smart, the kind of kid whose blog probably would have been a pretty good read.

So when I told her about the article I’d just read that said that kids are doing a lot of real writing online, she said, “Oh, I used to do that at my Live Journal site.” Hmmm… Seems she wrote volumes in real sentences there. She told me, however, that even though she kept all of her posts private to just her friends, her mom found out about it when she read all the friends’ posts. That was pretty much the end of that. Now this girl consciously tries to not spend too much time at Myspace, even though, she admitted, it’s hard not to. She seemed surprised when I told her I was a blogger. She was also decidedly unimpressed when I told her what I blogged about. “Oh, that’s cool,” she said before moving on to a story about a girl whose mother found her “blog” and grounded her for a month.

So, what does this mean? I dunno. My brain is still numb from the trip. And much of this isn’t news, I know. But it was an interesting hour, one that just confirmed a lot of what I (we) already knew. But here’s the most telling moment, at least to me. As we were descending into Memphis, she goes “You know, I think you’re the only grown up blogger I’ve ever met.”

What a surprise…