DISQUS

So have you gotten your phone to actually right yet?

Don't use my workout as an example--two days later and I can barely walk because my calves are so sore! That's what I get for jumping back in after slacking for so long.

I am so touched, especially by the other girls harassing you for me! :) Although as a correction, I must say that I have never been A-list, only C-list. Maybe this post will bump me up to the B-list!

Gee..nice pic of me blocked by the railing! But seriously, thanks for taking me along on the great hike through the city. I loved discovering new parts of the city and revisiting old favorites.

First of all, I've read that Twain really didn't say that. But who knows what you can believe on the Interwebs.

Second of all, winters are way nicer than summers here. It is sunny and warm right now--barely need a jacket!

And here I am, a technical writer, who never considered herself a writer, nor ever dreamed of making a living at writing! I think that's why it works for me, and why I don't really care that I spend less than 5% of my job actually writing. I just see it has a job to support a lifestyle and activities that I like.

And I totally understand about your sister. Back in high school, I was huge into music (band, piano, etc.). Being a piano player, I was in demand to accompany friends, play at church, etc. Everyone thought that it was so great that I could make money doing this thing that I loved, but I really hated it. I didn't like having to learn pieces I didn't want to play. I didn't like having the deadline to learn the piece and the pressure for my performance to live up to other's expectations. It is because of those experiences, and from seeing my teachers struggle financially, that I decided to not make music a career.

The conventional wisdom is that you should figure out how to make a living doing what you love, but I think it is the opposite. Trying to make a living doing what you love makes you not love that thing anymore. Instead make a living so that you can do what you love.

I am so ungeeky. It never even occurred to me to program when I was a kid. I waited until college before started nerding out. But then again, I grew up in the sticks and not SV.

I agree that MySpace does fill a need to some extent, and I too have reconnected with old classmates on there. But honestly, after a friend finds me, we read each other's profiles, and we send each other the "What have you been up to?" email, we don't keep up the communication. I think it is generally because we don't have any reason to. The sites that successfully keep people communicating and connecting over a longer period are sites that don't exist purely to network. MySpace is effective because so many people are on it that you are bound to find people you know on there, which is cool. It's like a huge directory. But once you get over the initial excitement of finding people you know, then what? MySpace and Friendster (I haven't used Facebook) have tried to solve that by adding IMing, message posting, and blogging to the sites. Those work to a certain extent, but as more and more sites have these tools and they become expected, the novelty will wear off, and folks will look more and more past the technology itself and towards what it can do to fill specific needs.

I think that when people hear about Web 2.0 as being about connecting people and social networking, they still think about Friendster and MySpace, which in my opinion serve no purpose because they don't solve a problem. I finally got the whole Web 2.0 thing when I realized that this new social networking isn't about the online chat rooms from high school (ah, 1997...those were the days...), but rather a tool to connect people in the real world. Yelp, Flickr, and Upcoming are all examples of that.

How do we get people to make that same jump? How do we get people to get over that idea that online social networking isn't just for nerds and perverts?

I think the important thing is to not talk about this stuff as Web 2.0 or social networking. A lot of my friends use Flickr and Evite, but tell me that they don't "get" blogging. As they see that there are tools out there to solve their problems, they will start to get on the bandwagon. So interconnection of these various online tools is vital. The more open APIs there are and the more that these different sites collaberate and realize that no one uses these things in isolation, the better. This is already happening, and I love that.

Haha...I am forever screwed with my screen name being hornline. My last name is hard enough to spell (Hoernlein) without the added complication of a alternate spelling as my alias. Aaron, you are not the first one to jumble the two, and I am sure you will not be the last!

I am not trying to defend Om or speak for Om here, but I think Om made the exact points that you did in this post. What I got out of it is that the difference between a journalistic post and a regular blog post is "the accuracy, research and a fair degree of networked people to figure out what’s a good story and what is not." One person can, and usually does, jump back and forth between journalism and regular blogging. You don't need to be separate people. Plus I thought that Om made it pretty clear that you don't need a degree in journalism to be a good journalist.

I think that since there can two purposes and goals of a blog, reader expectation is an issue. Does the reader expect a well-researched news story or an entertaining editorial?