Notice the twitter update widget now extant on the right side of this window. Over there —–>.
Note also how much my activity on here has decreased over the last couple of months. When I started this blog I was posting, oh, 12 new entries a month, and this month I’ll be suprised if I get three out of the way. Is my recent re-re-discovery of twitter responsible for the demise (relatively speaking) of my more “traditional” blog?
This is an important question, because the whole point of early blogs (or “proto-blogs,” to coin a phrase and clarify the title above) was to accomplish something that social networking sites like digg, del.icio.us, and metafilter as well as the “micro-blogging” resource that twitter provides are now doing better: “Web logging,” or letting people know about interesting sites that they’ve uncovered in a world of millions of channels with no program guide that we call the internet. Now, if I want to apprise people about something I’ve come across, I can do it faster, without all of this narrative, on twitter. Or as a facebook update. So I’ve decided to attach the twitter sidebar here so that I can let foks who read this blog but who aren’t following me on twitter know what’s going on in THAT part of my world.
But this is the thing: my web experience–the part that I “author” and contribute to–is diffuse and increasingly time consuming. I post food reviews to chowhound, urbanspoon, and yelp (so far); post film comments at IMDB; am a senior (as in old man) member discussing topics related to urbanism at the skyscraperpage and, to a lesser extent, skyscrapercity forums; have photo collections at both picasa and (to a far lesser extent) at flickr; have a few videos up at youtube; chat about coffee at coffeegeek; am diligent about recording hotel reviews at booking.com and tripadvisor; make many, many comments to the CBC and Globe and Mail sites; and on top of all that am an avid partaker of the joys, sorrows and stupid diversions on facebook… AND I keep this blog. And now I’m starting (again, after a couple of half-hearted attempts) to tweet.
Something has got to give. I feel as if I’m living too much of my life online, sometimes, and I am wondering if some of what I’ve read about traditional “macro” blogging, like what I do here, is true, namely, that people are abandoning it for the ease and immediacy of the twitter model.
I don’t know. What I do know is that there are things that I can do on this blog that I can’t accomplish an any of the sites I mention above. I don’t want only to blog about coffee or restaurants or movies, and so just posting to sites like chowhound or coffeegeek, important as they are, would never be a proper substitute for what I do here. I’ve been taken to task for some of my off-topic indulgences and my SELF-indulgence on places like the skyscraperpage forum. Twitter is limiting by design: 140 characters per entry, and that includes spaces. So if anything is to “give,” it has to be something besides this.
And wow, wouldn’t most of the world’s population be happy to have my “problems”! But sometimes I have to reflect on just what the limits of this online existence will be, what they CAN be, and what sorts of ground rules I’ll allow myself.
Onward- it’s spring FOR SURE now and after years of struggling (that would be four summers of struggle to be precise), I finally got somebody (“Superior Tree Service”) to trim, as in reduce by more than half, our killer caraganas. This is before, after a dangerous and exhausting job of trimming last summer-they are at this point about 7′ high and about 6′ wide, and COVERED with THORNS:
I know they look lush and lovely but they are the biggest pain in the ass imaginable (in fact caraganas are considered an invasive species and it’s illegal to plant them anywhere in the province now- they were originally brought over from Russia to serve as windbreaks for farms since they grow and withstand everything; then some prairie homeowners got the bright idea to use them as shrubbery and here we are). Anyway this is the same scene now:
And hey, isnt’t that a lovely house?
