Old school

Lately I’ve been putting what energy I have to give into some old school ideas on the web. Instead of jumping on the latest and greatest social media community, I’m reverting back to some things that have been around for a long time.

So, other than the time I invest into this site (which is growing it seems, keeping up with all the various categories), I’m putting my energy in two other places.

One is RSS, yup, that’s right, RSS. I saw a tweet from Chris Coyier the other day that summed it up perfectly for me:

tombstone
they pried rss out of his cold dead hands

I feel much the same way. I’m tired, so tired, of the trite quick response in 140 characters. Just recently Jeremy wrote a thoughtful post about performance in response to an article written about The Verge. I read it in RSS. Then the next day, Jeffrey wrote a response post. Again, the response was considered, thoughtful, and most of all, respectful. I prefer this type of dialogue. Because when you take the time to blog about something, you think it through, it usually isn’t a knee jerk reaction.

The thing that makes me sad when I go into my feed reader? How many blogs have been silent for a very long time. Yes, it takes some time to write, but I do it because it helps me think. And as Jeremy has said, my blog is my drafts folder. I wish more of the people who used to write, would write again.

The other place I’ve put energy lately, and it feels old school to say this, is Flickr. Yup, I’ve take the time, along with help from friends, to find interesting and beautiful photos on there. That community is very much alive and well—there is some absolutely fantastic stuff going on there. So I troll the explore tab, I look into friend’s faves to see what they are finding interesting, and what I’m finding is gorgeous, funny, and inspiring.

(Did you know there are all kinds of accounts that do photos of space? There are and they are wonderful.)

The iOS apps and the web site are evolving. Is Flickr perfect? Absolutely not. But is anything? Not really. I find that I use the app on my iPad the most, it is gorgeous and relatively easy to use. They’ve made changes to it that I don’t love, but guess what? That doesn’t dimish the community or quality of the photos that I’m looking at. It also means there is a team of people working through things and figuring things out and iterating and that is what I care about. Because I see changes, updates, and work being done, I believe Flickr is getting better overall.

And because of this, I’ve actually deleted a lot of my other accounts across various sites. I’m loathe to start new accounts now when a new thing is released. I often wait a long while, to figure out if it could be right for me and more often than not, I decide it’s not.

This site, it’s my home base and it’s what gets most of my attention as far as sharing my thoughts and ideas, but going through my feeds daily, looking at beautiful images, that’s where I find I’m spending most of my time these days on the web.