December 21st, 2006 -- Posted in ?:], Ommmm | Comments Off
Meet Justin, Alice’s first child (Alice is Emily’s older sister). He was born Tuesday morning and weighed 6 lbs and 9 oz.
My cousin is currently visiting me and my family in Torrance. I found out today that his father-in-law passed away early this morning due to terminal liver cancer.
Thus is the Circle of Life. With death comes life.
I had a realization today. I was speaking with my mother on the phone when she informed me of the news. After our conversation, I was thinking about the korean word for “passing away.” I asked her about it later and it’s true. The korean word for “passing away” literal means “to return” or “to come back.”
It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace.
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The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.
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And we didn’t just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped.
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Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.
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Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. … This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It’s a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who’s out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you’re not just a little bit curious.
What a beautiful article. And to you: the netizens, the creators of contents, the You-tubers, the MySpace addicts, the MMO playing, the broadband addicts.. to you all. I salute you!
This article rang so true for me. I’m not the greatest creator of content but this is all a big experiment to me. My blog and online experience has been a mishmash of everything. If the web were a buffet, I’d have stuffed myself with everything from chicken-chopped salad to pasta to blueberry pancakes. This year, the internet really felt like it was on steroids. It’s as if the internet were this pool of coke and someone decided to open up a packet of Pop Rocks into it. I can’t wait to see how things end up.
I had a conversation the other day with 2 employees of MySpace. One called MySpace the “dive bar” of social networks in the context of other, prettier social networking websites. He went on to say,
“We have our pool table there, the dart board here–”
“–and we have the creepy old guy too,” his coworker joked (in reference to existence of child predators on MySpace.
It’s not secret that MySpace gets the most traffic of any of the social networking websites. There number of user accounts is approaching 140 million users (bots and all) and their traffic rivals that of Ebay, Yahoo and Google.
Well, it’s not just your 14 year old teen girl squad members who frequent the site. Business are getting smart about it too.
Campari, an Italian drinks company, has a profile named MyRedPassion. She’s 28 years old and lives in Milano, Italy. She describes herself as:
“What I adore… Strong and skillful people, tolerance and freedom, the ambiguous side of life, testing… in every sense, excitement and thrill, sharing, seeing and being seen.”
Grrrr, baby, grrr!!!!
Check out one of 3 videos she has on her profile display her, ummm, “interests”:
Wow…. hmm… that really made me want to … drinks some Skyy VodkaTM (owned by Campari).
“That does not seem to matter to consumers as company representatives report that the “Hotel Campari” website received 170, 000 views. In fact, 13.5% of the traffic to the beverage company’s site was from social networking sites.”
