Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Why I have a blog

I was in a meeting yesterday and we went off on a tangent about online networking and one of the older folks in the group was all confused and said "what's Friendster?" No big deal, right? Well, after some friendly quizzing, we found out that they were completely bewildered at the very concept of most of the web 2.0 sites. Myself, as well as a couple of other people in the room under the age of 30, tried hard to not be condescending in our explanation of things. As the conversation continued, some of the middle-aged guys in the room remained suspiciously quiet and a couple working moms chimed with comments like "yeah, my 14 year old daughter is on her MySpace all the time! I have no idea what that's all about" and "is it like AOL?"

Is this me in ten years? I think it could be. I'm paying attention to the new stuff, but I'm not quite participating. Whatever it is, it's time to play catch up to make sure that I don't start down that slippery slope to being totally out of touch. Time to take an inventory of things. I'm not too far behind on the curve - I've kept up pretty well: I have a Blackberry, I own a Yahoo! group, I use PayPal, I dropped my Hotmail account for Gmail account back when it was tough to get Gmail account. But this is stuff that's been around for years. Heck, I've been on eBay since 1998.

I need to get on board with the new stuff. I need to jump on this web 2.0 stuff. I don't understand iTunes. I need to buy my domain name, create a MySpace page, get some videos on YouTube, and of course, start a blog.

I don't want to be clueless in 10 years - my kid is going to be zapping pirated media back and forth to his friends and the new guys at work will be laughing at my inability to use the new websites or files or gadgets... I'm not sure if it's a scared of being old thing or a scared of being clueless thing. Maybe the older you get the harder it is to understand this stuff. I guess I'm about to find out.

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