No comments about Read it. Love it. yet I’ve been saying this for several months…not in the blogosphere, but in real life, and now there’s more obvious signs appearing.
Clues I’ve noticed:
- My friends mostly don’t post bulletins anymore
- My real people friends especially don’t post bulletins anymore
- Poetry slams, bands, and events aren’t using the events tool to invite me to events
- Random friend requests from people I’ve never met have dropped off significantly
- When I visit my friend’s profile, their comment conversations are stale and barely breathing
- Most of my friends don’t blog, don’t update their status much or make changes to their profile
- Facebook is much more active
- Livejournal! is much more active
- Myspace is a thing unto itself (no way to pull in feeds from anywhere, or send them out really).
- Every time I say “Myspace is dead,” the person I’m talking to agrees…my teen kids, colleagues, friends from junior high. Real people are SO over Myspace.
And now, additional warning signs from a higher level… a chunk of MySpace’s upper level execs just left to start a new company.
Theoretically, MySpace could turn this around. The site still has ample revenue and loads of users, but I don’t think that they will. They’ve developed a heavy-handed corporate culture that seems to make it impossible for them to be responsive to trends and the rapidly changing needs of their user base. Like the French, they’re always fighting the last war.
My thinking?
Stay light, think fast, move nimbly or suffocate under your own weight.
I learned to program about this time, on a computer rather similar to the ones seen in this news report.
Our modem was larger and clunkier, but I can remember dialing the computer (rotary dial) and placing the handset so our terminal (not a full computer) could talk to the mainframe computer across town. 
…continue reading Remembering the early internet
No wonder I couldn’t work.
Photo of Barbara's messy desk
Photo of Barbara's messy back table
Step One: …continue reading Clearing Desk Clutter
I used to have a super-anally organized office. Of course, that was in Oregon in a work space I’d used for six years. I’d had plenty of time to figure out what didn’t work in terms of furniture layout and organization of my tools around me. I knew exactly where everything was and where it belonged. It wasn’t difficult at all. Every object in my office, including the extra staples, had a well-defined, well-confined home.
Two years and three moves later, I’m working in absolute chaos. The problems this presents are always most evident when I have the least time to do anything about it…in the middle of a project. …continue reading Essential Organization
I finish websites before they’re used when I work for clients …the content is in place, the graphic design is finished… the website is a “completed” project (there’s no such thing as a finished website, but that’s another topic). My own projects never seem to develop that way.
I rarely have the time to devote forty or fifty hours in one block to my own projects. I installed this blog in early December of 2007 and as yet I haven’t had time to do anything else with it. I haven’t been writing on it because the graphic design isn’t ready and the rest of elegantcoders.com isn’t finished or ready for the public either. I’ve had lots of ideas, thoughts, rambles and rants, but none of them have made an appearance here because I keep thinking I should get the blog and website in shape before posting. …continue reading Content by the seat of the pants