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You read this blog. You Twitter away. Aside from taking up time, does it have any impact on your day? How many of your Facebook "friends" have you actually even met? Do your LinkedIn connections actually connect to your carreer? How do "the bloggers" (as television and newspaper pundits like to describe participants in a medium alien to their own) have any realistic connection to your real life?
Yes, real life. You know, the life where you get hungry and stub your toe and, you know, talk to people. Do your online life and "real" life connect at any time but in those oh-so-brief liminal moments when you shift from one to the other?
Be honest now.
How real is the virtual? Maybe, just maybe, you're wondering: What's the point? Don't you, just a little bit, feel a little bit like Kara Swisher when she wonders this about Facebook's gaggle of apparently pointless apps:
While I will admit when I am not chewing nails that a lot of these apps are somewhat fun, I can’t help but ask myself that lyric from the old Peggy Lee classic: “Is that all there is?”
And if that is all there is, can Facebook really build a viable and long-lasting business on what is essentially a bunch of games that will ultimately become wearying for users? Doesn’t it need more robust apps that actually are useful and relevant and make Facebook the service that Zuckerberg has often told me was a “utility”?
While Facebook–with a cleaner and more strict look and a better navigation–is surely less goofy than rival MySpace for anyone over 12 years old, and its video, photo and email features are nice, the vast majority of its apps are still mostly as dumb as a box of hammers.
Yeah. Dumb. In fact, Molly Holschlag wonders if this whole web thing might be tanking.
I feel there’s a major shift in our industry. It concerns me so I want to chat about it with you.
The latest Dot.Com boom is declining as far as I can tell. Are we on the edge of another Dot.Bomb? What do we do?
I think not, personally. But maybe that's just me. Yet there's no doubt this tech/social/media/2.0 thing has been buzzing for a while. Perhaps you've been following things like the iPhone fetishes and the rubbernecking over the supposed Facebook/LinkedIn face-off.
Is that reflective of your real life, all that tech stuff? Some would say so. Take Jackie Danacki:
There’s something liberating about the micro-blogging format (and the fact that my updates are visible only to those I allow to see them). I also get into conversations via Twitter that I otherwise would not, with people I otherwise don’t email or talk to on the phone very often.
One thing is for sure: The real world is certainly paying attention to your online attention. And it won't hesitate to sue you just for stating your opinion.
When you consider that, it's almost funny what Tara "Twitter", aka Tara Hunt, notes about the California government's take on the virtual world and the real world:
Stuff like using open to the public Google Groups to correspond between project stakeholders (allowing for citizens to join in and comment and contribute, and, at the very least, lurk), wikis to lay out project plans, forums and blogs to start conversations and thoughts and ask people’s opinions of different ideas floating through the heads of officials, etc. None of this is allowed in California.
Odd, I thought, so I trotted off to see what this Brown Act is all about. What I encountered was shocking to me:
The Brown Act, officially known as the Ralph M. Brown Act (California Government Code Sections 54950-54963), authored by Ralph M. Brown, an Assemblyman from Los Angeles County’s San Gabriel Valley, was enacted in 1953 by the California State Legislature in an effort to safeguard the public’s right to access and participate in government meetings within the State.
There's no doubt that the web's own reality is impacting business. As reported and made relevant to my own personal life by Jackie's linking post:
Since killing off its idiotic subscription service, TimesSelect, the New York Times has seen traffic to its Opinion section double and overall website traffic grow 10 percent.
Well duh!
And the truth behind that little factoid is that web reality is not enough. Forcing people to fork over bucks (in the form of awkward online payment forms, no less) to access your content is not going to make your content
