Of Greetings, Web 2.0 and Starting to Blog

A very good evening to you all.

I have never been able to figure out how "Good Evening" suffices for a greeting even when you greet a person at night. I mean there is "Good Morning" when you greet a person in the morning, "Good Afternoon" when you greet a person in the afternoon and "Good Evening" when you greet a person in the evening. But what happens if the person you are choosing to greet meets you at midnight, greeting him or her with a "Good Evening" wouid be carrying it too far. At least thats what I think. Well maybe the people who thought about this never thought this one through or it was meant for those times in which nightly meetings were at a bare minimum excepting certain special circumstances which I would like to leave to your imaginations without me sullying the reputation of the blog or mine own.

I just completed the registration process and dispensed with the other formalities connected with setting up a blogging account on Blogger. I have often heard that blogging is what takes an individual's message to the masses connected by the medium of the internet. The picture that runs through my mind is one of a town crier shouting out over a mass of people except that here the mass of people runs into a few hundred million or putting it simply every man, woman and child with access to the internet. That is something. Think about it. In the olden days, the only people with that kind of power were Kings, Emperors and Rulers of Vast Dominions (ladies its no attempts at being sexist, barring Queen Elizabeth and maybe the Queen of Sheeba, our ancestors liked male rulers for some reason. Do not get me in the middle of this, take this issue out with our ancestors - both yours and mine). Then as time progressed, with the accessibility to Gutenberg's invention, people gained access to newspapers with the rise of industrialization and the coming wave of modernization. This led to the rise of news media and the new Kings, Emperors, etc. etc. were media barons (somehow this word brings a mental image of Rupert Murdoch to mind, no idea why) and these empowered few realized that in their hands they held the power to raise and destroy empires and fashion the minds of the plebian masses (read: you and I). However, the rise of the e-age is seeking to change all this making information and the means to get it out to the masses who wish to consume it readily available to even the village idiot. Now whether this is a good thing or not is something that only time will tell. Maybe it will vanquish media empires as we know them now and give rise to customized media outlets that will be published and managed by either single individuals such as myself or groups of individuals focusing on a niche segment of consumers. Move to today, the whispers of the coming age of Web 2.0 are getting louder to ignore. Think Yahoo!, think YouTube, think Digg (I am not even touching podcasting); all these are examples of companies that are seeking to surf Web 2.0 to take them to pole position someday (maybe not Yahoo!, if Carl Icahn has his way. But hey, thats a story for another day). The key to success is going to be the ability to garner short attention spans to capture advertising dollars in the bid to take "Free" to the masses as Chris Anderson has written in his watershed article in Wired 16.03 (Why $0.00 is the Future of Business). Come on, get real 15 years ago had anyone come and told me (or you for that matter) that access to some of the best sources of knowledge on earth would come free, would we have believed the person or laughed him out to spades. I know what I would have done, so I never made my gazillions off of internet ventures. The chances are if you are reading this blog, you havent either. So what this means is that the world as we know it is going to undergo a sea change in the next 5-10 years maybe 15 years from now we'd be laughing at the fact that people used to sit at quaint old computing machines called desktops and laptops typing out itsy bitsy pieces of thoughts called Blogs when people in that day would have the option of posting their thoughts to their version of the internet by just probably thinking, who knows what the future holds (maybe Ray Kurzweil could tell us if Bill Gates would stop using up his valuable thinking time).

Getting back to my story of finishing up with the formalities and such, one thing I realized is that setting up a blogging account is not as easy as it is made out to be. A user is forced to navigate through a series of pages which puts one in the same quandry as Alice in an attempt to find out how deep the rabbit hole went. I'd had enough and threw caution to the wind and my safety to Homeland Security (well they really managed Katrina didnt they???? How hard could it be for them to check out my blog and protect little old me). This led me to a conclusion, technology is not helping us get things done, technology is creating new things to be done and this is not a promising development. Instead of making life simple, it seems that life is getting more and more complicated day by day. Navigating through GPS systems on the daily commute, using laptops, palmtops and God-knows what else, life sure has not gotten any easier and a larger part of the blame for the introduction of this complexity could be laid at the doorstep of technology. Hmmmm...... but then technology would have to be a real person. Think about it we have Lady Luck, Father Time, Mother Earth; how would technology be personified? I like to think of technology as the old lecherous uncle of Mis(s) Fortune looking over Father Time's shoulder to see how he can appropriate each grain of sand that falls in his hour glass at the same time depriving people of the fruits of Lady Luck till the time we go back to the embrace of Mother Earth. Yeah, its a he and in my mind, he is an old, haggard, evil lecher who is never going to bring any good to anyone. No wonder I see him as Mis(s) Fortune's favorite uncle.

Getting back to my travails with setting up my blogging page. I wonder why with all our so called advances in internet technology cannot things be easily formatted by moving a box here and a picture there and so on so forth (this is the best I could do, but I hope you got the picture). Or is there more to this than meets the eye. The way I like to see it is that big media (read: Google, Yahoo!, AOL) wants to prevent people like 80-year old Ms. Moffet sitting in Topeka, Kansas from blogging, after all for all practical purposes, she is already got one foot in the grave. Till they discover a process to channelize thoughts from beyond the great wall of sleep and bloggerize them, she is never going to be part of the target audience. Wait a minute....... why am I bothering about little old Ms. Moffet whom I am never going to meet or never going to know her. After all do I not fall into the demographic 25-36 years or is it 26-35 years? Do I not form part of the "Target Audience"? Or have my luddite ways caused my intelligence to degenerate to that of a 5 year old (thats the age at which parents hook their kids to the internet, is it not? Or its 3 actually?)? Why am I who is college educated, Wired Magazine aware, earning a 7 figure income actually finding it difficult to navigate through the "sheer simplicity" of a blog site? Maybe in our quest to understand the complexities of life, simple things pass us by and our need to swat a fly causes us to reach for a rocket launcher instead of a simple fly swatter. Thats what technology does. Well a lot of effort had to be expended in order to complete the process completed with a tab which was the tab of a tab and then some other stuff which caused me to wonder will things get easier in the future or will they get tougher with each passing year.

Well as you can now see, I am all set to transmit my messages of hope/despair to all of you nice and decent people out there. By way of acknowledgement, I expect, return feedback and frequent interactions. Tell me about yourselves and your experiences with topics that I write about and maybe we can take it from there. Remember somebody is out here waiting, hoping and listening.

Until next time, Ciao.