Remember the days when the modern internet was new and everyone and their dog had a blog they were writing several times a week, if not every day?

Around 2004 blogs suddenly became incredibly mainstream due to their involvement in several political events and some other shady things that happened. If you’re really interested in this bit of history there is a wonderful wikipedia page about the history of blogging.

Personally I was a little late to that revolution having made my first blog post (that still exists) on the 21st of April 2006. My god I felt like I was discovering a whole new world of possibilities! And I was, I really was, it was around that time that the Slovene blogging community started really taking shape and I was following oh so many blogs. Most incredibly bad, some very very good. We even had a conference for bloggers or two, think they were called Blogres.

But I’m getting off on a tangent here. Fast forward into the present time.

Lately what I’ve been noticing is that it’s getting harder and harder to blog even a few times a week. Just blinking my eyes and completing a TODO or two and whoosh, a whole week has passed and my personal blog doesn’t update.

What’s stranger still is that I’ve been noticing this in my RSS aggregator as well! I have a folder specifically for personal blogs, which I define as blogs written by people for the people with no particular reason. Mostly about their life or some especially interesting thing they want to say.

These blogs, and I only followed about ten back then, used to be a daily chore. Nowadays as few as 20 posts accumulate over the course of a week and I’m following around thirty blogs.

My hypothesis as to why this is happening is that people have switched to Twitter and Facebook for their personal expression needs. Because they are tweeting tens of messages every day, they simply run out of things to say on their blogs. It makes sense really, after you’ve told everyone every minute idea that pops into your head, what else is there to say on your blog?

What do you think, is real-time chatting killing the need for personal blogging?

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Lately facebook has been taking a lot of flak over user privacy regarding the changes they’ve implemented to their API and how easy it is for 3rd parties to access user’s private data … or more to the point, how much pain users have to go through to hide their personal data.

My personal opinion is that, yes, facebook is being a bit of an arse about the whole issue. At first they were promising everyone a walled garden free of outside scrutiny where you can behave just like you were locked up in your little dorm room having fun with a few mates.

And people got used to that.

For example you’ll never see anyone complain about the fact their tweets are public, or that whatever they post on their blogs is public, or flickr or forums or irc and a miriad other services. The whole online world is … public. And nobody bats an eyelid.

Then facebook becomes slightly more public.

Public outrage!

Villages, internet and old women peeking out of windows

The fact of the matter is that facebook was never private even though it promised to be. In fact I’ll wager it’s more private now than it was ever before!

Wait what?

It all boils down to rumors and basic human behaviour.

if you’re worried about looking like an idiot, don’t be an idiot when someone is looking

Now I’m not a psychologist or sociologist or anything like that, but because I’m a computer scientist I like to pretend I can understand anything algorithmically complex – like people.

Also I’ve talked to one or two people who have lived in a small enough village to explain this effect to me.

When you have a small population of people living in a confined area everybody knows a little bit about everybody else. It doesn’t matter who you are or how many friends you’ve got. Someone will always know what you did last summer or how drunk you got on that party on Friday and not to mention what big of an arse you turned out to be when you dumped that poor girly.

Everybody! Will! Know, When. You, Fuck Up! They just will.

But when you live in a big city, it’s a little different. Suddenly there are so many people on so big an area you hardly know anyone. Most of us don’t even know any of the people living in the same building we are. If you’re lucky you’ll have a vague idea of what profession they’re in.

This gives us a super huge expectation of privacy and we’ve grown so used to being anonymous and unknown that we want this notion of privacy to extend into every little facet of our world.

So where lies the problem?

The problem is when these city slickers reach the online world. It looks anonymous. It smells anonymous. And it certainly likes to talk anonymous. No names. No identity. Nothing

Hoorah! I can make a total idiot of myself and no-one will know! yay

Well no, not really. Google and a bunch of other things are tracking your every move, every keystroke almost. They do this to make more money off of you through targeted advertising and some other unimportant stuff.

We’ve gone full circle, suddenly the online world behaves a lot like a village. Everybody knows everybody and so on.

So why such an outcry over privacy issues?

Well, because us city slickers don’t really know how to handle this kind of information. We’re not used to knowing so much about people around us, we’re not used to always having a pair of eyes on our back through the curtains of the window across the street.

That’s why we do strange google searches of people we want to hire, we research people we want to date, we … I don’t know, we basically dig up every little detail of anybody we encounter and think is important enough.

We want all that info.

But we can’t handle it.

A long time ago people in villages learned that being drunk at a party 20 years ago does not reflect poorly on a man today. The rest of us still need to figure that out so there won’t be cases of people not getting hired due to an obscure image found online or a drunk photo posted on their facebook etc.

Until then, for fuck’s sake people, if you’re worried about looking like an idiot, don’t be an idiot when someone is looking!

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Yesterday I read an interesting post about the speed at which information travels between two nodes in a network. It was about a so called Data Singularity and the basic premise was that nowadays information flows are so horribly fast that only computers talking to computers can handle the stream at all and that humans are even less than mediaries, but can only really comprehend meta-meta-data.

To recap the changing history of what the concept of “real-time” information means (btw this is a talk I was supposed to have at WebCampLj last month but then lost the artistic inspiration):

• there was once a time when any news that came to the listener in a week was considered real-time information, depending on how far away the event was (snail mail)
• then real-time became the speed of light with human routers (telegraph, early telephone)
• real-time then became instant, but not constant (phone, TV etc.)

But right now we are in a world where there is an instant and constant global conversation going on. Everybody is multicasting, if not downright broadcasting, very many random thoughts that pop into their heads. People are having conversations all over the place and it’s all right there; always.

Hell, even Google has decided to start thinking about something as horrible as real-time RSS feeds by integrating pubsubhubbub into their Reader.

It’s almost as if the whole world is conspiring against the lonely infonaut who just wants to be able to do something while still getting all the information they crave so deeply. I’m not sure where I’ve read it or how far ago, but it was something along the lines of the average person these days being completely and totally addicted to information and that this addiction is made worse than heroin by the simple fact society expects it.

That is to say, if you’re not addicted to information, you’re being quite odd and strange.

But where does this attitude lead us?

There are 25 million tweets made every day, that is to say 289 tweets EVERY FUCKING SECOND! Even if you follow a very small subset of those people, that still makes at least 10 tweets every minute!

Count RSS feeds into that … Reader already pushes updates to the interface so very real-time that when I click “mark all as read” there are usually 5 new items waiting for me in the time it takes for the interface to clear. Yes, it’s That Bad(tm). Considering that following only a handful of RSS feeds (about 100) means I personally get on average 500 to 600 new articles every day … yeah, that makes one article every two bloody minutes!

And they want to make that process even faster.

So essentially, as an infonaut, the internet expects me to read twenty tweets and one long-ish article every two minutes of my day. And that’s not even counting E-Mail, Facebook, Forums and a bunch of other things.

Just to give you a sense of how little two minutes is: It takes three minutes to steep a cup of tea.

Now obviously I am quite incapable of processing information constantly, all day, at a rate of at least 240-ish words per minute. For a little sense of what this means, the world record for typing is 150 words per minute sustained over 50 minutes.

Yeah that’s right, those very very crazy typists that type so fast it looks like magic … type much much slower than you are expected to read these days.

Quite apparent to anyone paying attention is that this situation is very unsustainable and people saying that “Oh you can just take an hour every day and skim through the titles of everyting” are downright bollocking crazy! What can be done is a matter of long debate, what will be done remains to be seen.

But something has got to be done ’cause this is insane.

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