Blast from Technology Past

The Internet has changed and enhanced the way we communicate with one another in less than 20 years. This is such a dull and obvious statement that I almost feel bad for wasting your time with it. We're so in it and take so much of it for granted at this point, but please indulge me. I sort of have a meandering point. Or rather a set of points to plot in four-year increments:

• 1992: sent my first email
• 1996: managed my first website
• 2000: wrote my first blog post (before blogs were called blogs)
• 2004: stopped buying CDs and books
• 2008: embraced Web 2.0

I feel like an early adopter, but I didn't know that social media would so quickly start to supplant "regular" Internet activity like email, websites, and, yes, even blogs. Just like paper newsletters and postcards, these things won't go totally extinct, but their purpose will shift. Content still needs to exist somewhere, but how you get to there will totally change. If you're maximizing your use of things like Facebook and Twitter, it already has.

The level of immediacy has reached a power point in a medium that was already (but not quite) pretty close to immediate. The ease with which you express yourself and learn about other people in your social circle and other places in your social spaces has expanded something fierce. You can share your ideas, the ideas of others, and that funny thing you saw a second ago in a second from now.

I honestly haven't been this excited about a communications leap like this since email and 1992.

I wasn't feeling inspired to write yesterday, so I posted on Facebook a simple call for help in picking my next topic for this blog. It took me about 15 seconds.

I've been friends with some of the respondents on the image below for a week. I've known others since the mid-1970s. Some responses are off-topic. Some are off-color. All are relevant in their own way. Thanks to everyone for sharing, for embracing Web 2.0, and for proving that there is abundant interest...and pride...in the city of St. Paul.

I'll be exploring some of your topics in future posts and I encourage readers to Google them further ahead of me. The Internet is waiting to serve you. Your local city is waiting for your exploration.

Blog posts are frequently shared via Facebook and Twitter, and I'm likely to do the same with this here post. But not before I turn the tables and post a Facebook snippet on a blog.

If you would like to read the original blog post, please click here.

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