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Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : The vanishing personal site

Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site's disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.

Now that's pretty darn insightful. Zeldman mentions Jody Ferry's site specifically, and it's a great example: a home page, and then links that take viewers OFF the site.

I've been posting more photos to Flickr than I have to my family galleries. I spend more time on FaceBook - mindless distraction that it is - than I do posting on my own site. And I just joined Twitter, for reasons that I don't know that I fully understand. To what end? I'm not sure.

I see his point - websites used to be all about capturing eyeballs and keeping them on your site. Then people started selling adverts, and it was even more important to keep those visitors coming in and staying in - or leaving through your adverts. Now, with the advent of all these more interesting services, and the ease with which they can be used, more people are just taking advantage of that ease and moving their content elsewhere. Why try to build your own photo gallery - or install someone else's - when you can just point people to your Flickr collection? Why post regularly when you can Twitter? Well, that's not quite the same, but it's similar.

I myself discovered del.icio.us and have all but stopped using the bookmark feature in my web browserS. Why? Part of it is the ease of having my bookmarks so easily available - especially from the multiple platforms and browsers. It's also a lot easier to find bookmarks when I need them - I tag everything going into del.icio.us, sometimes over-tagging them, but it's really easy to find stuff now - rather than spending 20 minutes trying to remember the name of a site, I go to the page for the tag that I believe is the right, and I usually have the link right there.

What does this all mean? I myself have been farming work out to others - and didn't think too much about doing it. Due to the nature of the internet, and the way my account is setup, my photos are public, my Twitters are public, and most of my bookmarks are public. Do I care? Well, sometimes I wonder if I'm sharing too much. But at the same time, I haven't done anything to lock down my family photo gallery - although it would be trivial to do so. I make an effort to keep my bookmarks private when it's not something I want shared with the public. I can do the same thing with my Flickr photos - and have done so in the past. Twitters, well, I guess that's more than a bit like this blog - I can, and do, self-censor. If I didn't, life might be more than a little awkward.

But where does it all lead?

Today's fun ride into work was brought to you by Chaiyya Chaiyya, a fun little song from the movie Inside Man (Widescreen Edition). It's Indian or Pakistani or something - not really sure to be honest - but it's kind of fun and helped kill 6 minutes, 54 seconds of my commute this morning. I particularly like the percussion work, as it's rather complex at times.

Oh, and if you just mouse over one of those links, you should get Amazon's fancy new product preview pop-up. It's kinda cool. And speaking of Amazon, did you know about Amazon MP3? Among the best reasons to patronize them is that, like the iTunes Music Store, you can buy just one song at a time if you so choose. You can also - get this - copy the song to any device you want. How? No DRM is applied to the songs. Madness!

Mingle² - Free Online Dating

NASA - Opportunity at Crater's 'Cape Verde' (Annotated):

Some very nice hi-res photos of the view of the rover Opportunity and where it's been/what it's been doing.

I'm hoping to do something with this in the "I promise, I really do plan to redesign the site at some point" redesign, but in the meantime....

Woody from Dateline Hollywood managed to get into the media lineup for the "Snakes on a Plane" premiere. The results? They boggle the mind:

All Your Snakes are Belong to Us

Brickshelf Gallery

The third rendition of my BTTF Delorean. A newer and more detailed model is now up.

If you haven't seen this, check it out - a model of the DeLorean from Back to the Future made out of Lego. It's quite impressive.

YouTube - The Pipettes "Pull Shapes"

When I first got this link, I figured it would be usual YouTube fare. And it was.

But the video, which at first seems to just be a movie clip they stuck in for the video, actually seems to be the video for the song - so it's either from some movie in the 60's or a well done spoof video. Either way, it's kind of enjoyable. The song is kinda "pop"-y, and spunky to boot.

Having just received confirmation that it's an actual group and this is them having some fun. Nice.

It has apparently become all the rage to put together a map of where in the US you've been - so here's mine.

create your own personalized map of the USA or check out our California travel guide

According to the site used to create the map, I've been to 19 of the 50 states, or 37% of the country. Amazingly, only about two of the states I've visited have only been for business only. And then there's Illinois - I've only ever been there to spend time in Chicago's O'Hare airport. Oh, and then there was also a frantic trip from O'Hare to Midway to make a flight. Of course, now that I think of it, Texas may not count either - but I happen to feel that 5+ hours on the tarmac of Dallas-Fort Worth airport in a plane with a pregnant wife, no air conditioning and nothing to do qualifies for a visit. It's not like I was in and out - and clearly we weren't having much fun...

Where Are They Now - The Great Gazoo: Where Are They Now?

The Great Gazoo? You know, the green alien who always managed to get Fred and Barney into trouble? Yeah, I figured you'd forgotten him, just like I did. He's not the only one listed on this site - there's also Punky Brewster, Snarf (from "Thundercats!"), Scrappy Doo, The Fonz and many more.