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Contrasting Thoughts
Are We Wu or Wei?
I just published this. It must be a day of conflicting ideas … this one revealed two alternative views as to why Net Neutrality is (or is not) important to the individual. (BTW - this house believes Net Neutrality is rabidly important.) Now, this post is about satisfying your inner geek. First up - Dave Winer (again) writing on Why I prefer blogging on the open web - totally with him
One of the reasons I prefer to blog here rather than on Facebook is that if I get an Aha! idea about a feature, over here I can implement it. On Facebook I’m just a user. That was/is one of the great things about the web. Anyone can develop features for it. On Facebook, just their employees can. No wonder it never moves
The iPhone killed my inner nerd is from The Verge, where Tom Warren looks back in the days where we had to work hard to make this computer stuff do what we wanted it to do. It never was my pleasure to do what I did back in those days - but I did - and I understand where he is coming from. I guess the conclusion is that back in the day we all had to wrestle with hardware to even get to a point where we thought about what we might do with the software. Today, spinning up disks in some remote data center, publishing live into a space that anyone can read if they choose is easy. Today the challenge is the software. And there are those that make it easy - maybe too easy - to (say) publish to the web. Why should I have to run my own blog/site to publish to the web is NOT the same as why should I have to build my own computer run my software. Buying an off the shelf piece of hardware that is not infinitely flexible is not an issue. If it works for you - knock yourself out. If it doesn’t - find some tech that is. Likewise for publishing to the web. If you don’t care about your thoughts and ideas being easily found, stored for posterity - again - knock yourself out. but if you do - why on earth would you not want to publish into your own space, under your control. I am getting to the point that if you only publish to Facebook - because that is easiest - well then you aren’t that serious, are you? Like Robert Scoble for example - this from the summer of 2014 .. and why he was so wrong then … and how he still might be changing his tune 3 years later? < p class=“postguide”>UPDATED : July 12th
Many thanks to Louis Rawlins, who not only took the trouble to read this article, but went on to offer me commentary which much improves the original post. Thankyou sir.
Originaly, I published this post wth a Yin/Yang symbol - Lousi suggested that
Yang and Yin represent activity and rest, light and dark, dynamic and sedentary, male and female, white and black. The feel of your post is more “wu” an “wei” – fullness and emptiness, advance and retreat. They are related, but subtly different.