The Summer of My Social Networking Discontent

A summer vacation on the beach is an ordered way to disorder my life. I escape social networks. Biznik and Linkedin are ignored. Facebook and Twitter are update free. My email accounts swell.

Was it my vacation, which caused my discontent? Not discontent, actually. It’s closer to a state of clarity. An absence of social networks restored my unplugged self. While watching the tide roll away I didn’t consider who would respond to my deep thoughts. I enjoyed spending quality time with my ideas without sharing them as tweets or updates.

During my unplugged vacation I started to examine the difference between a social network friend and a real-life friend. Visiting real-life friends during vacation was organic. We hugged. We laughed. We shared family photos and smiles sans emoticons.

Now I’m back from the beach and my photos have been uploaded. But no one is commenting. There aren’t even any “likes” or “unlikes.” Is this rejection? My Facebook page is a version of me and I’m not just being ignored. I’m being “unloved.”

Jason Kilar CEO of hulu.com Makes Me Nervous

Jason Kilar was on Charlie Rose the other night. He’s an interesting guy. He spoke with enthusiasm about hulu’s mission, hulu’s team of owner-employees, hulu’s positioning in the media business. He presents himself as a serious, smart leader. So why does he make me nervous?

During his conversation with Rose, Kilar mentions that hulu has three customers – their audience, their advertisers and their content creators. That breakdown bothers me for some reason. The “audience” is part of hulu’s business model – a silent partner of sorts. Isn’t the audience a separate entity? Kilar is suggesting that viewers are members and participants. He trumpets hulu’s ethos – success is achieved only when each customer group loves their product. They have to love it or they have failed. Love is the word.

Is Code Beautiful?

HTML was developed by engineers to manage text. It exists to control text so it can be shared with a small and well-educated audience, an audience who understood the function of the code and accepted readily as plain text. It appears that the earliest code looked like the content it delivered. The frame and the “image” were similar.

As the Internet developed and www grew, code became more sophisticated, powerful, complex and messy. It also became more rich, fecund, and potent.

Graphic designers discovered code and warped it with tables and fonts. Design forced code into strange positions and odd shapes. It became something other than a simple language. It developed style, found new clothes and accessories.

Businesses, corporations and advertisers fell into the web. They weren’t thinking about code. They didn’t know code. They wanted users, shoppers and consumers to interact with code’s results, with the visual solutions driven by code. It became a language of functions, signs and symbols that delivered a unique visual, which could sell a book, a computer or cookies. It could tell a story or sell a concept – “Yes We Can.”

Code became complicated. Is that when code became ugly? Maybe it was always ugly. But maybe not. Now, it’s being used in new, different or unimagined ways. When I select “view source” I enjoy looking at what I see and that might mean it’s beautiful.

Coding Myself into a Corner

I’m writing HTML, XHTML and CSS. My latest project is for a friend who has a yoga practice and studio. Writing the content and assembling the images for the site was my first task. It’s a small site – only about seven pages – so getting the content prepared took about a week. I’m still working on the images.

Once the copy was done I started doing some wire frames and creating all of the links. I developed a color palette based on the colors associated with the seven main chakras and converted them all to hexadecimal colors. The pages came together and l the links worked.