Autumn Leaves

Posted on: February 27, 2006

I surf around, and see a lot of websites with similar types of design. Usually big, sans-serif fonts (huzzah for Verdana!), "gelled" buttons and "friendlyspeak" language in their FAQs, which may not even be FAQs, but focus more on human communication than legalistics. This is admirable, altho I am often confusing one site for another. A lot of these also happen to be for "social networking", and a prime recent example I heard about—and didn't incidentally come across, despite the name—is StumbleUpon.

What we need to have are more very high-tech concepts that are very approachable. There's this word, "folksonomy", that I've never liked. It sounds like some kind of alien evisceration device, and if that sounds paranoid, let's just say I like "tagging" better. There's times when I'm dear to jargon, but I believe to use a tool properly, it's best to reduce the complexity of how to describe it to the most palatable common-denominator possible, and not even a lowest one. An example from my life is "techno", which I interpreted to mean "TECHNOlogy-based music". The "technical" definition is much narrower, and to this day, we still have a nightmare of electronic music substyles. It's verbose, it's a turnoff, and it prevents people from actually doing.

Sometimes, it's nice when you're thrown in the midst of an unexpected situation and you react. You may blurt out honest exclamations that wouldn't have come to fruition otherwise. Think too much and what comes out is too polished, too clean, too meaningless—I know I've been there before. It's like, throw someone in the middle of an alien landscape… "WHAT THE HECK?!?" The thrill!

But, I've become too used to that. At least for now. So, for this phase of my Second Life, it's a quieter, mellower, more subtle me. Not visually, but in personality. Like autumn leaves.

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