The Big Felafel

The Internet is snapping in two, my brain soon to follow

My life is starting to occur somewhere between the virtual world of blogs, emails, and Facebook and the real in-the-flesh world of cooking, taking care of my cats, and learning Illustrator. And it’s makin me a little cuckoo. I’m not the only one, either. And while my social skills may be plummeting, at least my knowledge of web2.0 and social media is accelerating at a rate I can hardly keep up with. I wish I could do a survey – what percentage of people even know about web2.0. Does my mom? Does yours? Does it matter?

What I can say, is this: the web is slowly drifting in separate directions, much like pangaea and the drifting continents. There are some really bad sites out there like the pushy sites that make you scroll for 5 minutes to the bottom for a glimpse at a signup form to receive a tip about the mysterious Google AdWords and AdSense campaigns. These sites and the people behind them are drifting away from the newer sites that have readable snippets of info, logical paths of information, and use interactive web2.0 applications like Facebook, Flickr, and RSS Feeds to get their content out there.

As most sites get better and better and bad sites slowly trickle away, my attention span will not know how to distinguish between good and bad, and my brain will go on information overload and slowly start to fizz and crackle. Any votes for pen and paper? There is just TOO much on the internet to keep up with and I’m feeling just slightly overwhelmed. Is it ironic to blog about that? My online experience usually happens like this – I start on some site for Israel news and end up, 5 clicks later on a page about birthday socks. I mean, rarely does this happen in real life. Let’s try it out:

R: “Hey, you got some news about Israel?”

M: “Yeah, but first you must come take a look at my birthday socks and tell me if you like them”

This reminds me of a conversation that Mitch Hedberg, who was a great comedian, might have had. But it would’ve gone something like this:

People associate long hair with drug use. I wish people associated long hair with something other than drug use, like an extreme longing for cake. And then strangers would see a long haired guy and say, “That guy eats cake!” “He is on bundt cake!” Mothers saying to their daughters, “Don’t bring the cake eater over here anymore. He smells like flour. Did you see how excited he got when he found out your birthday was fast approaching?”

I don’t know if there is really a connection, but I’ve been wanting to quote Mitch for a while, so there it is. More quotes to follow.

Here’s a web2.0 video