GlobalMegaBlog

I hate the idea of twitter. The idea of micro-blogging the minutiae of my life.. The idea that anyone actually cares what I’m doing on a minute by minute basis. Hell, I find it hard to bother blogging about stuff, because I’m fairly certain that I’m more or less talking to the wall. My life is not interesting enough to justify an audience. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.

However.

If I think about twitter as being essentially web based instant messaging, it starts to make a little bit more sense. I see a lot of my friends using it, and I’m starting to see the point, a bit.

To make a long story short, I’ve signed up for an account. I more or less swore this would never happen, and I’m going to state right now that I won’t be treating it like a blog. I won’t be posting updates when I go to lunch, or to bed, or the bathroom. I’ll be using it to communicate with friends more or less exclusively. You can follow me or not, up to you.

I love the internet. It’s an explosion of information. It allows anyone from anywhere to learn anything about anything (more or less). The old adage used to be that you learn something new every day. With the advent of the internet, the “day” part of that is becoming hour, or maybe minute.

Anyway, all this is a roundabout way of getting to talk about TED. TED is a conference which has been going on since 1984. Their site explains their mission much more thorougly than I am here, but the basic gist is that they gather together people from the worlds of Technology, Entertainment and Design to give 18 minute lectures on basically anything. Since April 2007, they’ve been posting videos of conference sessions on their site, and the output is nothing short of remarkable.

If you’re a science geek, you could spend hours watching videos on this site. Some of the ideas and technologies on display are breathtaking, and it makes you feel like we’re actually going somewhere as a species. In particular, I want to highlight the video I just watched. Go ahead, take the 18 minutes and watch this:

Isn’t that just the most amazing thing ever? Not just the fact that this group of scientists are figuring out such incredible stuff, or what this could mean for humanity, but the fact that it’s available for anyone to watch and learn about. It feels like this is what the internet was built for – to spread ideas, share knowledge, to advance our civilization. Ok, maybe that’s a bit lofty, but it things like this that help me counteract all the doom and gloom in the world today. On the one hand, the planet may be in an environmental death spiral, but on the other, we’ve got insanely smart people figuring out stuff that will maybe help save us in the end.. and thanks to the internet, we all get to participate in it, or at the very least watch.

For years, I’ve neglected my blog on Livejournal. These days, I’m more inclined to host my own (rarely changing) content, so I’ve migrated to my own domain, where I can neglect my blog that much more efficiently. All my old posts, going back to when I first started blogging about my cancer treatment, have been imported.

Frankly, I plan to post more often than I did before, but I’ve said that before, so I say it knowing that I’m probably kidding myself.

Anyway, welcome! Come in, make yourself comfortable, help yourself to one of these little crab things. Here’s to successful blogging!