Blogging has become one of those curious life distractions. Back when I started blogging in 2002, it was still a fresh and exciting medium, a medium from which I could potentially launch a lucrative career IF ONLY enough people would notice my brilliant and occasionally unspeakable hilarity.
Now, everyone has a blog, or everyone has disappeared into FaceBook, or everyone has jumped into the increasingly bizarre vernacular of Twitter, which has become something akin to shorthand swearing, what with it's omnipresent @ and # symbols.
But, that's the Web. Every month is a shake of the Internet Etch-A-Sketch, and we begin anew. My blog never caught on the way I had secretly hoped, but what did I actually expect from an eclectic mix of whatever the hell this blog has been about for nearly a decade? I don't have the regular ambition to be a Bleat, and I'm not curious enough to hoover up and link to all the news and opinion of the day of an Instapundit. Well, whatever. My blog is what it is. And it is a THUNDERJOURNAL.
I used to bemoan the fact I never learned a different language (I knew enough Japanese during my year living there to get through shops and restaurants), but the fact of the matter is I've learned and relearned the language of the Internet, and frankly it's getting tiresome. And it's not just tiresome because you have to relearn the language; you also have to remember all the previous iterations. It's like keeping an original version of Windows 95 on hand just so you can remember why things are the way they are now.
During my last job--of which I will only briefly reference, as that job is now the equivalent of Voldemort and "SHALL NOT BE NAMED--I had to perform all sorts of odd tasks meant to ensure Internet relevancy. Crap like search engine optimization (SEO) and Google Analytics and a whole bunch of similar stuff that always struck me as the kind of thing you maybe thought about seriously back in 2005, but really aren't part of the Internet of today. But, such concepts just aren't easy to let go, so they remain and continue to haunt us even though the Internet has long since moved on to other annoying things.
Just when you think you have it figured out, someone goes and rewrites the Internet dictionary, just because they can. "They" being the busybodies who think we want to have hyperlinks automatically appear on words and phrases, so when you accidentally roll over them, a small advertising box appears that's seemingly impossible to close. I used to think Internet advertising had hit it's annoyance apex with pop-up and pop-under ads. Boy howdy, was I mistaken. Rollover ads just make me want to put my forehead through the monitor.
Somewhere along the line, Web advertisers decided to sacrifice effective ads in the name of making them APPEAR IN FRONT OF YOU SO YOU CANNOT ESCAPE THE FRICKIN' THINGS! So, you have a silhouette of some dancing chick with text that says "Obama Asks Moms to go Back to School," and you're left thinking to yourself "What the hell is this shit?"
I can't profess to understand all the logic behind the way a lot of Web sites are architected today. I mean, I understand why sites break up articles into three or four pages to increase page views, but it comes at the expense of being exceptionally annoying. The same goes for Web pages that automatically reload after a predetermined interval. As if us stoopid Web surfers don't know how to refresh a page ourselves.
Posted by Ryan at August 26, 2010 10:16 AM | TrackBack
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