Archive for March, 2008

Usually I’m quick to criticise Robyn’s ever expanding TiVo wishlists/season pass lists. Seriously, 99% of the TiVo recordings are hers, and 95% of those are “just because.” But we found out tonight that the one I criticise the most has finally paid off, for me at least…

Before we went to the UK a couple of years ago, she set up a Scotland and Scottish wishlist to capture anything remotely interesting before her first visit. It was usually travel programmes, some good, most bad, but the wishlists stayed. Nowadays it throws up travel, cooking and the occasional PBS programme that may or may not be worthwhile, but as she exclaimed tonight, it caught something interesting.

Sweetness… Long time readers will know the efforts I’ve gone through to seeing or listening to Scotland games in the past, like the France vs. Scotland game in French for instance. I’ve never had it so easy, it’s now on my TV, recordable, what a novel concept… One I might get used to.

A little more searching unearthed a stunning turn of events…

FUCK ME! This is the game to end all games… I’ve not seen a Rangers game since… Well, if you must know it was the Partick Thistle game on November 1st 2003, a game I was at! So basically 4½ years, give or take… Sure, it’s not live, in fact it’s going to be over a day old by the time I get to see it, but it matters not. I finally get to see a Rangers game, and it’s the biggest game of the year. I’ll have to turn off the internet for the weekend, avoid any kind of contact to anyone who might know the score (which is harder than you might think).

I’m more stunned that Fox Soccer is showing anything related to Scottish football, as it seems to me they have an English bias, but I won’t complain, I can only hope it’s a sign of things to come…

I’ve been involved in social networks, social media or whatever you call it for the best part of 10 years now, which is actually quite scary in some aspects. It’s more funny how in those 10 years public sentiment has changed from one of trepidation to embracement, it was only 9 years ago I went to New York City to spend Labor Day weekend with a whole bunch of people I met on the old SixDegrees site. Back then there was kind of a stigma about it, you know, “you met people on the internet?” Now I can safely say I met my wife on the internet, and all my friends in Atlanta? All off the internet too, all without scorn or ridicule. It’s just part of everyday life now.

Why, it was only Friday night I had drinks and dinner with friends at The Brick Store in Decatur and part of the conversation was WordPress 2.5, and who was upgrading to it, everyone who could updated their Facebook status to say they were indeed at the Brick Store and one of the parting comments at the end of the night was “see you on twitter.” Twitter is currently my social network of choice, mainly because I’ve been twittering for so long:

I was only the 5,628th person to join Twitter, my first update was the 27,416th tweet in Twitter history. A little over 18 months later there are countless millions of members and my latest tweet is the 776,485,029th. There’s something about being there near the beginning, like Flickr users who were part of Ludicorp’s Game Neverending, it’s that hierarchy of geekdom (not to be confused with the hierarchy of gamerdom that is a baptism of fire in the form of kids yelling and cursing at you) we wear it like a badge.

Like my early social networking exploits, who can say they scored free swag from a startup who literally force fed them beer from a fish tank/cooler in their head office in New York, well around 30 of us out of a member base of over 3 million. Nothing can take that away. And those people haven’t quite disappeared neither, all it takes is an email to the old Topica mailing list and boom, nostalgia city. I think a 10 year reunion is in order next year.

But I digress, nearly everything is social networking/media nowadays, everything is RSS feeds and it’s making me somewhat lazy. I rarely visit blogs anymore as Google Reader keeps everything in order for me. I rarely blog as I’d rather update my Twitter/Facebook status. I rarely take pictures now as my phone has a semi-decent camera, and it’s always on me and I can quickly upload it to Flickr. It’s been a slow but significant shift for the last year or so. And it can all be aggregated on my Lifestream or FriendFeed, so you don’t even need to visit here anymore, it’s not worth it.

Embrace the socialism, reject the individualism.