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ursamajorIn the beginning, you could bookmark things to your web browser, and lo, it was okay. Because even in the early, heady days of the World Wide Web, there were enough websites out there that you couldn't be expected to remember them all.
And then there were search engines, so when your hierarchical bookmark folder system exploded out of sheer unwieldiness, you could just depend on a search engine to find what you were looking for, most of the time.
And then there was the vastly underappreciated Delicious, which let you bookmark things to the cloud, tagged for easy reference and rediscovery, and mostly shared in an awesome and unobtrusive way that meant you could often crowdsource information on a given subject in a way that you can't do with search engines, thanks to all of the metadata appended to Delicious bookmarks.
(And then Yahoo listed Delicious for sunset,AVOX AVOS bought it and eviscerated it, and everyone in my network fled to Pinboard or gave up on social bookmarking. It's still criminal what Yahoo had, and then trashed, in early December 2010. The Library of Congress archives tweets; this crowdsourced database directory of metadata-tagged encyclopedic knowledge deserved the same preservation. Yes, I am still saddened and furious, a year and a half on.)
And all the while, the popularity of various social media streams like Twitter and Facebook kept growing - more places to discover all sorts of useful information. But more often than not, these useful nuggets of information were buried in private or semi-private notes that were difficult if not impossible to bookmark (particularly with Facebook), let alone be able to search for after-the-fact. Neither of these tools come with particularly incisive or inclusive search functions.
Enter Greplin. (Referral link: right now, I have the free account, which lets you unlock a limited number of sources; if you join through me, I get to unlock more sources for free. :) )
Awhile back, in mid-February or so, I had the ambient awareness that we were in the heart of Maine shrimp season up here in New England; given that I follow a couple of hundred local restaurants on Twitter and Facebook, I would have been hard-pressed not to note that every Cambervillain chef and then some were dishing up wild Maine shrimp specials. So when I was at the grocery store and saw that they had wild Maine shrimp on special, you bet I picked up a pound of 'em and headed home to do my research.
Which meant that I typed "Maine shrimp" into Greplin and received the following results, personalized to my various reading lists:
Most notably:
- East by Northeast had a Maine shrimp congee.
- The Blue Room fried up their Maine shrimp with jalapeno butter.
All this was crossing my mind at the same time I'd opened Google Reader (looks like the promise of HiveMined is dead, so GReader is the best alternative for now, even with no sharing) and spotted Jaden Hair's recipe for skirt steak with kimchi butter. Which inspired me to make wild Maine shrimp juk with kimchi butter:
And it was damned good, even though the kimchi butter scaredhyounpark at first. (He does not tend to trust me with kimchi anything ever since I brought him home a Lil' Kimchi, aka a grilled cheese, kimchi, and sweet sesame black bean sandwich. PROOF IT EXISTED.)
Moral of the story: GREPLIN IS MY NEW BACKUP BRAIN AND IT CAN BE YOURS, TOO.
*
Tangent: Even if Greplin doesn't do the sharing/crowdsourcing that was the heart of Delicious, given the relevant privacy concerns, I am okay with this. I still miss old Delicious, though, for that reason. Pinboard has been pretty good; it's similar enough to Delicious that my workflow shift was minimal, and it's had the benefit of active development for several years. And Maciej has been incredibly responsive. But it's not quite the same ethos as we'd established on Delicious after five years, and the community fragmented and is just starting to come together and adjust to Pinboard. And Pinboard is still more privacy-oriented at heart rather than crowdsourced-knowledge-oriented.
The situation resonates strongly with me because in the past couple of weeks, I've seen several people post something along the lines of "I miss what LJ used to be." Where all of your friends posted regularly in one spot (and generally trusted that their content was relatively safe, unlike how people post to Facebook today); actual life updates instead of Facebook/Twitter soundbites or nothing at all. Now granted, in the LJ heyday, there was plenty of meme-posting and such, don't get me wrong. And it's not like people on Dreamwidth aren't posting long thinky things or memes or everything in between, because we are.
It's just - it's been almost two years since Dreamwidth came out of closed beta, and despite everyone believing that Internet Time is a seriously-sped-up thing, in terms of sustainable community building, two years is no time at all. I look at the changes in the technical infrastructure and I'm amazed and proud and think Dreamwidth has a long-term future. But the emo I keep seeing is like, "We built this community with our friends on LJ and then people drifted away from it to Twitter and Facebook and Dreamwidth and I Just Want My LJ Community Back and we may have been trying to do this community building elsewhere for a couple of years or else we may have been trying to re-establish it on LJ and WHY DON'T WE HAVE OUR COMMUNITY FEEL BACK YET? and WHY WON'T MY FRIENDS JUST POST WHERE I WANT THEM TO POST?!"
I don't have an easy solution or a quick fix, sadly. And there are definitely some days I wish Dreamwidth was as popular as Tumblr:
And that my friends were still webjournaling at the volume and depth they were a few years ago. They're not; it doesn't mean there aren't awesome new people, new friends that are. I appreciate both progress and nostalgia. I just want it all and I want it now, and so do you.
And then there were search engines, so when your hierarchical bookmark folder system exploded out of sheer unwieldiness, you could just depend on a search engine to find what you were looking for, most of the time.
And then there was the vastly underappreciated Delicious, which let you bookmark things to the cloud, tagged for easy reference and rediscovery, and mostly shared in an awesome and unobtrusive way that meant you could often crowdsource information on a given subject in a way that you can't do with search engines, thanks to all of the metadata appended to Delicious bookmarks.
(And then Yahoo listed Delicious for sunset,
And all the while, the popularity of various social media streams like Twitter and Facebook kept growing - more places to discover all sorts of useful information. But more often than not, these useful nuggets of information were buried in private or semi-private notes that were difficult if not impossible to bookmark (particularly with Facebook), let alone be able to search for after-the-fact. Neither of these tools come with particularly incisive or inclusive search functions.
Enter Greplin. (Referral link: right now, I have the free account, which lets you unlock a limited number of sources; if you join through me, I get to unlock more sources for free. :) )
Awhile back, in mid-February or so, I had the ambient awareness that we were in the heart of Maine shrimp season up here in New England; given that I follow a couple of hundred local restaurants on Twitter and Facebook, I would have been hard-pressed not to note that every Cambervillain chef and then some were dishing up wild Maine shrimp specials. So when I was at the grocery store and saw that they had wild Maine shrimp on special, you bet I picked up a pound of 'em and headed home to do my research.
Which meant that I typed "Maine shrimp" into Greplin and received the following results, personalized to my various reading lists:
Most notably:
- East by Northeast had a Maine shrimp congee.
- The Blue Room fried up their Maine shrimp with jalapeno butter.
All this was crossing my mind at the same time I'd opened Google Reader (looks like the promise of HiveMined is dead, so GReader is the best alternative for now, even with no sharing) and spotted Jaden Hair's recipe for skirt steak with kimchi butter. Which inspired me to make wild Maine shrimp juk with kimchi butter:
And it was damned good, even though the kimchi butter scared
hyounpark at first. (He does not tend to trust me with kimchi anything ever since I brought him home a Lil' Kimchi, aka a grilled cheese, kimchi, and sweet sesame black bean sandwich. PROOF IT EXISTED.)Moral of the story: GREPLIN IS MY NEW BACKUP BRAIN AND IT CAN BE YOURS, TOO.
*
Tangent: Even if Greplin doesn't do the sharing/crowdsourcing that was the heart of Delicious, given the relevant privacy concerns, I am okay with this. I still miss old Delicious, though, for that reason. Pinboard has been pretty good; it's similar enough to Delicious that my workflow shift was minimal, and it's had the benefit of active development for several years. And Maciej has been incredibly responsive. But it's not quite the same ethos as we'd established on Delicious after five years, and the community fragmented and is just starting to come together and adjust to Pinboard. And Pinboard is still more privacy-oriented at heart rather than crowdsourced-knowledge-oriented.
The situation resonates strongly with me because in the past couple of weeks, I've seen several people post something along the lines of "I miss what LJ used to be." Where all of your friends posted regularly in one spot (and generally trusted that their content was relatively safe, unlike how people post to Facebook today); actual life updates instead of Facebook/Twitter soundbites or nothing at all. Now granted, in the LJ heyday, there was plenty of meme-posting and such, don't get me wrong. And it's not like people on Dreamwidth aren't posting long thinky things or memes or everything in between, because we are.
It's just - it's been almost two years since Dreamwidth came out of closed beta, and despite everyone believing that Internet Time is a seriously-sped-up thing, in terms of sustainable community building, two years is no time at all. I look at the changes in the technical infrastructure and I'm amazed and proud and think Dreamwidth has a long-term future. But the emo I keep seeing is like, "We built this community with our friends on LJ and then people drifted away from it to Twitter and Facebook and Dreamwidth and I Just Want My LJ Community Back and we may have been trying to do this community building elsewhere for a couple of years or else we may have been trying to re-establish it on LJ and WHY DON'T WE HAVE OUR COMMUNITY FEEL BACK YET? and WHY WON'T MY FRIENDS JUST POST WHERE I WANT THEM TO POST?!"
I don't have an easy solution or a quick fix, sadly. And there are definitely some days I wish Dreamwidth was as popular as Tumblr:
And that my friends were still webjournaling at the volume and depth they were a few years ago. They're not; it doesn't mean there aren't awesome new people, new friends that are. I appreciate both progress and nostalgia. I just want it all and I want it now, and so do you.
