This website, triviality.net, created back in 2003 and the ISP user ‘homepage’ that preceded it have always been, first and foremost, a sandpit, a place to play and to learn. Here I have experimented and learned practical things like HTML, CSS, PHP and WordPress and also with writing and interacting online and with what we now call social media.
It has also given me the opportunity to grapple with the more abstract: what about our online and offline lives does it make sense to share in the 21st century. At what point do the dangers out way the benefits of maintaining contact with a diaspora of friends from the online and offline worlds.
The site has, since near the beginning, been home to this blog. The time has come to draw that blogging project to a close. It was fun. I learned a lot. I was part of a great unplanned experiment across the interwebs that involved millions of people experimenting with blogging.
Blogging lives on but it does with those who are dedicated to it and often, thankfully, good at it. I am neither of these things. So I remain an avid reader of a now much reduced list of blogs but am drawing a line under this project.
I did learn eventually to reject the notion of the sanctity the posted and to accept the idea of curated content. It’s time to take that further and draw the project to a close.
For most of us now the desire to share and participate online and the benefits we get from that are best met with other platforms where the tools make it easier to share content, to interact with the content generated by others and to be selective about what we share with whom.
While the blog is being retired the website lives on. For now it will simply be signpost to the platforms where I participate online. In the future, who knows…
For now I am an active user of twitter, last.fm and flickr. I’ve not quite decided what to do about goolge+ and facebook but I am on both.
So long, and thanks for reading.