Last week at an Ani DiFranco concert in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, I was seated in the back looking over the entire crowd, and I noticed that among the thousandsome Ani fans, at any given time, you could see at least least a hundred or so little digital screens. Each of these hundreds of digital cameras and cell phones were recording and sharing the experience with dozens of other people who weren't there.

My girlfriend was telling me about an evening that she was taking the ferry from downtown out to where we live in Red Hook. It's a beautiful little trip with some spectacular views of Manhattan, the bridges, and the Brooklyn waterfront. She saw that they were going to pass close by a huge tanker ship, so naturally she got out her camera phone to get a picture. She was having trouble getting a good shot, one that really captured the awe and grandeur of the gigantic vessel; by the time she put the phone away and looked up again she realized that she had missed the actual experience of feeling dwarfed by the tanker.

The Observer had a great article this week about another universal moment of technological interruption: the laptop at the dinner party.

Somewhere between Facebook and YouTube, the notebook computer became so essential to our lives that we began inviting it to dinner. It came quietly, ingratiating itself into the social ritual with such ease that we barely noticed. Until one night, halfway through the main course, seven dinner companions were suddenly crowded around our unassuming little MacBook watching “Dick in a Box.”

Connecting with people virtually while temporarily disconnecting from people in the real world is quickly becoming pervasive. As noted in this article from Slate, "Faxes, e-mail, cell phones, VoIP, Web video, etc., have been productive and fun but have also dragged many of us into a nonstop orgy of connectedness that can sometimes crowd out tenderness and meaning." Though both experiences have genuine merit, we should recognize that they are qualitatively different. Interaction with the virtual world is cerebral and intimate, while interactions with the real world can be visceral and communal. There's no internet experience that can replace the gut feeling of being among a crowd of other living human beings, especially when that crowd has a common focus. This change in our behavior is not merely anecdotal, these instances are indicators of a fundamental change in human behavior. As personal technology evolves, checking in/out from the virtual/real world will become seamless; but the differences in how each environment affects our thinking and perceiving will persist.

Months ago I read a fascinating paper by Danah Boyd that provides an insightful perspective on the complex question of "What is a blog?" As a term that seemed to have lost its meaning before most people had found it, "blog" has quickly outgrown the limited confines of its early definition. Boyd argues that we've fallen into a trap by attempting to define blogs based on their various genres of content, rather than by a set of practices, i.e. focusing on the "what" instead of the "how." This leads us to use familiar, yet inadequate, frames like diaries and journalism as metaphors for a wholly original means of communication.

I completely agree with Boyd's thesis, and would like to add that the conception of a blog as a destination is also outmoded. Traditionally, blogs, like all websites, have been thought of as online destinations - a unique place where an audience gathers to receive the content created and/or collected by the blog's creator, as illustrated below (please forgive the over-simplification of the illustrations - sometimes quick is better than perfect):



With the promulgation of publishing tools that enable creators to repackage their content and ship it out in generic containers like RSS feeds, the notion of a blog as a virtual dock, awaiting its visitors, is quickly losing relevance. I propose that you think of my blog simply as a unique curated stream of content. My blog needn't be identified by its URL address, but rather by its collection of thoughts and links; a farrago of ideas and experiences drawn from the hundreds of sources, both virtual and real-world, which I encounter every day. Blogs should be conceived of as waves of information flowing from an original source out to a community of subscribers, as illustrated below (see qualification above):



At lunch this afternoon, Noah Brier said that blogs can be like The Simpsons in their evolution: poorly animated and lacking a charismatic lead in the early years, and requiring some time and exploration in order to eventually achieve their full potential. Also, like The Simpsons, the plot-lines may vary while the quirky characters stay consistent. With this in mind, I invite you to join my community of subscribers by adding my RSS Feed to your feed reader of choice. Have a little patience, and hopefully I'll prove to be a sufficiently quirky character for you to follow.