2006 (A Digital Decade, Part 7/10)
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
This is Part 7 (Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6,) of a personal look back at the sites, tools, behaviors, platforms, and technologies that have changed my life in the past 10 years. Please add your own thoughts and memories in the comments.
In 2006, I joined Flickr, started publishing my Delicious bookmarks, and I started blogging.
I relaunched this site with a major redesign in Spring 2006, with a few important similarities to it's current incarnation. It had one larger main column on the left, and a smaller side column on the right. Back then, however, the site was really more of a tumblog, modeled after a few of my all time favorite blogs kottke.org and coudal.com. The kind of stuff that I now post to my Tumblr blog was the primary content on mikearauz.com: interesting links, pretty pics, and funny videos.
Flickr wooed me in, and I discovered the social side of photography. I shared a small studio space on the lower east side, and was working on portraiture. What was fascinating about getting into Flickr was having what felt like an objective judgement of your work by the number of views, comments, and likes that each photo earned. It was both relieving and kinda corrupting.
The sad part is that - even though I'm still a happy user of Flickr - the site has ultimately discouraged me from being a photographer. It feels more impossible than ever to make pictures that truly feel original. When I try to take photos of my own, I can't escape the thought that someone else has already taken a picture just like this one, and I can find it in an instant on Flickr.
As the de facto web designer and digital strategist at Pompei A.D. where I was still working, I got the opportunity to oversee the redesign of the company website. ...A blessing and a curse. You know how people say that you're always your own worst client, well imagine if you're also an entire company full of talented designers - who have never built a website themselves - who have a lot of ideas about how it should be designed.
With the tireless work and creativity of Ian Coyle, and his team at FL 2, we actually managed to do a decent job of creating a website that was both a beautiful and immersive experience, with a completely dynamic and easily updated blog-like back end - the current version of Pompei A.D. My only regret now is that I wish I had been more honest about the firm's willingness to actually maintain a blog-like site.
I (re)discovered The Cluetrain Manifesto. I couldn't believe how dead on it was. It put everything I was thinking about how the internet was changing the marketing and communications landscape into words. Then I discovered that it had been written in 1999. Well, it still holds up 10 years later.
I also read another internet nerd classic: The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan
. As the hundreds of little sticky post-its, bracketed passages, and notes in the margins will attest, this book changed my life. And that's not an exaggeration. As he's done for many other students over the years, McLuhan's ideas about technology opened my mind up to an entirely new way of thinking about our digital world. The book raised my level of curiosity, and critical thinking about the role that the internet was playing in our lives.
By 2007, this curiosity became a career aspiration.
In 2006, I joined Flickr, started publishing my Delicious bookmarks, and I started blogging.
I relaunched this site with a major redesign in Spring 2006, with a few important similarities to it's current incarnation. It had one larger main column on the left, and a smaller side column on the right. Back then, however, the site was really more of a tumblog, modeled after a few of my all time favorite blogs kottke.org and coudal.com. The kind of stuff that I now post to my Tumblr blog was the primary content on mikearauz.com: interesting links, pretty pics, and funny videos.
Flickr wooed me in, and I discovered the social side of photography. I shared a small studio space on the lower east side, and was working on portraiture. What was fascinating about getting into Flickr was having what felt like an objective judgement of your work by the number of views, comments, and likes that each photo earned. It was both relieving and kinda corrupting.
The sad part is that - even though I'm still a happy user of Flickr - the site has ultimately discouraged me from being a photographer. It feels more impossible than ever to make pictures that truly feel original. When I try to take photos of my own, I can't escape the thought that someone else has already taken a picture just like this one, and I can find it in an instant on Flickr.
As the de facto web designer and digital strategist at Pompei A.D. where I was still working, I got the opportunity to oversee the redesign of the company website. ...A blessing and a curse. You know how people say that you're always your own worst client, well imagine if you're also an entire company full of talented designers - who have never built a website themselves - who have a lot of ideas about how it should be designed.
With the tireless work and creativity of Ian Coyle, and his team at FL 2, we actually managed to do a decent job of creating a website that was both a beautiful and immersive experience, with a completely dynamic and easily updated blog-like back end - the current version of Pompei A.D. My only regret now is that I wish I had been more honest about the firm's willingness to actually maintain a blog-like site.
I (re)discovered The Cluetrain Manifesto. I couldn't believe how dead on it was. It put everything I was thinking about how the internet was changing the marketing and communications landscape into words. Then I discovered that it had been written in 1999. Well, it still holds up 10 years later.
I also read another internet nerd classic: The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan
. As the hundreds of little sticky post-its, bracketed passages, and notes in the margins will attest, this book changed my life. And that's not an exaggeration. As he's done for many other students over the years, McLuhan's ideas about technology opened my mind up to an entirely new way of thinking about our digital world. The book raised my level of curiosity, and critical thinking about the role that the internet was playing in our lives.By 2007, this curiosity became a career aspiration.
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