Google Talk, Google’s first-ever instant messaging platform, launched on August 24, 2005. This company has been in the messaging business for 16 years, meaning Google has been making messaging clients for longer than some of its rivals have existed.
Month: August 2021
On Curating and Editing
I posted a thread on Twitter and then thought, heck, that’s a blog post!
As I continue to cull through old J’s Notes posts to reshare on the current site I run into the moral quandary of not just choosing what I don’t want to reshare, but how much I should edit what I do reshare.
For the first, sure, it’s kinda dishonest for me to hide some of the things I proudly shared in the last 20 years but I’ve grown, become better informed, a better writer (in some areas), and generally don’t necessarily have the same tastes as I did in my mid-20s.
For the second, I’m torn on how much I should “clean up” past content or just let is live as a historical document of, wow, I really messed up my grammar or used “pisses me off” a lot as a youngin’.
If I do edit, do I owe the potential reader any notation on what may have been edited? Does degree of editing matter? Am I overthinking it?
This is ultimately for me, I don’t think anyone out there is going to wonder what I thought about random links I found interesting in June of 2003 other than me, and I’ll always have the archive to embarrass myself with.
Also, anything I don’t include is probably available to anyone with a medium degree of internet sleuthing because nothing on the internet is private and everything is forever to a degree so I’m not protecting myself from future dirt digging (if needed).
This is also a hidden process, I could do nothing and no one would know, but the whole point of blogging for 20 years has been a certain degree of oversharing.
So it’s really about what do I want to continue to embrace and have my name attached to.
I don’t really owe anyone anything when it comes to my website’s content, but as someone with a general interest in history I think about what I would want to see if I dug into something like this.
Aritha van Herk had an good, thought provoking response:
And I’m ultimately torn on this – I like seeing history evolve and show that change, but we also live in an era where we give very little room for someone to grow as a person over the course of a lifetime, let alone a decade or so.
Curating is one thing, all history is curated, we don’t have a record of every moment of every thing, but editing is a different beast.
If history is edited, is it really history?
I’m not editing to hide anything, really, but even curating at this point is really editing an already existing historical record.
Chris O’Donnell, with one of the few active blogs I can think of that pre-date J’s Notes, added:
And the changed beliefs is the big thing, but does killing it off look like whitewashing?
I’m also probably being waaaaaay too generous to myself to think that I’ll ever be of any import that my past thoughts are going to matter one way or another.
On Afghanistan
In light of what’s happening in Afghanistan, I may have made this statement 12 years ago in reference to health care but it still stands.
If the government is going to get into the business of doing something – health care, utilities, etc. – then it has a moral obligation to do it right.
We can make all of the arguments in the world about why and whether we should have been there, but once we were there, we – and ALL of those involved (allies) – owed it to the people of Afghanistan to do it right. We clearly failed.
Already there are those who served alongside America who are suffering and dying for fighting for something even the Afghani government didn’t believe in.
And the Taliban’s historical treatment of women and ethnic and religious minorities hasn’t changed in twenty years so the tragedy there is only going to grow.
Of course, it’s easy to sit and rant on Twitter compared to those who have had to figure out an optimal solution over the last 20 years. It’s just hard to believe that the best outcome was what we’re seeing now.
Buried by the Ash of Vesuvius, These Scrolls Are Being Read for the First Time in Millennia
A revolutionary American scientist is using subatomic physics to decipher 2,000-year-old texts from the early days of Western civilization It’s July 12, 2017, and Jens Dopke walks into a windowless room in Oxfordshire, England, all of his attention trained on a small, white frame that he carries w
Today in old millennial nostalgia
Pizza Hut’s BOOK IT! club and the stickers that came with blank VHS tapes. Great big waves of nostalgia washing over me.
Toon Town
Six years ago, on a cool spring day, the reward of my yearlong search was sitting in my beat-up Mercury Cougar. The months before were filled with dead ends, endless phone calls and unanswered emails.
The joy of exclamation marks!
There is a town of 1,471 happy souls in Quebec called Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!. The second “Ha!”, amazingly, is part of the town’s name, not my commentary on the first “Ha!”. Unlike, for example, the Devon town of Westward Ho! Ho! There, the second “Ho!” is mine.
J’s Notes at 20
Twenty years is a long time by any standard, but for the internet it’s downright ancient.
It seems a little unnecessary to say it’s been an eventful twenty years because, over the course of twenty years, yeah, there’s gonna be some things happening, both personally and globally.
Every now and then I kill some time digging through the J’s Notes archives of nearly 4,000 posts made before 2011 and I’m astounded by a few things:
- I’ve come a long way as a writer.
- My production is nothing compared to what it used to be.
- My tastes haven’t changed too much.
- So much of what has been published on the internet in the past is is dead and gone.
The first three kinda run together and makes sense – as one grows they ideally hone their craft (whatever it may be) and how they use it changes as they do. J’s Notes used to be my social media platform where I shared everything I was finding interesting before Facebook and Twitter came along. It was a lot more political when I was. It was a lot more personal when I needed it to be.
J’s Notes was also a catalyst for so much of my life. I turned an interest in weblogging/blogging into an interest in New Media that transitioned into Social Media and getting a reputation for knowing a thing or two about this stuff – which allowed me to turn it into a career.
I’ve made a lot of friends thanks to this too. Like, real world, off-line friends. Heck, I met my wife because of this stuff.
So there’s a certain degree of nostalgia and memories that keeps J’s Notes limping along – certainly more than my inability to throw anything away (I have t-shirts older than J’s Notes).
I’ll be shocked if I’m here again twenty years from now saying “woah, 40 years already?!!” but 2001 Jason wouldn’t have expected to be here now writing this.
Here’s to 20 years of shouting into the darkness of the interwebs!