Big MoBrother
I can't sleep (I think I may have broken my biological clock permanently).
Checking out my referrers, I saw a couple good, and almost completely opposite, thoughts on my moblogging experiment. First, over at OxDECAFBAD:
Is Russell losing the Moblogging faith already? :) He raises an interesting, mostly obvious point: After all the whiz-bang setup and build up - what do you have that's so important that it's worth covering in mobile multimedia splendor?
On one hand, some would say, "Nada mucho," and hang up their camera peripheral. Me, well, I don't have the hardware yet to deluge my corner of the web with instant snaps and clips of me, my girl, the cats, and co-workers. (Though I have gotten a start on it.) But, I find what Russell's posted so far to be fascinating and amusing. Of course, he's in an exotic locale with respect to me. Why else, unless he was a photographic genius, would his lunch seem interesting to me? Then again, I might be in an exotic locale with respect to someone else.
Anyway, after all the fun of connecting various bits together, you always come back to finding a reason to use it if you hadn't had one to begin with. Sometimes the reason ends up being that it's just fun to play with bits connected together, and that someone somewhere might just find the result interesting. No one's forcing anyone to look at all the pictures of the world's cats, you know?
That's true. I live in Spain, sometimes I forget. After 3 years here, I've gotten used to the peculiarities of life here pretty much, but other people might be fascinated at things around me. I know I would've been before I came here! It's a really good thought. I actually read Les' post this afternoon, which is why I decided to take a bunch of snaps on the way home from work today. I'll try to keep thinking like when I first arrived here and take shots of stuff that others who don't live abroad will find interesting.
That's one way of thinking... the other is this highly amusing post by James in Ireland:
Woh, hold the pony, stall the ball. This is going too far Russell! Next thing you know is you'll have blogstalkers :o
Seriously though, I do wonder whether Russell has thought out all the implications of opening up his world visually to his readership? I've been a fan of his blog for a while now for two reasons. Firstly, I'm just as geekily obsessed with the whole moblogging area as he is and secondly, because he has a genuinely engaging and personal style of expression. If Russell is pissed off about something you'll know it. If he's deleriously over the moon about fixing some obscure bug, ditto. I've always found his blog wonderfully 3 dimensional (the 3rd dimension being time ;).
But now that he's moving into the 4th dimension by gluing on a visual layer I'm not too sure that I'm alltogether comfortable with following the story. Delighted and all as I am to see him get his Manywhere Mobloggerapplication off the ground and eager as I am to try it out myself, I'm not convinced that he should be experimenting with it in the laboratory of his personal life! I used to feel like a simple fan, now I feel like a voyeur! I don't want to see shots of Russel's apparment or video of his wife and son going about their own business in their private lives.
Stop and think about it Russell. I'm still blown away by the possibilities of Moblogging but for the documentation of public events in public places, not personal events in private lives.
Having said that I must admit it was strangely fascinating to observe the 4th dimension for a brief moment and that's what worries me. Isn't this just an extension of Reality TV? Reality Web. Reality Blog. I can see people attempting to make a living out of this. Sure, we already have voyeur dorms and the like but what about people turning their whole 4 dimensional lives over to blog voyeurs? Scary!
Heehee. Very amusing. My life as a low-budget version of reality-TV! Wow... I understand the thought, but I think it's all about sharing and expressing, and less about voyeurism. I mean, we're all curious about others and how they live. The word voyeurism makes it seem dirty and bad, but the fact is that we all only have one life, but are very curious about the "what ifs" of life lived another way. That's how I see it anyways. I share a bit about my life here and in return I get cool feedback from others. I'll repeat it again, blogging has changed my life - introducing me to interesting people and opening lots of doors of opportunity which would normally be shut off to me. This is worth opening up a bit of my life to others.
However, I will say that my wife has similar thoughts to James, actually - though she gets more upset sometimes at the stuff I write about (financial details for example) than photos. She indulges me for now, which is nice, as she can see why I like blogging so much. As for moblogging, I'm not publishing anything too steamy, so I really don't think it's a problem and for people like my parents, it's really nice to see how I live and snapshots of day-to-day life and little 10 second videos of Alex, etc. But I'll keep this in mind... Maybe I should title my moblog, "Big MoBrother"
-Russ