[A Life Beyond Traditional Media] is a place for me to lay out my ideas on communications through technology, half-baked though some of them surely are. It's also a place for you — friends, colleagues, strangers, random travelers — to agree, contradict, challenge, argue, and respond. It's a place for thinking out loud about the ways people connect through technology — whether it's building brands or building friendships. It's founded on my belief that we're still at the beginning of this internet thing, and that discussions of where we've been, where we are, and where we might go are essential to the health of the medium.
(It may also be a place for odd humor and forays into my other life as a music and arts journalist, should the mood strike me.)
[A Life Beyond Traditional Media] isn't a technology blog — well, not exactly — OK, it's sort of a technology blog but not in the true sense. Technology blogs often look at how technology is changing the ways we communicate. I prefer to look at how the ways people choose to communicate are changing the ways they use technology.
Call me a semantic hair splitter if you will, but I'll stand by this difference, even if it's often only one of perspective. Brilliant people are creating technology without clearly defined utility, and users are deciding what they will do with it. Is Twitter a microblog, a group chat, or an oddly public instant messaging client? I've seen people use it in all those ways. Is Flickr a photo-sharing service or an open content stream for third-party apps like Flickrvision? Thanks to open APIs, it's both and more. And when you post to your blog, do you use a browser, desktop application, mobile app, or simply email (or email from your mobile phone)? Well, it's really your choice.
Sometimes technology changes the way we communicate, but just as often communications change the way we use technology. As a guy whose fascination with communications has driven my study and work since I was 13, I'll write about the latter. Of course, having laid out my thesis, I remember that rules are indeed made to be broken — especially as it's my blog.
