Add to this the machine gun calls to action in the form of me-too social networks, overpriced affiliate promotions, and chocolate box ad matrices, and what you have is a shit tip of information design. It’s gotten so bad that a wealth of plugins and scripts have sprung up to strip pages back to useful content and make them legible again.2The result of all this is that it’s even harder to find blogs that you can read for pleasure. Whereas reading offline is for downtime, reading online has been demoted to killing time, and tablogging is to blame. I think it’s time that well-meaning publishers abandoned the blog format in favour of something more suitable for their content, their audience, and their long-term prosperity.
-from Put Things Off (via Merlin)
It’s funny this should come on the heels of the latest email from my hosting company. They tell me I need to shell out another year’s worth of hosting fees and I immediately began thinking how I could resurrect IndependentReport.org. What niche might I serve? How might I begin parsing articles to fit certain sections that still keep with what the old readership (as if any remain) might expect? How could I move to a mode editorial position and allow others to generate content?
Then it hit me (especially after reading this article): who am I kidding? I’ve so moved on from that URL and that version of me it’s not even funny. So I’m letting the hosting contract lapse. And while it saddens me, it really is the best decision.
This also explains why my wife and I complain about the Internet so much these days and, as older people are wont to do, pine wistfully for “the good ol’ days” when the Internet was still awesome. Not that it can’t be, but the awesomeness is seriously harder to find.
