Dan Mayer's Blog

Recently i saw a statistic that about 90% of websites are unread or unknown. That is kind of saddening to me. When i first started building websites when i was about 15 or so the amazment to me was the ability to reach the entire world with thoughts and ideas. I had the ultimate power to place my views out where anyone and everyone could find them. As I have grown up i have made many sites and promoted many thoughts and ideas and useless babble and fun on the interenet. I have become parts of online communities where i participate in discussions and more. I have been able to maintain a voice through joining communities and focusing on those websites. My own personal sites and attempts at being vocal on the web have become more and more silenced. My first site as a child was far more popular than the site i have today. Although i would argue that the site i have now has far mroe to offer. The sites in the past were dominated by personal sites with a loose inner connection to one another. Now with the community dynamics on any one site people have moved away from the slow difficulties of maintaining a personal site, to working within a community site. This could be a good thing. I guess it allows people ith a specific intrest to get feedback and have more discussion than before. It does kill off many of the sites that were static and un maintained from being viewed. I think the problem with this is that smaller opinions now are falling more into community and corporate goals. Many larger sites are corporate sites. This can skew the views. There isn't so much of a cult following between little sites that shared an obsession of some topic. It is now just find the one community on that topic and discuss there. The competition of having the newest and best information about something has moved from a dedicated fan to a news posting site. The recognition only going to a nickname with perhaps an e-mail link. I don't know if this is considered good or bad, but i still will have to say it is sad to see everything moving in a direction that self publication is a unheard medium. I still want to have the feeling i did when younger that i can scream to the world and someone will hear. Maybe I am just not screaming loud enough anymore. hehe