July 17, 2007
The Giant Interweb
I said over dinner last night that I'm totally in love with the internet, but since that alone doesn't seem like that big of news, let me explain: In the last week I've had a host of experiences that heralded to me just how much the internet and specifically "Web 2.0," is changing our lives and just how deep and wide its impact is.
When I returned from Israel last week, I talked to my book editor who said that he'd heard from his assistant (with whom I'm friends on Facebook) that the conference had gone well because, thanks to the Facebook Newsfeed, she noticed I had gotten a whole host of new friends out of it. Then last Wednesday, when it was birthday (which was announced on the homepages of all of my Facebook friends), I must have gotten close to thirty emails or Facebook Wall messages from friends around the country with whom I'm not in regular contact. Last year, before Facebook really took off, that number was much much smaller.
Over the weekend, I posted all of my photos from Israel to Flickr, the first time I've seriously used that site. Mostly I just post photos to my own website here. This time, I took the time, though, to tag and title all the Israel photos and post them—and then yesterday I got an email from "Gifted Gourmet," a Flickr user, who runs the Olive appreciation group on Flickr (technically called "Olives, the gift of the gods from Roman times to today") and had noticed that I had a photo of olives in a Tel Aviv street market. She asked me to add my photo to her group.
Then later yesterday I was emailing with a colleague who explained that she met her "boyfriend" online when he started reading her blog—they've never actually met and won't until November (he's a soldier serving in Iraq actually) but they exchange emails each day.
What an odd odd world we live in today. It's pretty exciting to watch this all evolve.
