I'm going Web 2.0 crazy!

I am no technophobe, by no means, but I am totally capricious in what sorts of tech I'll dive in to and what I won't. In terms of communications technology, my family has been the motive force behind my forays into it: my brother had a beeper in high school (that was during my Luddite phase) and then worked at a cell phone store before they really started taking off in 2000, and my sister persuaded me to use e-mail in college (back when they still had Unix terminals on campus), and then got me on my old blog when she started posting photos of her newborn baby girl in 2003.

But since then, I've been a rather reluctant, foot-dragging convert to all of the social networking craziness that's followed. A friend convinced me to use Friendster so she could embiggen her circle of... friendsters? I signed up for Myspace when its music applications really took off, but haven't been on it much at all. I had resisted Facebook until my wife forced me to join earlier this year in order to see pictures of her niece and nephew, and even then logged on infrequently, and rarely posted any comments (I'm still puzzled by the entire "poking" thing that happened - what exactly does that mean?). And even though I'd read stories about kidnapping victims who've twittered their locations to rescue, I didn't think anyone would want to know, in excruciating, minute by minute detail what I'm doing during the day - I wanted my posts to mean something, and the short form wouldn't allow for any depth of thought. So far, I've been happy expressing myself through maximally verbose posts on my old backwater blog, contented to have it read by the few people who still use the site.

Until now.

Getting ready for this trip to Palestine, I decided that I'd make it a public, political sort of an act, to keep my family, friends and coworkers updated on what I'm seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, so parts of the world becomes humanized and neighborly. So I started posting my own frequent status updates of Facebook, opened a Twitter account and started twatting. The faculty in our department at work started a social network ring today on something called Wiggio, so I joined that and started posting there, too. Following a friend's example I decided to start this blogspot site so I could post in longer form in a way that I'd feel comfortable having my coworkers read (fewer f-bombs). I've even activated the mobile update options on any of the accounts that had them so I could text message updates from my cell phone (if, say, I've been kidnapped and the kidnappers are too dumb to take my cell away from me). In internet exposure terms, I've gone from zero to Perez Hilton in the space of a week!

Perez Hilton... well, I guess at least the pressure of having to say something profound is off now.