Recently, I received an email from someone in the marketing department of an institution that I’m affiliated with. Turns out, he was expressing concern about some of my web activities that didn’t carry appropriate institutional branding. He explained that I was “going all wild west” and doing things my own way instead of following policy.
Boy, did I get a kick out of that message.
Because I realized that what I like most about the various digital spaces where I play, is precisely that they are all “wild west.” As soon as such venues are codified and monetized, they lose their appeal for me. I need a place to play and get messy and make mistakes. I don’t much need a place to play by the rules. I already have plenty of those kinds of places in my life.
For example, lately I’ve lost interest in Twitter. While I still auto-tweet some blogposts and post photos of what I’m eating, I don’t generate much new content there nowadays. Instagram, which seemed a lot of fun for awhile, lost a lot of its appeal when it was bought by Facebook. Ditto for Gowalla and Brizzly (Gowalla I miss especially–I liked it early on when I was earning badges and toting items around wherever I traveled). I though maybe Pinterest would be my new digs, that is until Ann Romney joined. That kind of killed it for me. I dabbled a bit in Storify until I realized that it was cross-posting all of my stuff to Facebook. Ugh. Hate applications that go there.
So…I need a new online frontier. Anyone have any suggestions for me?
Note: photo above taken while I was on a western road trip two weeks ago–driving from one end of California to the other…