There is some good that came out of a rough day today, and I would love to share. I…am a published author!!

Please take a look at http://pingzine.com/web-hosting-magazine/pdf/issue-23.pdf, page 57, to read my article.

I can’t even describe how much it amazes me. Even if it’s not the biggest magazine in the whole world, I have this wonderful memory of my first real day at Lunarpages, sitting on the couches up front, watching people I had never met walking around in flip-flops and shorts, seeing the fish tank, watching Customer Support Reps on the phones, and the best part was when I picked up a magazine called PingZine and my future boss Amy told me, “Oh yeah, I have a couple articles in there” in passing. I read them, of course, and was blown away. I silently wondered, “I wonder if I’ll ever be published here someday…”

And it’s surreal knowing I am. I enjoy the magazine myself, so it’s a bigger pat on the back for me, and just a really decent accomplishment in my life that I’m so incredibly proud of.

I received a letter today from Dean Garner. The purpose was, as I knew it would be, to ask for donations for the Honors College. Last year, I kind of scoffed at it because I was dirt poor. His letter this time really made me think, though.  If not for the Honors College, I honestly have no clue what would have happened to me. I’m sure I’d have gone to college…but would I really have? And what college would it have been? Would I have remained in St. Louis, never met the wonderful friends I made at Adelphi or had those phenomenal experiences I had there? Would I have wanted to be a writer or would I still be flailing at music composition, wishing for Broadway? Would I have moved out with Adriann? Would I even have loved her?

The Honors College was such a huge part of my life. The experiences there touched me in a way few things will, I think, because those experiences were things I could have never done without that place. Without Dean Garner, who called my house to interview me, and when I told him my favorite novel was The Fountainhead, he said it was one of his as well and had I ever read any of her other novels or this or that book? I remember vividly sitting on the floor in my bedroom, talking to Dean Garner, and visualizing him sitting around a huge oak table with a bunch of other hugely important professors who didn’t care about me. And then when I visited the Honors College with my mom, he welcomed us in front of everyone else, remembered my name and my mom’s name and where we were from and my favorite book and musicals.

Every time my mom came up to see me, he engaged her in conversation, really listened and talked to her, and had a great time. He wished me well at graduation, hugged me and said that even though they pronounced my name wrong, he would still miss me.

;___; Blah…it tears me up thinking about him, about the Honors College, about Adelphi and college… Do people miss things the way I miss them? Am I putting more emphasis on these feelings than I should, lamenting things that maybe aren’t so important or life-altering? I don’t know how anyone else feels…I just miss these things so terribly at times, it’s heartbreaking. I don’t know how to properly vocalize what I feel.

In short, I would really like to donate to the Honors College. $50 or whatever I can do will assure some other kid there has the opportunities I did, can do the things I loved so much. Without my own scholarship, I would have struggled to figure out how to attend. It would have been a nightmare. I really hope my contribution can assist in some small way.

Will 2.0 Save the Web?

“Web 2.0” is either the greatest buzzword of the century or the worst, depending on what your definition is. And let’s be honest, how many people actually give it a proper definition? Lately, everyone and their brother have been throwing the term around like confetti on New Year’s Eve. The definition in Wikipedia (ehem, speaking of 2.0!) is the one most people refer to and the one I choose to believe to start, so let’s review it:

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a perceived or proposed second generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.

What everyone agrees on is that Web 2.0 is about social networking. Sites like Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook are prime examples of the burgeoning need to create communities that revolve around one simple thing – the user.

Let’s go back to 1998. I’m about 14 years old, I have glasses half the size of my head, a curly perm of hair down to my butt, I’ve just entered high school, and I’m angsty. “Mother,” I say, because I’m too snotty to just say ‘mom’, “We need a computer.” Now while many of you may have had computers back then without qualms, it was a bit of a to-do for my family, considering no one but me really cared one way or the other what WWW stood for. I was extremely conscious of the importance of this tool, because I saw the potential in communicating in a new form. I hated the phone, you can’t talk to a TV, and I was incredibly shy – the internet was perfect.

Whatever it was back then, we (or some people) refer to it as “Web 1.0”, the beginning of the World Wide Web. Back then I, like many others, connected to the internet via AOL, accessed chatrooms based on that browsing system, and found the concept of instant messaging to be phenomenal and almost mind-boggling. I was young, naïve, and I created flashy, ugly webpages just like everyone else. I knew how to insert pictures, highlight or bold text, and how to make an image look like water. ;) I was ahead of my years. I could have been a “web designer” back then, because I knew 1) how to set up a free website, 2) how to manage that website, and 3) how to slap a background and some text on it.

But Web 2.0 suggests we are moving forward. This is the second generation of the Internet, and if I wanted to be a web designer now, I’d have to know CSS, PHP, HTML, Ajax, and/or Ruby on Rails. Clearly, my puny little water-wave websites with flashing candles and pink text wouldn’t do the trick, and obviously no one would pay me to make a website. Unless you’re trying to win some kind of “ugliest website alive” contest, in which case my prices are quite reasonable.

In Web 1.0, I was just a user among users, and I had no control. Sure, I could create a website but that didn’t mean anyone would care, and if they did, how would I know? “Guestbooks” and email were the closest and only forms of communication between webmasters and their users, clients, and surfers. There was literally no connection – it was, as I saw it written somewhere, one brochure after another without correlation.

Web 2.0 has changed everything. In this new generation, the internet is clean, classy, and only gets better with age. The more people use 2.0 products, the better they become and the smarter to boot.

Look at Wikipedia.org for example. A few years ago, I laughed at its creativity and now it is arguably one of the most important forms of information on the internet, not because its anything reputable or because it was written by someone with a PhD but because the masses have control. Or Myspace.com, which, five years ago, I couldn’t have cared less about but which I am not attempting to sever an addiction to. Myspace’s success had nothing to do with marketing tactics or flashy design (it’s probably the ugliest website ever) – it was all controlled carefully by the best kind of advertisement – word-of-mouth. Joe told Tim, who told Susie, who told Larry, who told Patricia, who told Jenn, who told me, and now I have 300 friends and Tom to thank for my full-blown addiction.

Now that 2.0 has made it to the cover of Time Magazine, I think people are really starting to let the backlash rip. They’re saying it’s a passing fad, that Web 2.0 is “merely” social marketing and hippie mentality. They say there really isn’t anything we can gain from this simple ‘trend’ and that it is just that, a trend. It will pass, and they can’t wait.

But will Web 2.0 really pass?

The answer is yes, mostly because everything passes but more because it’s a stepping stone to whatever Web 3.0 is. What excites me most is that nothing on the internet can last forever and the evolution is what drives a fad to become a lasting effect on the world. Web 2.0 has certainly influenced how business is done, how websites are run, and proves that there is still power in a single person who wants to make a change.

The WWW is revolutionizing itself right under our feet. Or, excuse me, we are revolutionizing the way the WWW is run and the old corporate bulldogs that once black-listed any peons under their weight (AOL, Yahoo, Google) are slowly but surely being replaced by smaller-but-better underdogs who want to save the world and all of us lowly peasants beside them. Places like Myspace and Digg start out incredibly small and snowball out of control; where it took a million users, a million dollars, and a million ad campaigns to populate AOL, it takes little but word-of-mouth to take Myspace from a whisper to a shout, to bring Digg into people’s vocabulary (I was “dugg” yesterday and I shall “digg” today).

Thus is the world of Web 2.0, a world in which the masses of people run the show.

For the most part, anyway. ;) There’s always a catch, and I think the catch with Web 2.0 is the fact that places like Myspace, Friendster, Tagword, TheFaceBook are just poor clones of the original good idea. Myspace was, when it was created, a good idea. “You want to make friends?” it asked, and we all said, “well…well yeah we want to make friends!” And so it beckoned, “Then join us!” And we did. And we made friends. And we ranked our Top 8 and made it into the biggest deal in the world, citing and ending friendships on the premise of a trivial list of faces. Then, people started taking advantage of the freedom. Myspace had to sell adspace (had is perhaps not the word; maybe Myspace just did), the ads kept getting more and more terrible and annoying, and then users created accounts just to spam like always. What started as a peaceful way to meet and make friends, to keep in touch and blog for fun, became a haven for rapists, child molestors, and idiots. What began as a fun way to show who your best friends are began to be taken seriously, ranked and rated, and then expanded because Top 8 was just too few.

It’s the end of Myspace, I feel, not just because I’ve deserted it but because it’s honestly not working anymore. I read something about 40% of the people on Myspace are over 30 and it really depressed me, partially because I feel that Myspace’s innocence has been tarnished and partially because two years ago Myspace was underground, understood, and just damn cool. And now, your aunt and grandma can surf it and find out that you’re a closetted homosexual and ruin your life by telling your mom. This hasn’t happened to me, but I’m sure to many others. And not just the fact that 30-year-olds are considered “old” and that seems to make Myspace by relation just as old, but because of the ads, because of the lack of working servers, because of poor management and too much publicity, Myspace is going to die. And sadly, I won’t morn it, neither will anyone else, and when it’s packed full of soccer moms and businessfolk looking to connect, it will be a different kind of site and perhaps a little sadly, there will never be anything like it.

Or will there?

Web 2.0, as I see it, is about connection. And when connection no longer works or is severed, there’s something wrong. With Myspace, there’s no way to fix it. With the new sites like Digg, de.licio.us, clipclip, ChaCha, etc., stand a chance, but the moment their moment comes, it’s the end. So I guess 2.0 is half connection (a way for us all to have some control over this online world) and half the fury of the underground, the way it used to feel to blog and the way it feels when you stumble upon a site so precious you wish no one else could have it yet you want the world to discover it from you.

Yeah, there’s my two (thousand) cents. After being bombarded with “web 2.0″ this and that at work, I finally have my say. For the moment. I know it’s disjointed and the like, but someday I’ll refine it and clean it up.