Rich Manalang is taking a back seat and suspending some but not all of his online activities which is an interesting exercise I will follow as it unfolds. Or, rather I won’t, because he won’t be blogging about it. I suppose I could always email him at work.
I suspect Google Buzz was the final nail in his Web coffin. It certainly was for me. The privacy issues, the multiple, loud and prolonged orgasms from the Technorati, the same old avatars gradually showing up in my ‘Friends’ list quickly followed by the immediate same sense of ‘Emperors New Clothes’ and the inevitable post coital cigarette: ‘How was it for you, darling ?’
Rich’s decision to take a step back interests me as in the past, on at least two occasions, I have gone slightly further and committed Web 2.0 suicide. This entailed spontaneously and maliciously terminating a bunch of accounts on FriendFeed, Tumblr, LinkedIn and elsewhere. Of course, it didn’t last and in due course I miraculously resurrected myself - but after slightly longer than three days.
What I find slightly odd about Rich’s decision is that he will preserve ‘IM and email’ - I presume he means in order to work but maybe he includes personal use too - but he then goes on to include Google Reader as he finds ‘GR adds order to the chaos’. I agree completely although I think the experiment would be much more interesting if he ditched GR and idle Web browsing for that matter too.
I suspect if I embarked on a similar exercise I would revert to scanning my small set of favoured Web sites. I also suspect, and it sounds slightly counter intuitive, that I would find lots more to blog about. Of course, Rich can’t blog more because blogging is also suspended during this hiatus period. I also find this odd as he states outputs (5%) are much more valuable, but greatly outnumbered by, endless, mindless consumption (95%) so it would be interesting to see whether his outputs increase as a result of his self-imposed exile.