Thursday, August 10, 2006

Geeks, the web, and demographics

I just got an email from a friend who said "I read your blog. I enjoyed the bits that weren't over my head :-)". I realized I need to be blogging about non-technical stuff (I thought I already was :-)). The timing of my friend's remark coincides with a thought I had about the other day, which applies to much of the "cool stuff" on the web these days; the web is still too geeky. digg's categories are flooded with what a technically inclined demographic would "dig"; just one step removed from

I fit into some technically inclined demographic, but most people don't. I worry that we're still not building solutions, sites, applications, and tools for the masses. Of course there are the social networking sites of the world, which put simple "profile" pages in the hands of the relatively non-technical (and relatively young demographic; I'm in my early 30s), but still, most people don't, or can't, even use those.

Sometimes I think we're (the technically inclined web using, and building demographic) all in some self fulfilling cycle, and it's all the same demographic kicking up all the same dust over and over again. I subscribe to the belief that in order to move the planet forward, such a demographic does need to exist (Apple Inc, first movers, geeks, etc) in all fields, but I guess I find I don't always fit a specific demographic, and I find myself, as a builder of technology and applications, just wanting to be a user sometimes; and a happy user at that.

Oh great! Another geeky blog posting. I need to get a handle on this. Maybe two separate blogs.


cyberstever said...

If you think is too geeky, perhaps you should try a news site with more breadth - .  Hidden gems include: pages with news about each town in the US and every major city in the world (+another 360,000 other topics), search results that go back over a year and include a visual representation of the amount of news on that subject for each day, it works well on your blackberry, treo, etc. Type in a zipcode, your favorite sports team, or whatever and give it a try.  BTW, its good to know that someone's still at AOL that I know. :-)

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