Map of the online world

I haven’t blogged in a while.  Today, I look at my email and I realize that I am just a drop of water in the ocean of bloggers.  I am my own drop, but to you, fair reader, I am still merely one of many.

That is why I say to you, fairest, dearest reader, go out and read.  Read like you have never read before.  Read from voices both shrill and syrupy, read from the blogs of blogger and the live journals of livejournal.  Read and absorb people.  Do not simply absorb text, think about who we are as a people.  If you are a parent you should know that now 57% of teens have created web content, either a blog or a website.  This is the sort of thing that gives a person pause.  It makes you wonder.

Let me please wonder aloud for a brief instant.  We have an online society now.  A database of people’s thoughts, methods, and attitudes that only seems to grow.  We have moved beyond just cataloguing websites and have moved on to tagging things.  This is an entry about people, teens, society, the internet, livejournal, Google (in the age of tags, one must name-drop).  Beyond this, though, we are in a time in which perspective over the internet will be a hot commodity.

Thomas Friedman, oh emblem of American “internationalism” (by this I mean, Americans who talk about things outside of the borders of the United States, however reductively), yes, I daresay, THE Thomas Friedman, has deemed our world now “flat.”  Whatever the merits of this point, I can say this: a web-resource that permits people to see, perhaps in an interactive graphic, a map of online content would be far from remiss.  It would downright rock.  I would love to be able to scour the world of graphic designers’ websites in a format that allows me to localize them.  Mouse over a part of a roadmap and a tree of design sites flowers before your eyes.

At this instant, by articulating this idea, this simulacrum of a web-experience, I am anticipating, as Baudrillard might comment, that there is already something or somebody attempting to fulfill the parameters of this fantasy and that I can probably find such a website although it almost certainly wont be what I have envisioned, unless someone has gotten ahold of a wide array of detritus and made bitmaps of them.  Clown costumes, mounted antlers, rings and teeth dug up from peoples’ backyards, you know, all the good stuff.

So fulfill my damned simulacrum, people.  Do it!  Do it now!!!!!

And email me the link when you’re done.

Anyhow, I still dig reality.  Sometimes too much.