The Classic (Un)Social

There’s a general climate of calmness as the telco industry enters the Summer season in earnest and starts revising plans for Autumn, and it’s starting to show in my neck of the woods.

Sort of. Work has been steady, and I’ve been keeping things ticking by listening to oodles of classical – we picked up a couple of “Bach”:CD:B00062FLII and “Handel”:CD:B00062FLI8 collections a few weeks ago, and the Baroque Music stream at 1.fm fills in the gaps whenever I need to concentrate at work, helping me revisit the joys of melody and counterpoint in this day and age of guitar players and “popsicle” songs.

And yet, sometimes I look at technology websites and wonder if everyone is going bananas, since all news seems to fit into one of five categories:

  • Preposterous rumors of every possible kind
  • Sales volumes comparisons for games consoles (go Wii!)
  • Utterly random stuff about that doesn’t seem to ever get anywhere
  • People linking to people who linked to things
  • Musings about how to harness some minor chirp in the social networking landscape (which is erupting with acne) into a business model.

Which is kind of puzzling to me. I’ve recently been invited to Jaiku (you’ll find my RSS feed there, but nothing else), avoid MySpace like the plague, use only occasionally (and only then because it lets me keep track of friends via ), and can’t quite figure out yet – and it doesn’t feel like I ever will, really.

I have long left the mess that is Orkut, am beginning to snap back at the idiots who keep inviting me to Hi5 and have very little interest in anything but LinkedIn, so I think I’m definitely not the online social type.

So it is with mild boredom that I watch the Pownce unfold, (even if they are using Adobe AIR for their client), since it all feels like a million pinpricks of attrition fighting for our attention and keeping us from actually doing stuff.

That said, I’m going to follow suit and get some stuff done – my desktop is in dire need of a thorough cleaning, for starters.