a new requirement

So I've been busier at work the last couple of days, and also thinking about what's next for 2006. Part of it's been about work, part about what to do with my copious free time (other than child and house maintenance). Some of that is small scale stuff, like making sure I read more books, and some of it is bigger picture, like do I need to find something new to do, and somewhere new to do it. Not very interesting at the nascent stage, at any rate, which is why I haven't been posting as much the last several days.

Partly I've been thinking about how I interact with the magical world of blogs or other sites that are participatory: it seems like there's very little civility out there, and I get irritated -- at myself -- for wasting my energy on putting something online (at other sites) to have someone be rude because they can, and because there's no social consequence. Is this really a grand step forward in human interactions?

In other words, if part of Web 2.0 (a buzz phrase which seems to have died a death?) is participatory decentralized authoring, what's the value if your decentralized "content creators" act like a bunch of idiots? What if in fact they're not hiding behind the monitor and they are a bunch of idiots?

Let me add that if your blog isn't about certain teams in college football, American politics, or general news and culture, I'm not talking about you. Books, London, Iceland, TEFL in Denmark, cats named Bob and Slinky, carrots, chooks, Australian toddlers, and the best for college football: all good. (is there broader meaning that only one of these is US-based, and that all but two are on Typepad?)

Presumably the answer is that it doesn't matter.

In any case, the only question I need to answer is whether, within the constraints I've set for what I don't cover in this blog, I can still write something interesting with some regularity. Let the games begin!