maybe flickr is cool after all

i just read this article about collective storytelling.

i've also been browsing the very old school and very nearly hideous website of one nathan shedroff. i don't know who he is, but he has some interesting thoughts on design, marketing, and communication.

i sat down after work today and planned to finish the photo essay i'm working on. but things don't feel right if i'm not doing three things at once. so i'm asking brother about time-delayed stylesheets and looking up nathan shedroff on wikipedia (no entry exists, by the way), while at the same time writing this and occasionally switching back to that photo essay. what was i trying to say?

the article on inadvertant net art nods to this kind of fractured attention. we can switch perspectives within this story just by clicking that convenient hyperlink. we can switch stories completely by clicking that convenient next blog button at the top of the browser. it so easy.

my photo essay-in-progress concerns one of the podunk slices of nowhere that float in this green ocean of northwestern missouri. my story of it will be so different from the 67-year-old guy who runs that old gas station and fixes up old cars. for one thing i get to tell mine to the vastness of this internet, as easy as clicking buttons. who will listen to the cranky old 67-year-old? does anyone ever buy gas from him and his old-fashioned gas pumps these days?

but i don't know his story.

i'm just sitting here typing out a short rambling blogpost, adding my chapter to the great and spacious internet story.