There’s a lot of thoughts that have been milling around in my head for the last week or so and I have tried more than a few times to start writing a couple of different posts about related ideas but could never get past the first paragraph or two. It is like I was trying to wade through mental molasses where no matter how hard I tried there was just no real feeling - or as they like to call it in the blogosphere - passion.

How many times have you seen it mentioned in posts about blogging? You gotta have passion about what you are writing about if you want to attract and keep readers. It’s not that I lost my passion about writing but more like what the hell part of the wide wonderful world of the internet and technology do I have this passion for. I’ve always been a jack of all trades; and master of none, type of person. I have always been fascinated by by a wide variety of things. Whether it be from philosophical thought to learning a new programming language to music to cool computer hardware.

Through it all though is a basic realism - well I think of it as realism - that no matter how high our collective idealism might be it is all affected by our base human nature. In the tech blogosphere I have seen this high level idealism which has been collectively labeled as Web 2.0 reach ever new levels while often ignoring how real people live and interact with technology. Maybe this feeling comes from becoming jaded after playing to long on the cutting edge of new web technologies that seem to want us to forsake everything that has come before.

I have a lot of respect for my good blogging friend Louis Gray who can see a trend in where his attention is being taken and turn that into an good solid opportunity that will most likely increase his profile within the blogosphere - and it fits in with his passion. When I look at things like Web 2.0 and cloud computing I don’t just see things like link blog aggregators or cool social network things like Twitter. No - what I also see are things like a headlong rush into technologies without considering privacy, security or social implications when these cool technologies start interacting with real instances of human nature. What I see over reliance on the false belief that we live in a world of ubiquitous high speed internet access that is equitably available to all people.

The fact is that we don’t and as long as the pipe providers believe that they hold the keys to a true world wide internet we never will. As long as these providers believe that they have the right to control what is freely given we will never have a true Web 2.0 let alone a Web 3.0 .. 4.0 .. 5.0 etc. As long as the governments and corporations feel that they have the right to spy on our online activities we will never have a safe and secure internet. While the idea of cloud computing seems to be an ideal solution that has this collective idealism known as Web 2.0 literally creaming in its jeans over the perceived potential to created ever increasing web based applications that will free us from the tyranny of desktop application corporations like Microsoft.

I say perceived because the fact is that all they are doing is trading one master for another. Sure you can use web based software from anywhere in the world and that is a cool concept in contrast to being data bound to a single machine but the reality is that your data is being held by whatever data center is a part of the computing cloud those web apps live on. The moment you type in whatever it is you want saved it now longer is yours or in your control.

Sure the collective Web 2.0 idealism suggests that this is okay because these cloud computing providers don’t really care about what is there but this again is ignoring the whole real world human nature part of our world. For every good idealized person there is a person, a group or company that isn’t so idealized. They don’t respect or care about any perceived goodness of the web. For them it is all about profit at any cost by any means. That is human nature.

This is not to say that there isn’t a place for Web 2.0 applications but this over reliance on living within a browser doesn’t make any sense given the incredible computing power that we have sitting on our desks or on out laps. It’s not like we’re going to stop moving forward with computer development - that would be totally against our nature. So why do we think that the end all be all of applications are the ones that operate within one of those many tabs of your browser. This isn’t even taking into count the basic insecurity of those various browser we want to transport our personal information through to that collective cloud of data centers own by a corporation.

In a post today Paul O’Flaherty wishes that we could kill the browser

It’s awesome that we can do so many things from inside our browsers but sometimes I don’t want to boot Firefox in order to be on UStream or Blog TV.

I realize that he is not calling for the end of the browser per se - I’m not that foolish - but what I think he is asking for is some sensibility, some realism that not everything has to sit in a browser window.

Myself I find I very rarely use a browser. When I do fire it up it is more out of habit than anything else. Maybe this is why I have such a hard time getting this whole application in a browser thing; or living within a browser for all our information needs. Where I do find myself spending most of my time is in FeedDemon. It is my principal window to the web via the RSS feeds I read or new blogs I find by clicking on the links in the posts. Even here though I find myself irritated by things like the tabbed windows. I truly get how they are a handy way to access a lot of different things from within one application but again given technological growth and the availability of multi monitor setups tabbed interfaces are not as productive as we might think they are.

Sure for laptop users or desktops with single monitors they can be a saving grace but come on if you have two or more monitors let’s use them. Nothing irritates me more than having to flip through tabbed window after tabbed window as I try and research things or try and piece together a coherent post based on blog posts I have open in the multitude of tabs in FeedDemon. There is nothing productive about that - if anything it slows me down because I am having to constantly flip through the different tabs to pull all the pieces together. Now if I had an option to have the selected post in the feed displayed in a totally separate form or window that I can position anywhere I please on my monitors I would be able to move from post to post just by moving my eyes - now that is being productive.

While I might get cranky at times over the whole gushing enthusiasm over this collective Web 2.0 idealism I don’t deny that there is a place for web based applications or collection points for our data and information. But to think that we are even at a point where the desktop is becoming irrelevant is misplaced. I love the web and everything that it brings to our real world. The interaction, the friendships that can be formed, the incredible ways in which we can learn new things. This is the beauty of the internet and what keeps me coming back day after day.

As I said above I have immense respect for bloggers like Louis who can concentrate on one part of their passions and make it interesting to learn about or able to inform of us of new things in a way that makes us want to check them out. I wish I had that ability but I don’t because for me the web is far to wide and human nature is too much of the unspoken player in how we use it. For me as well the desktop is still more important than living on the web via the browser which makes it difficult to do more than look from the edges at the whole web application way of doing things.

The challenge for me I guess is like Louis makes the web stuff interesting to read about I have to find my way to make what I believe in interesting and compelling enough to encourage people to read those thoughts.

For anyone left at the end of this post - thanks and let me know your thoughts on anything I have written here. I am truly interested in your opinions on all this.

Conversation Tags: Web 2.0, browsers, internet, technology, FeedDemon, idealism