Slashdot Mirror
Why Personal Websites Matter
latif writes "Lately personal websites have fallen out of fashion. Some term them as vanity sites, and others are scared of privacy concerns. The article Why Personal Websites Matter discusses some reasons as to why they have to be embraced to stay competitive." I see the personal website as the virtual equivalent of the front of one's home, except that most virtual homes have large signs in the front yard that give a running play-by-play of the inhabitants. Just like one's home, it may be prone to vandalism, but it's far easier to make one's website be an expression of oneself, than to put up large signs outside!
Personal websites are a good idea, in theory -- but, in practice, there are far too many useless, egotistical homepages. That was maybe acceptable in the infancy of the internet, but people are getting smarter now. Blogs are better because they give what people care about -- your opinions and knowledge -- without the self-advertising.
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
I don't know about you, but work is a large part of my life. Seems that the corporate control of the net has kicked in once again...
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Rate Naked People (Not work-safe)
for prospective employers to beat you with. When a cv comes in, do a Google for the person's name, check them out, their hobbies, their faith, their habits..... Result: Interviewer knows more about the interviewee than the interviewee knows about the company.
I think personal websites are cool back in the day when... well, HTML isn't so complicated, and the average website is a few tables with a few pictures.
now, if you would just look at the mountains of shit you'd have to sift through to make a site (try webmonkey.com), it's unreal! Just to make a simple but reasonblly respectable* site would need two years of university education if you never done it before.
And what I mean by respectable is that - on average, websites have became much more feature rich, the graphics much better, the content more frequently updated, etc. That little website you used to use as a homepage that's hacked up in an afternoon looks by today's standards simply pathetic - and people know this. They fudge around with building a site and then find out, man this is a lot of work and not worth it.
Besides, there are millions of places online where you can do exactly what you would have be doing on your own site anyway - I keep my journal on slashdot; I get a whole comment feedback system without having had to muck with CGI code / HTML / site design / debugging / server troubleshooting, and so on. Now, eventually I would like to port it to something myself just to have a little more control over it, but really, even if I think about it now, it's not worth the trouble - and keeping a blog online would be exactly the same thing I'd be doing if I had my website, so this simply removes a lot of the hassle.
So, similarly as people don't all do the painting / maintenance of their home by themselves, website I think comes the same way - it's the tradeoff between convenience of something prepackaged (weblog sites, say) vs something custom, and the amount of effort needed for that little custom isn't always worthwhile in all cases.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
In the case of PWSs, obviously there is often vanity or some form of craziness, but equally often people use them to keep geographically distant relatives up to date on the growth of children etc., or on whatever activity might be of common interest.
And even in the craziest of implementations, it could be reasonably said that at least it takes a bit more intelligence to design a web page than it does to plunk down $3000 for fancy wheels and tires for a car.
Of course the guy with the car generally gains some ancillary benefits woefully unavailable to the guy who sits in his room coding HTML.
"Damn, Paris, why do you have to stop doing that to answer your cell phone? Get back to work so I can finish my post on Slashdot!"
Personal websites seem to be taking off - as blogs.
Blogs are an interesting thing really - a published diary - in realtime.
I don't really see them as important though. It is like my preference of topic-oriented discussion vs. person-oriented discussion - so it is natural for me to prefer a site dedicated to a certain topic.
I have learned much of what I know about computing and other technological-related subjects from web sites, usually personal ones.
To repay this benefit, I think it's important that I provide information where:
My cases in point are my HTML tutorial and my guitar chord tutorial, both of which address their subject matter in a way not found on (many) other sites. These tutorials have (from my logs) proved to be very popular.
I actually had a discussion about this with one of my friends awhile back. It seemed back around '97 or so you could make a web page, submit it to AltaVista, Infoseek, and HotBot and be almost certain of a steady trickle of hits. For example, my younger brother made a web page about all his pets, and then later added pictures of his wristwatch collection. It used to be just having matching keywords was enough to get your page noticed. Pretty much in the same period of time Google became popular, the hits on his site ground to a halt.
Personal websites are at a disadvantage under Google's Pagerank system. A new page isn't going to have many other pages linking to it, and for the most part, personal webpages won't end up with many other pages linking to them unless the content is very popular. Google has created a kind of catch-22 situation... You have to already be popular to get a good Pageranking. The system is great for indexing an existing web of sites, but poor for allowing new sites to get exposure.
I just remember running into personal webpages far more often back in the days when AltaVista, and Infoseek ruled, before the spam sites started abusing keywords. I'm sure Google didn't intend to turn the Internet into a popularity contest, but it would be interesting if they added user-adjustable features like Slashdot's moderation modifiers so you could give a higher (or lower) bias towards personal webpages.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
I originally created my website to share my ideas and opinions on the world, but I realised that there is already too much out there (the blog-boom?) and I didn't need to be an endless source of flames.
Now my site has taken a new edge to it, it no longer related to anybody but those who know me and live around me. Some people would concider my site to be of any marketable or even personal value anymore, but it doesn't matter. The only people who matter are the people who you want it to matter to (seriously, how many of you think that people in a fridge or road cones on buildings matter?).
PaulGraham.Com and Stallman.Org are websites of two well-known individuals in the computing industry. The two websites make very different statements about the respective individuals. Paul Graham's site is neat, and organized. Richard M. Stallman's site has lots of information and links related to his idealogies. Even the choice of the domain name reflects something about their personalities. Paul Graham has chosen a dot com, while Stallman prefers a dot org.
Ummm. Exactaly what does the ending tell about the person? Is Stallman an entire organization? Is Graham a commercial operation? What does a dot net say about me?
But I think many people have missed the point of personal websites. Just because they're on the Word Wide Web it doesn't mean your audience should be everybody in the world. Many people set up websites intended to be viewed by a small group of people (such as family photo albums who nobody but family or close friends would be interested in).
Also, how many people who design websites for a living today started off by knocking up a basic website? Most likely it was the equivalent of a "Hello World!" example, and the most readily available content was most likely all about you. Now, unless you were particularly eccentric its unlikely you ever intended this to be seen by thousands of people, but it was still a necessary stage in your learning process.
So stop being website snobs - there's enough room on the net for everyone!
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Just as there were tedious people writing cruddy webpages there are tedious people writing drivel in their blogs. At least their godawful webpages tended not to clog up google so badly.
;-)
A semi-static[0] personal web page, if written correctly, provides the best solution. It can include everything people might want to know about you, including your opinions and views; it's low-maintenance (you only need add articles every now and again, when there is important stuff that needs adding) and people are far more likely to read one or two thoughtful, well-written[1] articles written on such a site than the reams of semi-literate journal entries most blogs seem to consist of.
As you might guess, I'm not the world's biggest blog fan
[0] Updated, but only infrequently and with important stuff, not how you're pissed at rasterman today because enlightenment crashed on you.
[1] If you only add an article every now and then you can afford to spend some time and write it well.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
...to paraphrase.
The vast majority of personal websites suck. This is a fact. The ones that don't suck are really only useful to a handful of people.
When was the last time you wandered through Google results for "personal website"? If I had to venture a guess, not until you clicked through to that link. Yet when was the last time you visited someone's personal website? Again, this is only a guess, but probably within the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours. This is because the content on that site was, at some point, useful to you-- even if you were the one who created it.
I use my personal website (here, if you dare) primarily as a collection of links that I use daily and also as a way to get my PHP and HTML work out there, on exhibit. I have, probably, ten consistent viewers world-wide. Three of them are my mom, dad, and sister. And this is fine for me! Because I know that the content on my site (with the exception of maybe one or two areas explicitly for display) is of relevance to absolutely nobody.
People here are talking about how in the old days of the Internet (which can't be that damned old if I remember them), personal websites contained a diverse variety of information on just about anything, and that these websites formed the backbone of how people did research; some scientist in Alameda's paper on nuclear vessels, posted on his website, was just as valuable as, say, a fan-page devoted to Evangelion by some kid from Buffalo. Nowadays, everything has a website. You can get any information you want about anything straight from the manufacturer, and personal sites be damned; they're only opinions.
Both points are valid. In the "old days" the information you got was still people's opinions, which meant you had to find three or four correlating opinions before you could really judge. Now, personal websites allow us to cut through marketing and P.R. bullcrap, but we still need three or four correlating opinions before we can really judge.
I'm straying from my point. Does anyone here follow anime? Stupid question, right? How do you learn about new releases in Japan? Sure, if you know Japanese, you can check out TV Tokyo or TBS's websites and get the info from them. But odds are you don't (and this is not a slander against those of you who do-- statistically, however, you're in the minority, OK?). So how would you know about releases like (and I'm dating myself here, as the only reference I have handy is a copy of Newtype that's about three months old*) Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, Scrapped Princess, or Sora no Stellvia? Personal sites do allow "niche" sectors like anime (ha ha) and, I dunno, latex doll painters a way to spread information. The personal site is the next step in "word of mouth".
(* Newtype USA is only a year old. Hardly enough basis to say that anime is mainstream now; but that's not what's at issue here. You could just as easily do a google search on latex doll painters and find out more than you ever wanted to know. The point is that Newtype is only one source of information. The internet, and personal websites, provide about fifty zillion other points of view.)
Just to state it clearly here: Less need for personal websites != no need for personal websites.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
What is weird is visiting the web site of someone who has died. Often, their ISP leaves their sites up for years later. It seems strange and sad to learn about their family, pets, sporting activities and plans when you know how things turned out in the end. I believe people often think they will live longer than they do. And I think of the time wasted putting these sites together when they could have been spending the time enjoying themselves in the pub! Nobody ever said on there death bed 'gosh, I wish I'd used a different background for my personal web site'.
I stole this
..said we could all be famous for 15 minutes.
In the web era that translates to: we can all be famous for 15 people.
Indeed, that's about as many as look at my personal web site (www.mvw.net), and I am happy with that. I get to hone my web design and sysadmin skills, my mother gets to see what I am up to, and a few people like to engage in debate which is fine.
And the most important : old friends can find me! My name comes up very early in Google as a result of the personal web sites. Web sites are a bit like business cards in that respect - people don't look at them in a lot of detail but without them you're lost.
Michael
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
If someone's personal homepage mentions a certain hobby in detail, chances are other people will pick up on it and visit that website to see someone else's experience.
I love the homegrown websites about hobbies and cool stuff. It's the corporate websites that have choked the life out of the Internet by making giant sites that cover everything mildly, so I can never find the real content -- from the people!