Anyway

It’s all too easy to get sucked in to check­ing your Twit­ter and your Plurk and your Brightkite and your Face­book and whatever oth­er ser­vices you use; in my case I can claim I need to know some­thing about how these things work for a pro­ject. In the­ory I’m mak­ing use­ful obser­va­tions of how people inter­act with ser­vices and what value they get from them, but in real­ity I spend a bit more time watch­ing and read­ing than is needed for that. It’s very easy to fol­low tweeted links and then find myself web-surf­ing, just like it was in the early days of the web, when we all watched what came up next on NCSA Mosa­ic’s “What’s New” page. So it’s a little iron­ic that John tweeted a link that made me more aware of the slip­pery slope of online dis­trac­tions, and poten­tial ways to com­bat them. Thanks, John!