Words collide (#dblogcheck)

Once upon a time, the Internet was thought to be like a high-speed road. Some thought of the Information Highway as a path towards unfamiliarity and confusion, much like the Jackie Robinson Parkway which twists and turns through parks and cemeteries before dumping you amid the streets of Brooklyn. Others thought of it as a way to make more distant locales seem closer, like Interstate 80 which can guide me from my home in New Jersey to San Francisco, California without making a single turn. But, like a highway, it was one-dimensional, both in who used it (techy-type people) and what it carried (text.)

Then it went from being one Highway to an intricate lattice of highways that not only crossed continents, but somehow crossed oceans as well. Its reach connected to every type of home and every type of person. They called the network of roads the World Wide Web. Software programmers used little spinning earth-icons to reinforce its long and multi-dimensional reach.

But the World wasn’t big enough for some. They had to make it even bigger and expand the metaphor beyond the third rock from the sun and into space that hasn’t yet been fully discovered. Entering: CyberSpace. Its capabilities had again expanded, but its user-base was lagging.

Eventually, The ‘Net spawned numerous social networks. These brought the non-tech crowd out of their comfort zone, and people like my grandmother signed up and got Facebook accounts. But still, the intergalactic metaphors continued: we saw the rise of things like the Blogosphere and Twitterverse. For a brief moment, people took residence in MySpace (is anyone still there??).

But just when it seemed to be getting too big and chaotic, people started migrating towards others with similar interests or motives, forming Online Communities. The personal interactions became paramount, and nobody really cared about the wires and fiber-optics and hard drives and routing tables that made it all work. To most of us, that stuff just lived ambiguously in The Cloud.

Now where was I going with this….

Image source: Apricum.net

Oh yes, social networks colliding.

I have an online diabetes presence in the blogosphere, the Twitterverse, Facebook-nation, and YouTube town. Do you know how to find me there? Click the icons below my picture on the top-right of the page. (I also have a personal Facebook page which I mostly limit to people I’ve met in real life.) At times, I get notifications from WordPress when people start following my blog — or from Facebook when they like the page — or from Twitter, for reasons I’m not quite sure about. And sometimes I wonder who the people behind these notifications are. Plenty of people who follow me never say anything.

Of course, there are readers who don’t log in, like, or following. To those guests, I have no idea that you’re even here.

So if you’re here, please speak up. Introduce yourself. Say “hi”.

Do it anonymously if you like. The requirement to leave an email address will be turned off for awhile (though your email is never revealed to anybody but me, and I don’t use it anyway).

That’s what Monday, July 22 is all about. It’s “Check-in Day“, the brainchild of Chris at the A Consequence of Hypoglycemia blog.

By realizing the impact and reach of our content. I’m sure we all know that the diabetes community is more than the active 1%, this is just a way to shine some light on the remaining 99%

-Chris Snider