My alchemical broodings over the past few weeks has finally come to this. I took all these ingredients:

• last.fm – tag, order, publish and discover new music in the social sphere of cyberspace
• del.icio.us – tag, order, publish and discover link in the social sphere of cyberspace
• flickr – tag, order, publish and discover photos in the social sphere of cyberspace
• wikimedia – the open source software for the open source encyclopaedia

To bring it altogether in:

• wordpress – a highly flexible and customizable blogging tool.

I started with a Xanga blog in 2003, but only got into it full force with the encouragement that mytwu.ca gave me and others. Everyone quickly graduated the Kindergarten years of mytwu.ca and embraced xanga. There they played, battled, and at times donned the ugliest coloured skins. But now grade school has come and the bright yellow bus is on its way.

Tagging, blogging, and establishing your own domain somewhere along the cyber lines became the mature thing to do. Journalists, lawyers, and musicians (plus their wives) are among the many who realize the importance of finding themselves in cyberspace wherefrom they may centre their efforts of self discovery and self expression.

Is this about branding or is it merely narcissistic? I don’t know – only stats and the number of comments one gets can satisfy these answers. And I think most know what kind of vicious cycle of thinking that leads to.

No, I think living online (blogging, flickring, etc) has to be done for the same reasons as for living offline. It has to be for your self, while at the same time recognizing our social context.

Xanga was popular, because it placed the mytwu preschool graduates online together. We had our subscriptions, blogrings and stalker lists there to bring and hold us together in a semi protected environment. That these things disproportionately matter so much are the stuff of a people who live in a bubble.

del.icio.us, flickr, last.fm and wordpress (and for the daring, wikimedia) pops the artificial bubble of Xanga and  opens one up to greater potentiality, more balanced by the importance that social systems like del.icio.us, flickr, and wordpress (with its superior integration into search services like technorati and its syndication technologies) place on identification (reading, photographing, tagging, describing) over identity (stats, comments, subscriptions).