Twitter to Blogs: “You are so yesterday”

Just when I thought I had got to the bottom of this whole blog thing, along comes Twitter to mess with my head. What is the point of it? People keep saying to me “Websites and blogs are so old fashioned, Brian. You need to move on to Twitter. That’s where all the young, funky people are hanging out these days. Blogs are for fuddy duddies. You might as well be a medieval monk writing an illuminated manuscript on calfskin, or chipping out cuneiform characters onto a clay tablet in Ancient Sumeria.”

I’ve lost count of the amount of people who have come up to me and said this. It could be as many as zero. Possibly even less.

Personally I’m a bit worried about Twitter. I hear it could be dangerous for one’s mental health. Apparently the “King of Tweeting” Stephen Fry, went into a depressed sulk when someone dared to call his tweets “a bit boring”. But the sulk was only temporary, and Fry is now back tweeting like the bejaysus. This modern day Oscar Wilde has been using the latest “killer app” to share his wit with over a million followers: “To the airport. My damned book almost certainly hasn't been writing itself while I've been here in Barcelona. Curses.” “Breakfast with Horace Luke and John Wang of HTC. Amazing fellows.” “Must be bedtime. Ner-night”. “Happier than a happy person can be that LGG won 3 Brit awards. Raa raa uh-uh aah”. “Flying later. V excited about the Mobile World Congress” “Some models of iPad will have 3G as well as WiFi”.

I dunno. When I read web content of this quality, it makes me want to give up blogging in despair.

[Incidentally, for those of you who aren’t quite as in the with the in-crowd as national treasure Stephen Fry, LGG stands for Lady Gaga, who is a pop star.]

Anyway, I am going to approach Twitter with an open mind. Stay tuned for my final verdict, which I will publish next week.

A Meditation on Google Earth

Anyone else out there obsessed with Google Earth? People who know me will be aware that I have a habit of reading the atlas for hours on end, pouring over maps of faraway places, imagining what they are like. So you can guess how I excited I get about Google Earth. Since it came along I have visited the Antarctic, gone on a road trip across America, taken in the view from the top of Mount Everest, flown over the Sahara desert, explored the valleys of the Hindu Kush, island hopped in the Caribbean, strolled through the streets of Paris at evening, and gone on a cruise up the Yangtze River starting at Shanghai. Pictured above is an image of New York from Google Earth. Why, only last weekend I took a tour of the Alps in the morning (really quite beautiful), before flying down to Tuscany in the afternoon to have a poke around some of its stunning Renaissance towns. My adventures haven't even been confined to planet earth - I've also glided over the surface of the moon, and wandered through the galaxies using Google Sky. By zooming in on the night sky you get a sense of how big the universe is. It’s very big indeed. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that it is better to not think too much about just how big it is.

All of this raises a tricky question: is there any need to travel anywhere any more? Why bother? I think the only remaining reason to travel is the smells. And Google are doubtless working on an application that will bring us the aromas of every location on the planet - Google Scent. Once that is available, there really will be no need for me to ever leave my bedroom again, and humanity will have attained its ultimate end.

Isn't it a little bit sad that there is nothing left to imagine any more? Never again will we dream of remote, mysterious places, because all those places are right in front of our eyes anytime we want them.