6 comments

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  Amit

  1 year ago

  I think it's important to segregate static information which forms a low barrier to knowing "about you" and the stuff which is active, that forms an ambient view to yourself temporally, which is where your activity renders. Hence, I don't think the personal homepage is dead.
  
  Far from it, what is more important is using your personal homepage as the owner of your web-wide identity. For example, my single authoritative FOAF file could be just at amitkoth.com, with other FOAF publishers being a subset of my master.
  
  In a new age where identity is also centralised e.g. OpenID, it is also very useful to have a personal homepage to actually run your identity, if you're techie enough to do that.
  
  In addition, a personal homepage essentially uses "live widgets" to still achieve the same purpose - tell people about yourself. While before you pasted in picture galleries our your site, you can now pop in a light FlickR widget to show your photos. In fact, if you think about it, the smart services should be attacking how to widgetise an old style personal homepage. Your professional background could easily pull in your LinkedIn profile in a widget as a replacement, and so on.
  
  The secret sauce to a killer service for public use is to see - what used to be on personal homepages? How can each bit be widgetised? Usually, it takes the form of a rich content system, like FlickR replacing the need to have your own photo gallery.
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  Vitak

  1 year ago

  When I wrote my first webpage page in, um, (cough cough) 1998, it included a lot of information and stories about the things I was interested in the time. Having a personal blog, I don't see it as too different than that personal webpage I had 10 years ago. While I don't include pictures of me or intimate details about my life (which I don't do anywhere on the web except my SNS profile pages, and I don't include much information there), my blog offers great insight into who I am through my thoughts on topics that matter to me.
  
  Being in academia, I know that a lot of people in my profession still maintain personal homepages with their CVs, their class information, etc. They use those pages as a form of validation, as if to say, "You can trust the journal articles I have published because look at everything else I have done." For us, it's essential to maintain an air of legitimacy.
  
  That said, I completely agree that SNSs have replaced the personal homepages of a decade ago. They are much easier to create and maintain, and they are linked directly to all of that person's "friends'" pages. I mean, how much simpler can you get than the Facebook interface?
  
  Finally, kids today are still being very creative via the Internet, just not necessarily through personal homepages. In the Pew Internet Project's "Teens and Social Media" report from Dec. 2007, they reported the following stats regarding teens' (12-17 year-olds) use of social media:
  
  * 39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos, up from 33% in 2004.
  * 33% create or work on webpages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments, basically unchanged from 2004 (32%).
  * 28% have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19% in 2004.
  * 27% maintain their own personal webpage, up from 22% in 2004.
  * 26% remix content they find online into their own creations, up from 19% in 2004.
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  my profile on BigLife social n

  1 year ago

  I think my profile page on the BigLife.ws site is a perfect example of what you are talking about. I can cname any domain name directly to it. It's a nice blend of personal and business and it's on a social network which is a good fit for me. Having it on BigLife.ws means I get good pagerank too for any keywords I have on my page. I haven't yet pasted a twitter or friendfeed widget on there but plan to.
  ~V
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  whitneymcn

  1 year ago

  I just recently re-entered the world of people who have a "personal Web page." I'm in the camp of people who create a lot of stuff here and there across the Web, and I got tired of trying to decide which URL made sense to pass to others in a given situation (and, for that matter, tired of trying to remember all the URLs), so I created a sort of homepage for the first time in years.
  
  The page, however, is nothing but a hub: simply links to the sites that I've created or use regularly (http://absono.us). I've seen a number of others take a similar approach, as well; so much of our activity online is tied to specific sites that pointers make more sense than a ca. 1999 home page.
  
  My resume? On LinkedIn, no point in retyping it. Cool links I've found? All on del.icio.us already. You want to know what music I like and listen to? The Hype Machine already keeps track of that for me, why would I maintain another list?
  
  The Web offers us far better tools to capture the different aspects of ourselves now, making links and pointers a much simpler, low-friction approach to offering an online presence.
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  Josue

  1 year ago

  @whitneymcn that's exactly what I ended up doing a few months ago =)
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  Andrea Hill (afhill)

  1 year ago

  My URL "home page" just points to my blogs, an outdated portfolio, and my lifestream. I figure people can choose to follow me however they wish from there.
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