An Essential Persepctive
by Eric and Sean on April 15, 2009
in blogging
Note: Today’s guest post is from Dan Miranda of Command Your Time. Please take the time to read his post as there is an important reveal inside that addresses one of the essential truths of our collective future.
The year was 2003 when I first clicked “Enter” on the Yahoo.com sign up page. I was excited as any young man could have been. I had just received my first e-mail address and it was a more significant moment than I had imagined. Having a virtual home gave me reason to explore the Internet and changed my life forever.
Because of my addiction to sports, the first real website I fell in love with was ESPN.com. I would check once every day to see the latest news and information, and to this day, I still do. There is no doubt that ESPN.com was also another factor that lead to my exploration of websites of all kinds.
Somewhere around 2004, I started playing around with Google. Not only did this introduce me to many new websites, it was soon to become the world’s premier search engine. As you’ll learn later, I was (perhaps surprisingly) always ahead of my friends technologically. It wasn’t because my parents had more money or I rushed out to the store first, it was because I had a distinct talent to pick out things that were going to become the new, hit thing.
I found American Online Instant Messenger, or AIM, in 2005. To be exact, I had three different buddies (my list now ranges over 400). Anyhow, this was the precise start of my social networking career. It marked the point where I was interacting with others I knew through some online form. Social media is the future. Quote me on that.
My forum joining year was 2006. I became apart of wrestling forums, sports forums, and television show forums; it really gave myself a place to stay at home. It helped me connect with the human person and made me a more complete human being. In 2008, I found two things that would change my life: blogging and Facebook – we will deal with the latter in a short moment.
I dawdled with some new blogs and quit shortly thereafter, (this time I’m here for good) but it gave me the idea that perseverance was taking over in the world. Because there are that many people in the universe, only few can climb above the rest. Sound familiar? Darwin’s theory of evolution.
On April 4, 2008 I signed up for Facebook, a move that more or less changed my life, and not necessarily in the positive way you might expect. The need for balance in our lives suggested other aspects of my life would fall – hard. It was a struggle to get through each and every day. When I stopped using Facebook in the summer, I became more and more socially active (surprising isn’t it?). Some of the concepts I used in that period of time to balance my life will be displayed on my current blog.
2009 brought the year of the upstart website Command Your Time. The average person only lives about 245,300,800 seconds. Command Your Time makes sure you use it to the best of your abilities.
Why should you care?
Because I’m only thirteen years old. I have spent a major part of my childhood on the Internet as have my peers. It’s part of the future. Kids are going to discover the Net at a younger age and as an adult, it is your duty to be aware.
Right now, you’re probably thinking one of two things: a) whether you should read another word or 2) about what tomorrow’s generation is going to entail. Here are three things that I expect to increase drastically in size over the next ten years:
- Social Media. This is probably the most obvious one. I think it’s certain that sites we haven’t even heard of will give Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace a run for their money. Out of the three aforementioned sites though, I think Facebook will end up being the most successful, with Twitter at a close second.
- Blogging in form of videos. We have seen footprints of what could be a huge explosion. If YouTube challenges Viddler, we could see a magnificent battle for the top “blogger-friendly” video making website. I’m assuming everybody is going to have a much higher bandwidth and hopefully the sites will reflect this.
- Search engines. They’ll be more precise and won’t just cover the web. They will be our official directory. Google will remain prominent in that scene, but will slyly expand into bigger, better things. For instance, it’s my belief that we won’t refer to Google as a search engine, but rather a complex website with a ton of great features (ie: GMail, Google Maps, Google Reader, etc).
Through internet triumphs and defeats, I start a whole new chapter at Command Your Time. Reserve your spot on an e-mail or RSS feed list today.
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Hi, Dan! I agree with much of what you say and I am THRILLED that I have finally been out-youngified by someone! I’ve basically been online since I was a kid and I find a big difference between the way I use the internets and the way older people use it.
Anyway, I popped over to CommandYourTime, hoping you would have a vlog up, but alas it is not to be. (Unless you plan some in the future? In which case, YES PLEASE!)
Hayden Tompkins’s last blog post..Why You Can Stop Making Your Bed!
Thanks Dan, for sharing this great insight. There’s no doubt that the WWW is changing rapidly and our lives are having to quickly catch up.
I was thinking about your comment on the rise of Vlogging. I think there’s no doubt that is will grow significantly over the years to come, I’ll just be interested to see how it affects text posting. I really believe that words in the form of text and images (the static kind) will still hold strong. If anything, I could see new forms emerge. Maybe a bit more complex than just a basic page of words and pics, like slide shows or something. Who knows.
And there’s no doubt that Google is moving away from just being search giant. They’re quickly becoming the Swiss Army knife on the Net.
Great post, Dan! 13 or 33, you’re a great writer with a lot to say! Eric
@Hayden: You make a great point (indirectly so). One of the reasons vlogging will grow rapidly over the years to come is because the younger generation will come into its own. There’s just no doubt about the fact that younger surfers have more interest and just feel more comfortable with videos than the WWW fogies that came before you.
I never really looked at that fact so directly until now. Am I a fogie?! AAAAaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!
I’M NOT A FOGIE!!!!
OK, I feel better now.
Eric
If you have to ask…
P.S. Thanks for making me sound intelligent and awesome!
Hayden Tompkins’s last blog post..Why You Can Stop Making Your Bed!
@Hayden: I didn’t make you sound intelligent, I just expanded on your awesomeness!
Eric
@ Hayden: Ha-ha yes. Those oldies don’t know what they’re doing with a mouse and keyboard.
@ Eric: Google is killing it, in all aspects. As for vlogging: newer generations are already loving it. I can’t wait to see what is going to eventually transpire and how sites like Viddler will be effected by it – in a positive way.
Dan Miranda’s last blog post..Link Up Wednesday: Five Must Read Productivity Articles
A very interesting article Dan.
I’m kind of in the unique position of having taught the old fogies how to use computers and also worked with children aged 4 to 11. The differences between the two is drastic to say the least. I’ve literally had people too afraid to turn a computer on in case they break it!
I’ve had to repair CD-ROM trays because someone thought it was a coffee cup holder! I’ve even had to explain to someone that the mouse is not a remote control.
Yet I’ve never had to teach a 4 year old anything basic about computers
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@Marc: Well I’m not going to lie, that did make me chuckle quite a bit. The world is full of funny anecdotes about computers in particular, I’ve found.
Dan Miranda’s last blog post..Link Up Wednesday: Five Must Read Productivity Articles
@Dan Heh you should have been there to see the poor old man literally pointing the mouse at the screen and trying to work it like a TV remote.
With the years I’ve spent in IT support/repair and training I have a ton of anecdotes, some you won’t even believe. Heck if I hadn’t have dealt with the people in person *I* wouldn’t believe them!
Eric, we should swap stories one day
Stunning post, Dan, but scary.
I feel so OLD!!! Nine years ago, I couldn’t turn on the computer. Last month I learned what widgets and plugins were. Yesterday, my young teenage daughter taught me how to do smileys in my blog comments box. Normally I love learning, but technology and social networking memes are spreading so exponentially that I feel permanently left behind. So I write with a pen. I read. I listen to music, I sing, hoping that there will always be a place for those.
My daughter’s roughly your age Dan, but was ridiculed at school a few years back because she was the last person to get Bebo, wasn’t allowed Facebook or MSN, has AOL time limits and parental controls on her laptop and still isn’t allowed to answer her mobile phone while she’s talking with us face to face or with others.
But she isn’t ridiculed now. She decided to focus on her singing, songwriting, acting and writing. She wants a blog and has suddenly realised she has the content – original content – all in place. She has a band and writes songs for it; she sings in concerts, acts in plays; she writes stories that leave me breathless. Twitter? As a parent, I’ve said no. She already feels like there aren’t enough seconds in her day to do all the things she’d like to. When she’s ready to build an audience, then I reckon she’ll dive into social media.
I look forward to checking out your site with her. Well done, Dan. Fantastic piece. And thanks Sean and Eric for knowing this would be a cracker!
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Dan: Excellent post. I couldn’t feel any stronger that it’s paramount for our coming generation to have access of all tomorrow’s tools. You are fortunate your parents are so forward thinking.
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@janice: You run one tight ship although I must agree with you about this point: “[My daughter] isn’t allowed to answer her mobile phone while she’s talking with us face to face or with others”. That’s something that really ticks me off.
My parents just let me roam free. I guess they assume at one point I am going to see whatever I see now so throwing it all out the window is their outlet.
@Writer Dad: I guess your right. They set me up with a laptop and just let me roam. If it weren’t for them I wouldn’t be at the Blueprint right now making this comment.
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You’ll go far, Dan – you’re a total natural! We’ll be able to say we saw you at the start of a stellar career!
About your reply to my comment above. It made me smile that you assumed our ‘AOL controls’ were about what we let our daughter see or visit. It’s not about what she’s allowed or not allowed to see. It’s about the amount of time she spends online, the amount of non-cyberworld stuff she’d let drift by if there were no boundaries. The story I told you about MSN and Bebo etc was from a few years back when she wasn’t even a teenager.
I can tell from your wonderful writing, your maturity and your response to my comment about mobile phones that you’re intelligent and that your parents have done a great job – you’re using your skills to inform and inspire people like us over at Blogopolis Blueprint – but have any of the kids at your school been cyber-bullied into suicide while their parents were happily letting them roam, unaware of what exactly they were doing? It’s a two way communication thing as well as a trust thing. It’s still our resonsibility as parents to take an interest in what our kids are doing so that we can learn from them as well as guide them if necessary and keep them safe.
I think online education’s the future and I agree with Sean that our kids definitely need the technological skills you so clearly have, Dan, but I still feel a balance is needed.
@Sean – why don’t you have cable TV?
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Janice: I can’t afford it.
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Dan is an awesome find. Love the way the site looks Eric.
@Cindy Appreciate all the support I’ve got from you!
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Thanks Cindy!
Eric
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