ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

(Extracted from tomorrow’s reading in Our Daily Bread

“The end of all things is at hand; therefore be serious and watchful in your prayers.” — 1 Peter 4:7

“THERE IS A WEB SITE that claims to predict when you will die. After you answer a series of questions, your projected date of death appears along with a digital clock counting down the number of seconds you have left to live.

“It’s all based on current life-expectancy charts, but seeing it on a computer screen makes it more vivid. As the site says, it’s “the Internet’s friendly reminder that life is slipping away.” ”

A HOLIDAY HAS JUST PASSED and i’ve got next to nothing done. Not much prayer, no marking, no teaching preparation, no gym exercise, no chit-chatting, and not a blog entry yet.

Spent almost the whole day on my new website (nope, not revealing here), experimenting with Fantastico and free php-based CMSs such as Xoops, Mambo and phpNuke. Yes, many insights gained. Yes, closer now to that ‘Web haven’ where one only has to fill up forms to update content. However, before more could be achieved in less time, so much more time has to be spent making the whole thing work first in the desired flow. And one problem followed another. Kept seeing “Internal Server” errors. Not so fantastico afterall.

At the end of the day, seemed to have just returned from a black hole which has sucked up all things and yielded very little in return. Another case of “more is less”.

Deja vu huh? What’s new after four years of working on the Net? For all the grandiose promises held out by cyberspace (a.k.a. elearning, web portals, open-source code), there are also many more ‘black holes’ into which time, money, information, dreams, credibility, and etcetera, have vanished.

Meanwhile, life is slipping away.