The Issues around Personal Websites: Time and Place

While webcams and other tools can help express change, they can also describe a sense of time and place. The most common way to indicate a sense--or change--in location is to update the site by hand--a tedious process. There are really no tools to do this automatically, though you could easily imagine how they might work.

Imagine a site served from your computer, reflecting bits about yourself as a kind of digital mood ring. Your computer already knows a great deal about you: how busy you are at times, how frantic or relaxed you are, whether you are there or not. If your site were served from your computer, or linked to it, that activity could be reflected in your site. There are technologies already available, such as ICQ, that let others know when you are online. It isn't much of a stretch to build tools that tell people more than simply when you're online, but perhaps where you are and what you are working on. These are some of the things that will make sites in the future seem more personal.

 

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