The Issues around Personal Websites: Communication

Since the Internet is a communications medium, personal sites have the opportunity--and almost the imperative--to create communications between the owner and his or her audience. Even a simply email mailto or guestbook is a start. Halcyn has taken this idea to new heights by offering a paging system from his website. Some form of feedback should be mandatory. The objective it to create some form of conversation--even among the audience themselves. This conversation doesn't necessarily need to be realtime or unlimited. In fact, communications of this sort work poorly when unedited or require realtime response. Instead, dialog can often be better when it doesn't need a constant, high pace to be interesting. As always, the more personal the conversation, the better, but to make this work requires involvement and accessibility, something than scares most people.

Unfortunately, this is for good reason. The kind of feedback many people get from their own sites is usually encouraging, interesting, and thoughtful, but often it can be vitriolic and nasty. Often, having a site is seen as an open invitation by some people to be mean on a personal level for no apparent reason. But this is the danger one takes when opening oneself to others and shouldn't be a reason not to.

 

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