Holland Swenson

Congratulations Doug and Jen! They just had a baby boy. Well, Jen had it, and Doug probably just stared and got grossed out. The crew of the Ugly Couch Show hope he turns out to be a fine and well-rounded geek like us, a model citizen in these geek-friendly times. Bonus: He’s already got his own website (Holland Swenson.com)…

What if you had your own website when you were born, and everything you did and everything that happened around you was preserved and commented on and tagged properly with archives and photographed? Most kids from my generation (I was born in 1977) were of course subject to their parents’ amateur photography or videography, and those memories were preserved on old VHS tapes or scrapbooks. Blog are an entirely new thing that allow us to catlaog everything neatly and easily record smaller, more mundane memories every day with ease. Had I and my parents had the benefit of such technology when I was born, I might have a clear record of what happened in the years I could form no long term memories. I remember bits and pieces of birthday parties and trips to the zoo and such, but nothing clear. And I’ve long since forgotten the names of many of the kids I grew up with. What a benefit it would be to have all that preserved forever and in one place, and searchable!

The data doesn’t degrade. If your host shuts down ten years from now, just move the data elsewhere. I doubt WordPress is going anywhere any time soon. If they fold up and you want a better blog platform, just import all the old blogs and comments from the old software to the new one. Make backups regularly, and you have a blog of your entire life. Never again will we wonder about our ancestors and how they lived, because you could just read about nearly every day of their lives.

Privacy issues? Maybe. Depends on how private a person you are. You don’t need to blog everything, but it would be encouraged, for completeness’ sake.

Well I hope Holland keeps up his website when he’s ready to start blogging on his own. If just for posterity. And if you spend enough time on the internet, you pickup geek traits, which I cannot overemphasize the need for these days. Geek is good. Geek is smart. Geek is sexy. Geeks run shit, and chicks dig us.