Tracks only wash away in the sand

I love media integration. Web 2.0 is one of the best things I have ever experienced in my life. My blog is the perfect example of this. I am a very OCD kind of person. My CDs are all alphabetized at home, my apartment is usually in a very clean state, and I want to have one (albeit wide) footprint on the internet. I want everything I do to mesh cohesively together. Take a look around.

I have a couple links to the fantasy sports leagues I run and play. I have links to mine as well as all the rest of the 3B guy’s Xbox Live tags. I post my Last FM music tracker. The only things I don’t have integrated are my Facebook and MySpace. The Facebook I toy with adding here, they have a widget much like Xbox has, but as of yet I don’t feel like throwing my full name and social network out there on this, dunno why. On the flip side, this blog is fully hooked into my Facebook, allowing the blog posts to upload automatically to it as well as linking to the blog directly.

This all brings to mind just how rapid a footprint can grow. I started to explain to my Mom over my trip home last weekend that spam can be battled by creating alternate e-mail addresses you never check for things like one time deals and Coke reward points. And that just brings up such a massively important point; your internet footprint is huge.

When I think of everything I’ve been a part of, the list goes on… Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo, Live journal, Absolute Punk, Amazon, Ebay, Gawker net, Last FM, Xbox, ect… Now most of these are defunct and I avoid their begging me to rejoin like the plague, but for those I remain active in, you always feel that anything you do should be relevant to everything you do, no doubt? So the ability of web 2.0 to integrate different internet worlds together through widgets and badges, well that kind of makes the interwebbed world a small place; the same way the internet made the real world a smaller place.

Now the inner OCD in me just has to battle the compulsion to preserve everything I ever create. I still have my earlier web pages saved in a combined 5 MB zip file somewhere in the heart of my computer. This blog? I want to publish it into a table top book so that I may keep it safe if something happens to the internet. The funny thing is, the more I think about preserving footprints and legacies like that, the more I feel it fruitless because after you die, what’s the point? Ah yes, that brings on the next step in my journey, conquering my mortality. It has been suggested I read the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Who has thoughts?