parental advisory
What did I do before internet resources? Well, certainly not have a conversation with my wife over dinner like this:
ME: “[...small talk about the various parents-of-small-kids connections we're making in Portland, our soon to be home city...]”
SHE: “Oh! Have you seen Urban Mamas? It’s for parents in Portland, and it’s great. You have to check it out.”
ME: “Really? Okay. Well, can it compare to Berkeley Parents Network?”
SHE: “Maybe better. It’s more focused, the topics cover the spectrum of our needs. And it’s actually not-ugly.”
ME: “Ha! Say goodbye to that Craigs List, listserve-style interface, huh?”
SHE: “Right. It’s more like Dooce, but not that pretty. And with more contributors.”
I’m pretty sure we refrained from implying hypertextual markup in the rest of our meal talk.
As I later found out, Urban Mamas does make me tingle in that special way that means “I have found a resource that I will one day soon wonder how I led a complete life without.” Which set me to thinking, does every city have such a “guidebook” for young parents who are trying to forge that network so critical to emotional survival? Or, to put it another way — both more generally and specifically — the things that matter to you* in your city: is there an online resource that you can tap?
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*…And I’m implying “things that make sense to publicly share.” MyBestFishingSpot.com, for instance, would be a sucky idea.
February 7th, 2006 at 9:01 pm
I once gave myself a hernia trying to hyperlink a word I was saying.
February 7th, 2006 at 11:30 pm
This site makes me laugh.
February 7th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
The jokes on this site, in case I needed to clarify.
February 8th, 2006 at 9:46 am
Oh, Joshua, you have to have special training to do that. Next time try using a different octave to pass the link-to location at the same time that you’re saying, you know, the linky word. The Throat Singers of Tuva are pretty much unrivaled in the area of hyperlinking speech.
February 8th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
Dooce is really good. It’s not a resource for me, particularly, though. I like webcollage (”exterminate all rational thought”)
http://www.jwz.org/webcollage/
What is it a resource for? That a good question. Uhh, maybe Dada?
It’s good for multisociating. That’s a made-up word for “getting distracted”.
February 9th, 2006 at 9:54 am
Oh, damn that multisociating! I am supposed to be working! Not exploring randomly through collaged web images toward the ever-beckoning internet horizon. Anyone who ever thought computers would increase productivity surely didn’t see the World Wide Web coming.
In our mealtime talk, Dooce was not so much a resource (although it is a good destination for funny), as shorthand for “nicely presented web site.” I think our current top parenthood-related internet resource is actually Ask Dr Sears, which no home containing children should be forced to do without.
Might I heartily recommend to anyone who works in a networked environment, to follow Carrie’s link and consider installing WebCollage and DriftNet to, ahem, “snoop images from traffic on your local subnet: your screen saver can display a collage of the images your coworkers are looking at”?