Ev BogueA few months ago, I read this series of articles by Jonathan Harris called World Building in a Crazy World. Reading Jonathan's work opened my mind to a new way of thinking about how I was interacting online.
It helped me begin to view my role online as being, in part, a virtual world designer. I'm not just creating words, I'm creating a world in which these words live. My website is a virtual world -- not a piece of paper.
For some reason calling a website a virtual world lends me to take the design of it more seriously.
I anticipate that website design will continue to morph over time into more world-like spaces as bandwidth and technology evolves.
It's very easy to let other people build a virtual world for me. But then, I have to operate under their rules. When I used to publish in Facebook, I did so cognizant of fact that the virtual world was owned by someone else. I'd read the agreement between Facebook and me: if you upload something into this world, all my data belongs to them. I gave away some freedoms, in order to operate in their virtual world.
When I'm creating my own virtual worlds online, there are two things that I keep in my mind:
1. I want ownership.
If I'm signing away the rights to my data, then I'm not building my virtual world, I'm building someone else's.
2. I want freedom.
To design in a way that suits my imagination. In the current age, that means full control of CSS3 + HTML5.
The best way to facilitate both of these things is to build on my own domain name, using a CMS (content management system) that I can install and design within.
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I often find that it's easier to ignore my own virtual world (here at Evbogue.com) than it is to take a hard look at every day. It's easier for me to interact in someone else's virtual world than it is to invest in my own.
Here's my question: how much do you invest in designing your own virtual worlds?