Chip off the block

Complete with a quixotic, multi-syllabic and numbered WordPress.com domain, my youngest daughter started a blog a few days ago. Her joy is wonderful to experience. Her first instincts on content were very good, fun ideas. Nothing like what I do. Her blogs were something like this:

• Here’s a huge list of all my favorite things

• The Best Disney Shows

• People actually like Teletubbies?

• Doll makeover

Here was her only disappointment: her next instincts were entirely social, and no one goes to her website. Just like no one goes to any regular websites anymore. Her next idea was to conduct a poll for what she should write about, and voting on some other issues. From growing up with the mature Internet, she understood the web as natively social. YouTube and sites like Scratch are community-based – you ask a question, you get an answer. You expect a baked-in audience.

After communities, websites seem static – dead, you might say. But she got to work and immediately started distributing the links on her other sites, after learning how to copy and paste URLs. I smiled to myself: “Ah, a chip off the ol’ block!”

But it is so interesting to see someone creating with the web, versus experiencing the web, for the first time. It’s really magic. I hope that we continue to present the fun of the web as being in creation and not just consumption.