Tag: Community

Different decade, same story

No one wanted to think about the gangs of no-hope teenagers who already took over the nearby park all day, drinking lager and waiting for something to happen to them, trapped in a forgotten village in no-man’s land between a ten-shop town and an amorphous industrial sprawl.

Meena, in Anita & Me, by Meera Syal

The phenomenon that is Boston Globe’s Big Picture…

The phenomenon that is Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog.

  •    Started by someone with an eye for opportunity and good photographs.
  •    Powered on by the community with hundreds of comments and thousands of shares on each post.
  •    Turned into a closed network by a marketing maven who thought of harnessing the community info by linking in FB’s comment engine.

I discovered the blog sometime in 3rd quarter of 2008 (that’s the earliest share of that URL I can find in my rss). My visits to that treasure trove reduced a little after Alan Taylor, the good fella who started the blog, left. I stopped visiting completely, in frustration, after they removed the blog’s own commenting system and instead introduced the Facebook engine. Having quit FB in 2008 and being glad for it, I wasn’t going to join that waste of a site just to comment on BP.

Visited the blog again today after ages. Was happy, and sad. The feeling was similar as that when you visit your old school. The building, the memories, even some of the teachers are still there. But there are new guards at the gate now, who tell you, you no longer belong there. That love-longing-belonging-outcast feeling :(

[Feeling sad now. Don’t know if it is about the BP Blog or about the school I can never visit again]