My 15 (out of 43) Things
If you haven't visited 43 Things, you are missing one of the great current phenomons on the web.
Visitors to the 43 Things site are asked to list 43 things they want to do today, tomorrow, or in general in their life. It's best to establish an account before you start doing this. This sounds like an amusement, or at best an exercise in personal improvement, and this is a fair characterization.
43 Things is also an exercise in using lightweight web development technologies that are often called by the loose term Ajax. In some respects, 43 Things is not the best advertisement for this set of development tools: the UI is irritating and the database connectivity flakey at best.
Where 43 Things does better is as a genuine community site. Who else near you has the same goals? What advice can other members give about the goals? What goals have others found related to your goals, and so on? From this viewpoint, 43 Things is a great social experiment.
43 Things is also interesting as a site that provides a tagging mechanism. You can tag things as you like, and in the aggregate 43 Things is becoming an interesting collection of searchable tags, tag cross-references: a genuine folksonomy (although perhaps not as useful as my favorite folksonomy site, Flickr which lets you add tags to photos).
I'd suspect that 43 Things is also a great host for Google AdSense ads, because when contextual ads come up they are relevant to one's goals.
So now I've done a pretty good start on 43 Thing's 43 Things, but what about mine? I've got up to 15 so far. Here they are:
1 Watch my children grow
2 spend more time in the mountains
3 be financially solvent
4 live passionately
5 write a novel
6 have great sex
7 visit New Zealand
8 Lose a bit of weight
9 Write a neat program
10 be more thoughtful
11 Watch the sunrise from the top of Mt. Whitney (again!)
12 Scuba dive (again!)
13 Spend more time gardening
14 Teach my kids to garden
15 Show my kids Pompei and Delphi
P.S. It's also somewhat satisfying to see all the goals other people have that I *have* already done!
Posted by Harold Davis at June 16, 2005 06:08 PM
