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32-year-old Nathan Shedroff wears the title of creative director at Vivid Studios, a San Francisco Web site design house commonly cited as one of the world's top dozen. As well as building sites for the likes of Sony, he also maintains his own personal site. |
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"Ultimately, I think that everyone will have a personal page or site"
An e-mail interview with Nathan ShedroffI think there will probably be an explosion in personal sites. It's probably very similar to when desktop publishing tools allowed anyone to make a professional-looking business cards. Until then, there wasn't any need, culture, or tools around individuals doing that. Do you expect any substantial fraction of the population to have a Web page any time soon? I can't say how long it will take, but ultimately, I think that EVERYONE will have a personal page or site - if for nothing more than sharing personal pictures and things with friends and family. Large companies like Kodak are banking on it. What will they be doing with it? They will be using it to describe and express themselves. I guess I see them doing things very similar to what I'm doing with mine; sharing thoughts, experiences, and information, a bit about what I do, what I think, what concerns me, who I am, what I want, etc. There will probably be public ones and private ones--or at least, more private, secured areas for people considered friends or family. It can be a decent way to keep in touch with people, and is a great way to share pictures from holidays, photos of children, new houses, parties, etc. What's the future of text as a Web medium? Text will always be with us since it is such a simple medium to master and express one's self with. For proof of this, books and magazines have hardly gone away. Now, the Web and Net will become LESS text-dominant, but whether text will ever lose its dominance is a question yet to be answered. My guess is no. Yet little attention is paid to the Web's potential as a text medium ... That's because everything you need to write text for the Web is currently there. You can't sell more software based on it. ... Everyone ASSUMES people know how to write well since we are all taught to write. Of course, this isn't the case, but it never seems to be a good business proposition to try to teach people to write better since they, themselves, probably don't know the difference nor value it. The Net is a communications medium first and foremost, and one component of
this is publishing. Now, there isn't yet a lot of communications,
unfortunately, but it's getting there - slowly. I expect that in another
year it will be much more obvious.
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