I have sort of a LOVE/HATE rela­tion­ship with sites who post lists of great designs on the inter­net. I really LOVE the fact that they are a con­stant source of inspi­ra­tion, and offer a sense of con­ve­nience that some other indi­vid­ual has taken the time to scour the inter­net in search of what is great out there that’s worth see­ing in the world of design. I HATE the fact that so many exist yet col­lec­tively have a lot of the same con­tent. This is mostly a prob­lem because if I check my daily web­sites and see the same things posted in 4 dif­fer­ent sites, the inspi­ra­tion is lack­ing and feels like a lot of peo­ple are talk­ing at once yet no one is hear­ing one another.

This is one of the rea­sons I’ve really con­sid­ered not hav­ing a blog at all. Yes I’d love to have a place to share my thoughts and inspi­ra­tion about design, but do I really want to become part of the cacoph­ony ? Sim­ply hav­ing blog posts link­ing to other people’s blog posts seems counter-productive in the efforts to share indi­vid­ual and unique thoughts (what I thought a blog was for). Within the last few years how­ever there have been a few web­sites that really get the idea of col­lec­tive blog post­ing right. The idea that users could visit the site see what every­one col­lec­tively thought was inter­est­ing, but not hav­ing to deal with repeated ideas.

Sites like FFF­Found come to mind and just announced today We Love Typog­ra­phy offer oppor­tu­ni­ties for users to visit the sites, get inspired and feel like hey this is exactly what I was look­ing for, a place that has a lot of great exam­ples of work yet not just deriv­a­tive lists of links to other peo­ples sites, well sort of. Okay both of these sites do link to other people’s sites and exam­ples of work, but it’s done in the right way, by a ded­i­cated com­mu­nity of like-minded indi­vid­u­als that find great stuff and post them all in the same place, elim­i­nat­ing the need for a dis­parate group of web­sites link­ing back to the same content.

It’s becom­ing more and more appar­ent that the future of the inter­net is not to have all of these ‘peo­ple’ out there with web­sites that really aren’t related to each other, but to have col­lec­tive web­sites where every­one con­tributes to a sin­gle thought and idea. Take Wikipedia for exam­ple, only one indi­vid­ual actu­ally works for Wikipedia (the tech/web site guy), and every­one else whom ‘builds’ the web­site are vol­un­teers, or oth­ers on the web, every­one talks, but they also lis­ten, which cohe­sively pro­motes a sin­gle, shared idea. The same can be said for web­sites like Digg or even Face­book; with every­one link­ing back and forth and pro­mot­ing shared expe­ri­ences peo­ple are bridg­ing the gap between hav­ing pri­vate inter­net lives, to pub­lic, shared lives.

I think as a whole this is a great thing, espe­cially because the inter­net wouldn’t work at all if every­one wasn’t com­mu­ni­cat­ing, but what I think is most impor­tant about this tran­si­tion to a social web, is that every­one needs to speak clearly, and when applic­a­ble speak col­lec­tively. Sure every­one out there has some­thing inter­est­ing to say, but if your point of view is the same as another’s, why not speak together to more clearly com­mu­ni­cate what you’re try­ing to say?