First, if you haven’t yet, go read Jessamyn’s post: a 2.0 story.
Ok, remember this line:
The difference, to me, is people who have folded the web into their day to day lives and those who haven’t.
My dad’s one of those who has. Like Jessamyn, he checks for deals online for most anything he’s going to spend money on: printer cartridges, definitely, but also things like lawn mowers. When he decided to get an electric mower, he checked for reviews, ratings, and prices, and then purchased the one he wanted, all over the internet. Lately he’s been thinking about getting a new cello, so he’s keeping an eye on the ones offered on eBay.
And when he plans vacations he does that almost entirely online as well. The house I’m sitting in right now was found online and picked as the familial choice after much emailing. The rental arrangements were also made via email, and one of my uncles — who got here before the rest of us — sent pictures of the view to show that it really was as advertised.
We’ve used online reviews to determine which restaurants to try, and instead of figuring it out by hand, we use ESPN’s pick manager to keep track of the family bowl game picks competition. This afternoon when my brother called from his car wanting to know whether there was a bookstore along his travel route, Dad hopped online to check for more exact locations than our memories were providing.
And of course, here I am blogging about it all as I wait for a couple of pictures to download to my flickr account. A vacation may not count as “day to day,” but when internet access is a selling point on a vacation house, I think that says a lot about the internet’s importance to the people renting the place. Especially when checking in with work is not one of the reasons that connectivity is wanted.
(For those who actually like to see pictures from other people’s vacations, I’m posting occasional “postcards” on my other blog.)
