Happy anniversary, Nature Network!… And happy day of the Saint Valentine’s massacre!… (many hearts get pierced by arrows this day) Here is my contribution to the 14/02 collective blogging effort… But unfortunately I don’t believe it is quite the positive funny contribution you might expect……..

I love Nature magazine, and I became a subscriber last year, at the same time I was finishing my masters… When I heard about nature network, I got all excited, being a computer geek, electrical engineer and part-time philosopher. It has been a while since I started to feel that the world needed more forums and lists for scientists to meet and discuss in the Internet, and I thought NN might just be it. Nice use of the technology for a nice thing to do.

I started using the Internet ever since it was available to me. I had a BBS before that, and I saw many trends coming and going… gopher, usenet, ftp, IRC, having a page at geocities, ECMAscript, ICQ, dynamical pages, web chat, mail-list forum, blogs, flogs, flash, msn, skype…

Every time a new tool comes by, a new wave of users also comes, and the old tools stop being used. “Everything changes” as we say… You end up stopping to talk to some people you know, meet new people, stop doing something (as playing some game) and start doing other things… And I feel like what we do is less dictated by what we want, or should do, and more by what “everyone is doing”.

When I got to nature network, I got excited about bringing Brazilians to the site… After all, we got famous some time ago for being great users of Orkut. And Brazilians do use the Internet quite a lot… Some might say Brazilians are “people’s people”!… I imagined we could develop a nice Brazilian community around here. I also imagined I would meet some interesting people abroad, and that Nature Network would have on me an impact similar to reading the magazine: I would find out about interesting topic to learn, and I would have nice stories to tell my friends…

Unfortunately, I feel it’s not quite what happened. What I tell my friends is only about how I am excited about Nature and Nature Network, and about my blog posts.

Some of the most interesting blogs are from people who also maintain other blogs… So, I believe most NN users whose blog would interest me perhaps had blogs already (tough I confess I didn’t knew them). I’m not quite sure that people who didn’t use to write blogs or to make friends by other means started out with NN…

My greater disappointment was not being able to bring people here, and also the poor presence of Brazilians and latin americans in general…

But I believe in NN’s potential and in LA’s potential… Perhaps we only need a bit more time for the public I was hoping to see to get more used to the technologies. Who knows?…

I may be talking this just because I’m feeling a bit depressed… Perhaps it’s because my birthday (at 17/02). You know, it does this to us sometimes… :)

Happy anniversary to all of us bithday-boys-and-girls, and a very merry unbirthday to the rest!