Gus23.com: Homepage Analysis

Well hello. Who are you and why are you following me? Oh that’s right, we’re friends!

This week I spent a lot of time updating the homepage of my website, Gus23.com, with my new lifestream. Okay, hold on, wait a second, who goes there! What did I just say? Yes, I updated the first page of my website, the page that you see when you type ‘http://www.gus23.com’ into your browser. And what exactly did I add to it? My lifestream! Here’s a screen shot of my homepage, but as you can see, it’s very tiny:

In fact, to view the homepage in its entirety, you need at least a thirty-inch computer monitor. But obviously that is not a normal thing, so it’s seen as a scrolling window, which makes it even more exciting and dramatic to look at it.

So before I start, you might be wondering what a lifestream is. Well, kind friends, as Jon Gray, co-founder of Streamy eloquently defines it, a lifestream is a “chronological list of things you’re doing around the web”. Easy, right? For people who exist on the Internet (including myself), a lifestream is a way to keep friends and strangers updated with certain personal things that have become part of The Lifestream. These things can include: social bookmarking, photos, videos, micro-blogging, books, music, and movies. Lifestreaming has been around for a couple years, but I always say that when something gets the Gus23 Touch, it’s the beginning of the end.

Note: It’s interesting to know that the word “Lifestream” was first used in the video game Final Fantasy VII. It described the “lifeblood and very spirit of the Planet,” according to Wikipedia. I really love how new words have a way of rolling all around culture like that.

Let’s get started! My lifestream is interwoven within various pictures of my dudes just doing things on a stage. Whenever you see information being displayed from a lifestream, it is the most recent information to date. There could be tons of information, but I chose to display the most recent single piece of information (except for music) per application.

1. That’s my #1 phrase right now. My buzz phrase within my artistic practice, if you will. You look better online. It’s a fairly large and heavy mirror that I show on the homepage stage being carried by two dudes.

2. This is the first lifestream application. I’ve got a dude with a comic bubbling displaying everything that I Twitter. Rather than going into a description about Twitter, you can just read an earlier post about it. In the fewest words, Twitter is micro-blogging. I have 140 characters to write whatever, and I can update it from a computer or text Twitter from my cell phone.

3. The Digg application. Digg has been around for a couple years and I never really got into it nor will I ever truly get into it. The website is so difficult to navigate! Regardless, it’s a way to get interesting story titles from one place and onto my homepage. Whenever you’re reading a story, watching a video, or looking at a picture on the Internet, more than likely you’ll have a chance to ‘digg’ it. When you digg a link, you give it a sort of thumbs up, and it shares it with the entire Digg community. As for its place on Gus23.com, I thought it would be a great way to share interesting articles with my visitors. How often do you find yourself writing a new E-mail to a friend saying, ‘check out this article,’ and providing a link? If you and your friend are Digg users, you wouldn’t have to bother with the E-mail! I thought it would be cute to show a dude holding a placard and sharing the news with two dudes. One dude seems to be arguing that there’s something to read? Maybe he’s super excited—he just loves knowledge!

4. It’s time to Flickr! Flickr (pronounced like ‘flicker’ but written without the E, because that would just be too Internety) is my favorite program. It’s an oldie but a goodie! The website is designed okay, but it’s so easy to navigate and actually very friendly. You know how you get frustrated trying to find something on a website and think the website hates you? Flickr is your friend, I promise. Anyway, it’s a photo website, where you can upload photographs and share them with the world. The scene on the homepage is, to say the least, weird. It’s a blindfolded and gagged dude strapped to a chair, with wires going into his head. The wires lead to the hands of a mad scientist who is plugging them into a projector that displays the Flickr photos. I thought this scene was a dramatic way to show my disinterest in photography as a hobby—to get me to snap a photo for hobby’s sake is like pulling teeth, or in this case, crazy mind tapping.

Note: In the above picture, my screenshot includes my Flickr photo of the 9/11 “Tribute of Light” as seen from my building’s roof. I think it’s so cool to think about the scene as something straight out of the TV show, 24. It’s like the one dude is being interrogated about terrorism and boom, the tribute lights pop up on screen.

5. Oldies but goodies! These are two of the original three dudes that graced my homepage for the last three or so years.

6. This is the DJ’s booth, perhaps DJ iAmGus23, perhaps DJ Carebear (my actual DJ alias). Either way, Last.fm is an application that has a crazy feature: if you download the program and run it while you’re listening to music in iTunes (or whatever you use), it takes the song’s information and puts it onto the web! If I’m listening to music (unfortunately, it is specifically songs in my Library and not Internet Radio, which I always listen to) and Last.fm is open, you can see what I’m listening to. Crazy!

7. Finally, the end of the stage. I added a dude levitating and my parents’ dog, Jackie. I recently got a tremendous amount of Art & Life advice from my art sensai Adam Grossi. He mentioned the word ‘meditation’ and I thought it was such a great word. After all this hub bub lifestreaming nonsense, in the end (and AT the end of the homepage stage) it all comes down to meditations on myself. Specifically, it can be a meditation on my online presence. The lifestream allows me to focus on myself as I see me as well as how I present myself to you. And of course, I just like puppies, and so there is Jackie, in another meditative pose, the Downward Self (because she’s already a dog, I can’t say Downward ‘Dog’—it would just be too much).

Links Cited:
Streamy.
Wikipedia entry, Gaia (Final Fantasy VII): Lifestream.
Adam Grossi.