First Annual Anniversary Indulgence: Mistakes and Missteps

All new projects have points of failure, those bits and pieces that just don't function like the rest of the system. Looking back at Net Insanity's year of experimentation I see a lot of stuff I love and I'm glad I did, but I also see a few things that just didn't pan out. I don't regret my mistakes and I hope they were still at least mildly amusing for my readers, though I do believe that no lesson is learned without ample reflection. Today, I'd like to look back at some of those moments from the past year of Net Insanity that didn't work out so well.

My first big mistake was when I jumped the gun about Australia's most popular vlogger, Natalie Tran aka Community Channel. I usually don't feel compelled to apologize for being too harsh or judgmental, usually because I'm making fun of people who practically beg for ridicule. In the case of Ms. Tran, however I felt at the time, I admit that I made the freshman mistake of digging for things to mock in an otherwise respectable subject. Maybe I just didn't quite understand the angle of this blog yet and I focused on an entirely untrue conceit of a guy who hates the Internet. I don't hate the Internet. In fact, I love that it exists and I think it's the greatest technology of an entire generation. Yes, I would later revisit CC in a Youtube Nation feature in which I was much kinder, but that felt like too little, too late. For what it's worth, sorry, CC, for being a jerk in search of a cheap laugh.

Next in line is an aborted feature that, to be honest, was never really a fully-formed idea in the first place. I called it Contrast and Compare, a column that I can't for the life of me figure out what I intended for it to be. Looking at the one and only entry, it's basically just a prototype version of Youtube Nation, a quality it shares with a lot of early posts. Maybe I was just happy that regular features like The Craigslist Files were doing so well, but there's really no excuse for pretending that Contrast and Compare had any potential as a recurring feature. Lesson: Putting a number at the end of a title does not a regular column make.

All this reminiscing of the origins of Youtube Nation brings me to the real first attempt to make that feature. In a fit of ambition I decided that I ought to make a weekly Youtube video myself, deconstructing items I'd found on the site and giving Net Insanity a more multimedia edge. Oh, but the results were horrible. I may mock Youtubers every week for recording and uploading content that really never should have been made in the first place, but I make no claim to my own ability to turn grainy webcam footage into entertainment. I'm happy with what Youtube Nation is today, but that first foray was still a humbling experience.

I don't doubt that I'll make more mistakes in Net Insanity's second year. After all, there are a lot of new ideas on the docket and I'd be a fool to think they're all going to work, or that they'll all work without some serious modification. Thanks to all you readers who stuck with this blog even when it stumbled. I look forward to making a mostly functional source of Internet entertainment in the coming year.