Read the opening article from erelevant’s 2008 re-launch.

erelevant is a blog of ideas surrounding the central theme of using electronic media (“new media”) to interact with youth markets from high school kids to twenty-something adults. erelevant seeks to engage in the conversation of the “semantic” web by participating in social media, community-building, and the exploration of online identity. It discusses issues of language, politics, privacy, law, philosophy, and culture as they exist online.

Not to fall into the manicured hands of the devils of seriousness, erelevant also engages in some humor, some cusses, and encourages you to listen to music loud enough to severely irritate your coworkers.

My name is Morgan Daivs, and I am the Web Director at Warren Wilson College, a small liberal arts institution in Asheville, North Carolina. Erelevant is the place I come when the fief wars and sometime-mundanity of managing a college website threaten to overwhelm. It’s a place to get reoriented.

Working as the web person at a small private means that I’m a “Jack of all trades and master of none.” I act as the marketer, designer, developer, and frequently the author of content.

I graduated from Warren Wilson with a BA in Humanities in the class of 2002. I began seriously pursuing web design in 2000 during the final year of the dot-com boom. I worked as a part of Warren Wilson’s web crew, which I now have the privilege of supervising. With a strong background in the fine arts, I consider myself most at home designing with photoshop, xhtml, and css. I picked up PHP along the way and have produced some web applications of moderate complexity and success.

[…] The best way for me to innovate and enjoy what I do is to go native. Time to slip into the digital tribe and move among its peoples—virtual, 3D hands brushing in the darkness of social networked second lives, a million onymous youth dancing hyper-textualy into the night, the thrumming of drum and bass shared via mapped music genomes, and the twinkling glow of liquid-crystal-pixels offering up the entire geo-positioned world like an altar to a social, multi-cultural, semantic, hive-minded, Mercurial GOD.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ - Blog of Danah Boyd. A PhD student studying privacy and the internet.
http://greenteaicecream.co.uk/ - “Social Value and the Social Web”
http://www.fastcompany.com/ - Interesting blog associated with Fast Company magazine.

I am taking a hiatus for the remainder of the summer to finish some hulking, be-fanged programming projects. Once those are complete, I am going to “take off the training wheels” on erelevant–redesign and revision it around a broader central theme. It will be less personal, less inflammatory and more topical and content-oriented. […]

When Time magazine named “You” as its person of the year in 2006, it was a ham-handed attempt to salute “user-generated content” as the driving force behind Web 2.0. Last year MySpace and YouTube commanded $580 million and $1.6 billion, respectively, because regular folks participate in the grand techno-democratic experiment, baring their souls to the […]