April 2, 2006

The writing on the wall

No, yesterday’s lack of a post was not an April Fool’s joke :p I ended up having to attend a family funeral on Friday and given that it was about eight hours away from home, I was playing catch up most of yesterday. So no post yesterday.

Today, I have something interesting (or not so interesting, depending on your perspective :p) to announce. I was thinking the other day about the ancient art of graffiti :p No, not crude obscenities scrawled on a toilet wall somewhere but artistic (or near artistic) work put up on a wall by some aspiring artist who wanted a different (and larger) canvas. We have an example of that on a wall at the tennis court below our house. It is adorned with the most intricately painted lettering announcing something or other.

But let’s forget the art for a moment. What do people do in this electronic age when they need to just scrawl something on a wall to express themselves? Sure forums and message boards abound, but what do you do to express yourself graphically? Where can you scrawl "Kilroy was here" in the age of the Internet? What about those "secret admirer" columns that the newspapers here are so fond of? Where can you say "To the girl wearing the red t-shirt I saw at the mall – I love you!" on the Web?

I was thinking about this the other day and I began working on something which might fulfil this need – or not :p I call it Shout Out! It’s simply a site where you can put up a message to be read by all the anonymous millions out there on the Net. Yes, you can put up a text message as well but I would prefer it to be graphical – even if it is simply a graphic using a "handwriting" font so that it keeps true to the spirit of graffiti. So come on, if you have a message to send to the rest of the world, a secret to share with strangers or a thought to share with somebody that you’re too shy to say out loud, this is the place to go 🙂 Send me your message and I’ll put it up on Shout Out!

Tags: , ,
Posted by Fahim at 7:58 am  |  No Comments