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Saddly the people who donated money to him are probably the same people who cast their eyes away from homeless people

You don't have to be online to solicit money from strangers, not by a long shot.

I live in Denver, Colorado, near the 16th Street Mall (a large, outdoor street with no cars and lots of shops, biggest tourist attraction in Colorado). There are plenty of street performers that bring their guitars/saxophones/violins/etc outside and play music, and solicit a decent amount of money from it. They offer a service (music, entertainment) that is worth a quarter/buck/whatever.

Todd's webpage was very funny... worth a buck. I daresay they are thousands upon thousands of Blogs, web diaries, and the like, that are ignored every day. And with good reason, chances are only a very few are as entertaining as Todd's.

I hate homeless people begging me for change on the street, and hell yes I turn away from them. If someone is offering a service (music) or has an entertaining webpage, they are in a completely different league. Don't even partially blame the problems of the homeless on a lack of internet access....

Mark

Right answer, but wrong justification.

I used the net on September 11 for exactly the reason you described. At my office, we had a TV, but no cable or antenna: the television was used strictly for videoconferences. So, we had a colleague at another site pipe us the CNN feed over the video link. (Gotta love fat pipe).

The big story about the net as a source of information was how badly it failed in the few hours after the attacks: every major news site was utterly swamped, with the exception of Slashdot - and that's probably because most people were turning to /. as a last resort. I was much less worried about CNN being hacked than I was about not being able to see it at all.

On the plus side: Blogger, and web logs in general, was priceless to me in keeping track of my friends. The first indication I had that my NYC friends weren't hurt in the attack was seeing them update their personal pages.

I've been noodling on this for a while and it is disconcerting to me that these media outlets are shutting down or floundering.

The dearth of weblog content is an incredible outlet for relevant information on world events, often relayed by the very participants in the news. However, too often, the linking goes back to major media outlets or a subsidary of one a large corporation.

While even further "elite" discussion boards and content sites will flourish (uber, A List Apart and Flak spring to mind), they lack the resources to disseminate their clever and unabashed content.

Publishing tools like blogger make it easy for the non-technical user to publish their thoughts, witticism, and commentary to the web. It is only when these sites reach critical mass (Kottke.org, Zeldman.com) that it becomes hugely expense to continue relaying the message.

I see the future of independent content lying in the hands of smaller, more focused community sites (Metafilter, The Fray)

Despite their shortcomings, these sites are paving the way backwards to a smaller, more closely knit internet the way it was several years ago.

Suzie Homemaker and Joe Six-pack will continue to the media that's delivered to them, and the rest who desire the independent voice will seek it and should they not find it, they will create it as they always have.

In case it's not unbeleivably obvious to everyone, Slashdot is a weblog (not to mention others like NetSlaves and so on). Yeah, it's not the rantings of an angst ridden 13 year old, but who said weblogs have to be personal? I started up my weblog to post up news and pictures for family members who couldn't come to my wedding earlier this year and because Blogger makes it very easy to do so. It quickly evolved past that. The response included old college friends turning up in the discussion forum and some good technical discussions with total strangers. I've kept a website for 5 years, and never had that kind of response. Now some friends from my writing group have approached me about setting up a literary zine online through Blogger. It seems clear to me that weblogs are one of the main ways that people are going to use the web to communicate. Blog on!
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I'll bet / with my Net / I can get / those things yet.

-tokengeekgrrl

A nice history lesson on weblogs.

If you're interested in starting your own, there's a number of web apps that might help you, including Pitas and Blogger.

I keep my web log as a way of recording what's going on with me for friends, parents, and myself. Sure, it's not particularly in-depth or personal, but looking back on it helps me place when events happened, and is a nice little digital record for me to look back on.

The difference here is that among the giants, the small personal internet will always be accessible. Unlike television stations, a website costs very little to run. Even if yahoo were swallowed up by a larger company and turned into a "walled garden", the internet at large wouldn't skip a beat. Sure, it might prevent new users, who aren't familiar with the internet, from seeing the diversity available, but the underground will remain the underground.

And as sites grow popular, it isn't always necessary that they collapse under their own weight, popular sites like blogger have turned to their audience/users for money to buy new servers and the users turned out in droves to pay for a service that they use and enjoy. The power of the internet is that it's a community and the imminent purchase of a large anchor site won't do much to affect the internet that we know and love.

And, not always is it in the best interest of a large corporate entity to subsume their internet properties. The failure of go.com is a powerful example of how corporatization of popular sites can destroy a user-base. And as this happens more and more, you can expect that companies will be more willing to let their affiliate sites be diverse.

Bottom Line: As long as people are passionate about the internet, there will always be independent content. An undercurrent to the mainstream.

For the most part you can't make a community, especially if youre a big company trying to build a fan community around yourself. Creating a forum usually gives your critics a high podium to shout from, without much of an interest in actual discourse.

There are notable exceptions (TiVo comes to mind), but a lot of companies (and other organizations) get the idea that if they build a room, it'll become a community.

The truth is the web is so much vacuum that creating an empty space by no means ensures it will be filled with content. True online communities don't have one single home. Slashdot members form a community, but Slashdot itself isn't the community. Bloggers form hundreds of tight-knit communities, but Blogger isn't a community, nore were they trying to be one when they started. All three of these sites tried to provide a great service, and the community grew organically.

TiVo's web board was just a quick addition to satisfy customer requests for a common area, and now it's flourishing grandly on its own. WebTV's community center is the same way.

Communities are emergent entities. You can't build them intentionally unless you realize that and create a product, service, or theme which inspires people to want to talk to others, not specifically to 'be part of a community,' but because they want to share at the more basic level.

Kevin Fox

Isn't this basically how Google's scoring works? They score pages according to how "well-linked" they are, particularly to other well-linked pages. OK, this is using bookmarks, but the premise is the same, isn't it? As soon as Blogger has completed it's plans for world domination, most people's favorite links will be online anyway (and they'll all be 'that cool new dancing hamster page').

I don't know if this would work for the big artist (RIAA Fiends), but there are honest, nice people, out there that would like to give back to the small artist. It's already starting to work to some extent in the Blogger Community using a different serivice...

I for one would love to see micropayments take their place on the web. The only problem I would have is giving away too much.

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1. Go create a new account at http://www.blogger.com (unless you want me to mess with your real account), check "rememeber me" when you log on.
2. Create a new blog, enter you FTP password if you want me to be able to actually publish changes I make.
3. Add a blog entry that says you want me (Eric Costello) to add an entry to prove I was there.
4. Go to http://www.glish.com/cookies.html.

The other day, I asked if anyone had got Blogger running with a Palm. When I checked yesterday (it's in the "Feedback" section) there was still no response...

I think that jennicam is what the web is all about. It's just a single person who's made a site about her life. Nothing more, nothing less. Think about it, 4 years ago (40 internet years) jenni pushed the limits.

Some of you who've been online as long or longer than I have (11 years) will probably remember the way the web looked back in 93-94. Lots and lots of .edu sites, lots of papers about computers, biology, chemistry and the like. Every now and then you'd get a home page along the lines of 'This is me, this is my cat, I like to watch the Simpsons.'

Jenni [and the hordes (just look at Blogger) that have followed her] did it differenetly - and I am one of those who followed. We represent a much more human side of the internet. Sites like these show that people are more than the sum of our experience and interests and that's what makes us human. That's what makes us special.

While I don't deny the power of the internet as a tool for the distribution of facts and knowledge a lot of geeks need to remember that it can be used to distribute emotions. That's what jennicam's been doing for the past 4 years and that's what hundereds of sites who've followed her lead (and not only) are doing (and will keep doing) as well.

Jay

-- polish ccs mirror