Slashdot Mirror
Are Blogging and Unemployment Related?
Roland Piquepaille writes "The Washington Post is really nice with bloggers. Yesterday, it carried an article named "Free Speech -- Virtually," or "Legal Constraints on Web Journals Surprise Many 'Bloggers'". Today, Cynthia L. Webb focuses on an hypothesis from Chris Gulker, which he exposed in a column published by The Independent, "The View from Silicon Valley: Bloggers come in from the cold." As said Chris Gulker, "Many of us are Webloggers 'bloggers' for short. It would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between the meteoric rise of blogging, the practice of keeping a frequently-updated online journal, and the rise of unemployment in Silicon Valley and other tech corridors. Check this column for a summary or the original article for more details."
Skills and emplyment are related. That's for sure. You don't have to have a college education, but if you are competent in UNIX (and that includes all traditional Unixes and LINUX!) you can get a great job that pays well.
so, yeah, it's sort of unemployment related.
It'd also be interesting to see if there's a correlation between having a SHITTY ECONOMY and the rise of unemployment in fields who have MORE WORKERS THAN THERE IS DEMAND. But surely that's not possible. Blogging must be the cause.
"Blogging", besides being an extremely annoying term has way too much attention paid to it nowadays. It's just not that interesting a phenomenon.
"Today, Cynthia L. Webb focuses on an hypothesis from Chris Gulker, which he exposed in a column published by The Independent, "The View from Silicon Valley: Bloggers come in from the cold"
In other words, Chris Gulker is a professional troller.
When I was employed, I didn't have anything like the time to blog. Once I was laid off, I posted often. Now that I have some freelance work, I post less.
There are certainly counterexamples. I know some folks who find it therapeutic, so they make time to blog. For them, it's a journal that they can selectively share. However, I have certainly witnessed this correlation among my friends.
If you use that word in an interview
"I'm an avid blogger in my spare time"
*slap* *slam*
My Ass hurts.
Could it be that blogging is more a reaction against mainstream media conquering the web, with portals and pages that look alike like one TV-Channel to another?
Or am i the only one that gets the impression that the web looked much more interessting and much less boring 2 to 5 years ago?
... the rise of blogging is much more tied to the introduction of tools such as Blogger and Movable Type that make the process completely painless and coding-free. Almost none of the major bloggers are unemployed tech-types. I have no doubt that some bloggers are, but none of the bloggers who get the most traffic and other attention are.
...
Off the top of my head, the bloggers I can think of are (and you can probably figure out who some of them are): law professor, free-lance journalist (lots of these for obvious reasons), retired software engineer, university professor, graduate student, medical resident, military technician, political cartoonist
Bloggers come from all walks of life; some have certainly come from the tech field, but the explosion of blogging has come from people who are talented writers and have something interesting to say, but who haven't been part of the mainstream media.
Just because there's correlation doesn't mean its cause and effect. In recent years the number of teenage smokers has dropped, and cpu processor speeds continues to increase, the two must be related...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
How much of the population with weblogs/web journals do they really think comes from Silicon Valley?
/am/ a freshman at a public university, and so my 3.936 GPA is of more importance than employment.
I'm in Ohio. I have a web journal. (No, you may not have the address.) I am not employed; I
None of which has anything to do with why I journal. I write there to avoid ranting to my friends, to talk about local news and personal happenings and all that junk. A few people I know read it periodically. I mostly just use it to vent.
I do not live or work in Silicon Valley. I never have. I hope to god I never will. (I'm *not* a coder or sysem administrator or any of that. Not by any stretch of the imagination.) I'm not alone in this. The first people I knew with LiveJournals were high-school aged girls. (Actually, most of them started out at Diaryland. LJ is marginally better.)
Among 'serious' bloggers, the ones I read are the ones who comment on politics and current events. Most of them, I suspect, are also not former tech-field workers.
So unless we're correlating these things like the correlation between sunspot activity and skirt length--thank you, Mr. Heinlein--I don't see how they're getting this information. There's certainly no *causation* involved, that I can see.
Just think of the obviousness of it all. To post, you need time. Jobs tend to take up time, as does school for the younger ones, or just plain old life for all ages. If your life has more activities then you will post less often.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
I hope that made sense. =p
>One woman, a Web designer who asked that her name not be used, said she lost her job because of what she wrote on her Web log.
Emphasis on what she wrote, not Web log.
The Web is one way to publish information, be it through a homepage, an article, a comment in a discussion, or a blog. Books are another, flyers are another etc. If this woman displayed sensitive information (thereby breaching a contract), she has to pay the price regardless of whether it was in a blog or anything else.
There is nothing special or untouchable about a blog, and there is no reason to write an article explaining that although some people think that their blogs are anonymous, they can be tracked down. This is the same with a dozen other mediums.
Despite the unwarranted focus on web logs, this article does deal with some issues of freedom of speech, perhaps that's what this /. discussion should mostly be about.
--
I can just feel the -1's already...
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
I regret to inform you that you are teh sux.
Now I know who these ass wipes are!
Thanks DeepsideFAQ!
A possible result of unemployment is having time on your hands to record your thoughts...
I call this the cleaning the system syndrome. Most newbies to such services actuall use it to dump out their anxieties. There are exceptions, alright. And it would seem a natural conclusion that job uncertainity will only provoke more people to "blog".
Unemployed people don't have anything to do with their time. Also observed - a tendency to post more on Slashdot, download more porn, leech MP3s and warez from Kazaa, and install 5 Linux distros for comparison purposes and spent 18 hours setting up multi-boot. This and other news, tonight at 11.
I am supposed to be working right now.
Damn you /., Damn you straight to hell!
I personally think education is important. Having a BS degree in Computer Science or atleast CIS, should be made pre-requisite for all IT related jobs. Real Jobs require problem solving skills, and the only way to get these skills is to attend a proper university. If you wanna spend all your life performing backups, than I think you can live without proper education.
This is what happened in the DOT COM bust. Lots of unqualified people, without any problem solving skills and proper education got hired, and that pushed the companies down the drain.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I guess there is a correlation, because to run a blog successfully, you have to have something to whine about. Most of the people reading your blog are also whiners who run their own blog, and they'll pick up on your whining and link to it. Blogs are just big P2P networks for whiners.
Seriously, most blogs are just a place to vent in public, and being unemployed is something to complain about.
I wish these bloggers would focus their energies on something more productive tho.
This doesn't surprise me one bit....
What's the best way to discredit somebody? With slander/libel/rumors.
While it's true that there are a lot of bloggers out of work, there isn't really a lot of alternatives for us pasty ass geeks that just wanna make boxes do neat things.
A buddy of mine just got an 18k enlistment bonus, he's 35, tow truck driver. He's gonna drive gasonline tankers for the army. He had a skill they wanted. Nevermind the fact that he's 6'2" 260lbs.
I went down to the recruitment office and told the recruiting officer "Hey I got 7 years experience as a sysadmin, I can build networks, I can set up servers, i'm really good at fixing things! I'm only 29 to boot!"
He just sort of looked at me like I was in the wrong place. After finding out the army could only use me as either cannon fodder, latrine digger, or a cook, without a bonus, I figured I didn't really have a future there.
Going on to John Ashcrofts Homeland Security Guard courses, I just looked at those people in their silly "I wanna be a cop" costumes and snickered.
Sorry washington post, but it seems all the USA wants right now is cops, security officers and army personal. You say that bloggers are jobless, well fuck, what other options are we cut out for then???
Most of the people I know in my field are not bullies, and do not enjoy placing control on other people. We're just not cut out for that kind of work mentally or physically, and WP want's to talk trash about us?
Whats next? Are you going to say those people in the special olympics are slow?
Heh.
The white house is filled with the idiot son of an idiot. Why do I have this mental picture of GWB looking for the "any key"
Would agree!... I think.
I've noticed I post a lot more on /. since I've been unemployed...
http://www.fuh-q.com/
http://www.fury.com/
... I started blogging when I was employed, but had nothing to do at work 9/10 of the time. My boss basically told me to play, and when they needed me, they'd give me something to do. Since I could SSH to my webhost, I blogged. I was the closest you could get to unemployed while still receiving a full payroll check.
When I became unemployed (not ever getting stuff to QA because Sales won't let Engineering finish anything tends to do this), I blogged even more. When I became employed again, I still blogged (and do to this day), but I didn't blog as much as I used to, since I 1) don't have time, 2) don't have as much wandering in my mind because I'm focused, and 3) don't have as much anger to rant off in a blog. Thus, I don't blog as much as I used to.
I still do occasionally, though, and it is a good way to collect one's thoughts, and straighten one's self out a bit if one is a bit confused.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Where's the guy who has a tagline that says "why haven't you posted more than 1000 comments?"
I have a good answer for him.
Since nobody has yet given me any forumuales that take noticeably longer to do in RPN rather then alg, but I can give *plenty* that RPN is markedly faster in, RPN is clearly the supiour method.
You are not complete until you know RPN.
proof:
http://www.ibiblio.org/propaganda/microblogger/
which, in an interesting side-effect, can prove that blog "developers" can be bigger self-serving idiots than bloggers themselvese.
Since Ive found myself unemployed, I've capped my /. karma!
: )
You can't take the sky from me...
Going from that, I guess it's also a way to whither away whatever money you've got left (electric bills / internet) to reflect on it.
Of course, it'd be even more depressing when you can't even afford to blog anymore!
-Joe
If we're all god's children, what's so special about Jesus? - Jimmy Carr
In recent years the number of teenage smokers has dropped, and cpu processor speeds continues to increase, the two must be related
Really? Tell the Post, they might publish it!
As was hammered into our heads in Bio 1, "correlation does not prove causation." Repeat 100 times. Remember it when reading The Bell Curve. Now if only the rest of the world would do the same.
just helping out. You fucking suck.
Cause: blogging causes people to get fired from their job.
Effect: those who are fired or laid off from their job have more time, and therefore will blog.
Both these are distinct, and should be examined separately, not treated as one.
As anyone who's followed Mark Pilgrim's progress at Dive into Mark (www.diveintomark.org) knows, he recently got a plum writing assignment from O'Reilly because of the work he did on his website. I've noticed that Dave Winer seems to be doing quite well with his job and his web log.
:-)
I seem to recall a few logic problems when I was in college that sounded an awful lot like the thinking in this article. Not that you have to take a logic class to be a reporter these days I suppose...
c, article is wrong, blogs caused the bubble to burst when people found out what really happens to their computers . . ..
still employed tho, must not be working, boss isn't too angry yet. guess there really is something to being self-employed :)
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
can i have my computer back. I need it for work you meanies!
So why is blogging popular? I think it's the latest "not it your face" communication. First was snail mail, then came the phone, then e-mail, and IM. Whenever I communicate with you using one of those methods, I assume that *you* must be interested. But the problem is, how do I know if you are interested about a particular topic that I may want to rant about? I could just spam you with every idea in my head... or I can start a blog. A blog is an extremely passive communication system. If you are interested, just come on back and read my rants. If you are not interested, just don't come back.
Unemployment will come and go. And blogging? Well... the time for blogging has just come. It's the next step.
Sex - Find It
I'll keep my overwhelming urge to release all of my ramblings on the downlow...
/. so I'm probably doomed to the unemployment line soon!
Plus the fact that it serves basically no purpose for me (ie, no one cares about my ramblings vs. famous people who everyone wants to know every stupid thought that occurs to them)....
On the other hand, I'm posting my ramblings to
-Joe
If we're all god's children, what's so special about Jesus? - Jimmy Carr
There are so many god damned blogs out there, that they just average blogs in general to be boring, uninteresting, and just plain shit. I really don't see the interest of reading about someone else's daily activities unless they happened to be extraordinarily interesting, or of great contrast to what you usually do. Most of them involve people posting about their lack of Cheerios in the cereal selection, and how they dropped a five dollar bill in the sewer today. Yawn yawn boring. I encourage you, if you are a blogger, to make up lies and throw some violence, sex, and perhaps a little crime into your posts. That way they aren't just existing, they're intertwining with the existence of other people's interest.
The article displays one of the primary attributes of blogging that I dislike, the fact that its strongly a mutual admiration society. The description of the bloggers meeting in meatspace clearly displays this, they are sitting around brimming with self importance. Quote Gulker "Instead of barricades and demonstrations, we have Weblogs and P2P ... we're the same people who did the actual work that resulted in the greatest legal creation of wealth in history. And we have our eye on next year...
/., k5, metafilter are not up to the task.
If blogging is to live up to the hype its being built up to be it will need to get over itself and create institutions for critical peer review. Its pretty clear that the current ones like
You may want to check the blog of The Homeless Guy.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
It isn't just "bloggers" - it's more like "people who don't know anything better to do with the internet"
The weblogging phenomenon is an outpouring of talentless hacks putting up shitty websites to jump on the Interweb bandwagon.
--sdem
Correlation found between masturbation and lack of a girlfriend. News at 11:00!
They ended up hiring me anyway, but it was really strange to be on that kind of unequal footing.
It'd also be interesting to see if there's a correlation between having a SHITTY ECONOMY and the rise of unemployment in fields who have MORE WORKERS THAN THERE IS DEMAND. But surely that's not possible. Blogging must be the cause. Read: Correlation Not: Causal relationship Correlations are useful outside of determining whether or not one trend directly results in another because it is an underlying cause. An example: there is a strong correlation between shoe size and height, so shoe size might be a decent predictor of height. It doesn't mean that because someone has big feet, they're also tall. They have big feet and are tall because of their genes, environment, childhood diet, lack of osteoperosis, whatever. In the world of economics, correlations are used as what are called "leading" and "lagging" indicators. Leading indicators are especially useful because, whether or not there's a causal relationship or not, you can often use them to predict what might happen with the economy next. There are some questions which really don't deserve any attention, though. I really don't see much, if any, scientific value in this. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go drop a blog in the toilet.
...when I read about the legal problems bloggers can get into, my reaction is to assert even more strongly that freedom of speech should be absolute. The current judicial system is a means of intimidation used by bullies who want to prevent communication. If there were no such thing as libel, everyone would know that just because something is in print (in any sense), it cannot be automatically trusted. Let people say whatever they want, in other words; the negative impact of negative statements, including outright lies, varies inversely with the degree of freedom of speech. A radical approach, certainly, but if we all lived under a system that refused to make any utterance or expression legally actionable, our assumptions about information would be different. Today we tend to believe what we read; that is foolish, and the legal system encourages that foolishness.
/. for news, and sometimes the comments contain interesting things, but I can't quite imagine seeking weblogs to read, or wasting eyesight on them.
I also wonder: who bothers to read the babble of all these bloggers? Who has the time, or the lack of discrimination required, to give bloggers any attention? I look at
It sometimes seems to me that we live in a society that communicates both too little and too much. It's a matter of quality, in other words, and that involves taste and discrimination. My limited contact with some very clever people on the net has led me to constuct a (very unfair and inaccurate) stereotype: a hacker, and especially a young hacker, is remarkably skilled in a narrow, arcane field, and almost totally ignorant outside it. The older ones who have already had a decent education and a real life don't fit the stereotype very well. Yes, I know that's not always true, but...hackers have left me feeling that I am dealing with people who utterly lack the information that should be conveyed in a solid liberal education. We are living on different planets, and our fundamental assumptions and core information do not mesh well at all. So...if (I said "if"!)most blogs are constructed by narrowly informed and partially-formed people, the reasons for reading blogs must be few indeed.
Yes, all of the above means that I would be unlikely to read my own comment, and very unlikely to believe it. -- Happy holidays to everyone anyway. Grumble, grumble....
Q.E.D.
Well, The Bell Curve was not the first place I heard the term, as I majored in psychology. I thoroughly believe that genetics influence a tremendous amount of our makeup, especially our susceptibility to various illnesses. However, I found The Bell Curve nearly unreadable. I found it a good example of taking a little data and stretching it over much too great a distance.
:)
Everyone should make up their minds for themselves, to the degree their genetics permit, but bear in mind that the books conclusions are far from received wisdom. Keep a close eye on the book's use of statistics and remember the inherent limitations of intelligence testing with its fixation on one number to characterize each of us. Efforts to do so in the past have failed spectacularly. It his quite a leap to go from the shaky assumption that intelligence can be quantified to thinking we know how to design society around it.
For the interested, I happened across this site which had gone to impressive lengths to collect commentary, pro and con, on The Bell Curve. One of the most critical, and entertaining to read, is the late Gould, also of Harvard.
Oddly enough, the late co-author Herrnstein was my Psych 1 professor. Seemed like a nice guy.
I used to blog all the time when I was employed. Now that I no longer have a job, I hardly ever feel like it anymore.
Does that make me a rebel?
Not blogging. Americans being fired from their own companies replaced by foreigners. I am not talking about immigrants, people who want to make a life in the United States, but FOREIGN WORKERS. Hell, with the L-1, they don't even need to worry about H1-B quotas.
I laugh at these numbskulls who think their "skillz" and "contribution to ze company" will let them keep their jobs. Your time is coming, and I feel bad for you because I was right there with ya. Look at your managers - skills DON'T MEAN SHIT. How much you cost is what they are looking at now. And it is pretty hard to rate against third world nations.
I know of companies that are PROFITABLE who are shedding american jobs, replaced by or keeping foreign workers.
IT jobs are going the way of steel, auto, textile, and most manufacturing jobs. The decay has reached upwards into our eco-social system.
California has a budget problem - why? Over 60% of the taxes are paid for by 10% of the taxpayers. What has happened to those high paying jobs? Shipped overseas. Those salaries and consultant level hourly wages are GONE man. And those stupid idiots in Sacremento want to raise even more taxes?!?!
Silicon Valley has a 40% office vacancy rate. This place is done, man. It's nearly half empty. I am seeing more and more graffitti and boards. It ain't coming back like it was. It is full of indians and chinese people - English is barely spoken here. That is the future of IT - better re-train into Bio-Tech cuz the money ain't in IT anymore - irregardless what those ITAA fools say about jobs.
The internet has given rise to a whole new spectrum of people who feel the need to broadcast THEIR taste in things. Hence the advent of the waiter/DJ, and now the waiter/blogger.
Next new trend: waiter/coder.
I used to write in mine a lot. And I was unemployed. And then back in June I started working for SBC, and now I write in it once every couple weeks, if that. So in my case, there's a direct relation.
BytesTemplar.com
What type of metrics did the writer of the article use to assert the correlation between blogging and unemployement.
I run blogs4God.com - a portal of almost 500 bloggers - as well as a blog itself. There are no more or less unemployed from that segment than there are in my neighborhood.
Sounds a bit contrived - but whatta I know?
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
probably when nobody's able to make the logical leap from "i'm unemployed and poor" to "i need a place to bitch."
I don't understand. I've never seen a blog and have no desire to create one. I know of no other person (in the flesh of course) who has seen one or created one. Methinks that besides the attention they get from /. and TheReg, no one else on this planet cares.
I apologize if this sounds trollish, but really - who out there thinks that blogging is a big deal? It's hard enough to hear an informed opinion checking NPR and the BBC for information, let alone surfing peoples' random thoughts in blogs for useful information. Someone convince me otherwise.
Some random possibilities:
1. Blog excessively at work, get fired.
2. Work is slow, blog in spare time, both excuse for layoff.
3. Offensive or anti-employer blog, excuse for firing.
4. Already unemployed, bored, bogged down, blog.
5. Blog, post email address, receive spam, become unproductive from said spam, get fired.
6. Good technology worker, keeps up to date with slashdot blogs, has karma envy, must blog or feel inadequate, affects his performance at work, gets fired.
7. Blogging coder uses his own product, gets hooked, no time to create or deliver future merchandise, loses job
8. Bloggers criticize entrenched powers, who give them a bad name through big media, leading to negative view of bloggers, leading to layoffs for blogging.
9. The typical 50% random correlation between completely unrelated concepts such as unemployment and blogging, which many interpret falsely as a trend.
10. The above is a typical blog rant. BLOGGING GUARANTEES UNEMPLOYMENT! Anyone want to hire me? Prove me wrong, please.
Hula Hoops for the new millennium.
Is it fascism yet?
Here are the google results:
:)
blog: 2,960,000
my blog: 188,000
blog unemployment: 10,500
blog unemployed: 11,200
blog "job interview": 3,770
blog "wearing a tie": 205
blog "wish i had a job": 100
blog "i love being unemployed": 9
Make up your own mind!
People have too much time on their hands due to unemployment? What a crock! What I want to know is why there haven't been any new articles posted to Slashdot for over five minutes!!
I've worked with a handful of folks with none CS degrees or no degree and all but one were hackers. The poster has some valid points for you learn a lot about how to write better more maintainable code in college. Sometimes the proper way to do something isn't the most obvious (OOP) and it takes time to understand the best approach and how to implement it. Most projects I've been on haven't had time allotted for nitwits to learn good practices, so programmers need to learn it from somewhere. College is the place. The dot com days aloud anyone who could spell computer a decent job, but the quality of the code was often horrible and often because some web hacker was building it. I also realize some really good stuff was developed and a great deal of the hacked code was done so for time constraints, which lead to rant number 2, poor management. I've also experienced managers without a CS background who want projects completed in short time frames, but cut the design phase for that's were they perceive the least value. A manager with a solid CS education will realize that's were you can save the most time in a project for it's easy to change your mind on paper, but hard to refactor. The most successful projects I've ever been on have spent the most time on design and so had the least implementation time and were delivered under time. If only all managers and coders had a formal education and used what they learned, they this would be a much better profession.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And in other news blogging is the newest in meal replacements. It completed replaces your need to eat.
:)
The only side effects are that you will feel blogged. - Somebody had to say that
I don't think I'm the only one who read "Are Blogging and Unemployment Retarded?".
;)
That would've been weird. You don't have to be retarded to be unemployed.
I don't necessarily disagree, and I think neither do the authors. One chapter of the book goes over both problems with thier study and what you can't deduce from it (it's late in the book). They basically say something similar to what you said above (though a little less critical of course :) ). While correlation does not prove causation it doesn't disprove causation either, a big chunk of the book was an attempt to strengthen that argument.
Gould assumes too much (basically the problem I have with many, not all, of the detractors). He begins by saying they are social darwinisms and debunks that theory, good - he right on debunking it. Unfortunatly for gould The Bell Curve was not the classic social darwinism he debunked. He also make claims he does not support, i.e.:
The general claim is neither uninteresting nor illogical, but it does require the validity of fourshaky premises, all asserted (but hardly discussed or de- fended) by Herrnstein and Murray. Intelligence, in their formulation, must be depictable as a single number, capable of ranking people in linear order, genetically based, and effectively immutable. If any of these premises are false, their en-tire argument collapses.
occupies at least a whole chapter on cultural influences and the weaknesses of single number IQ tests, he just didn't like thier arguments so he dismisses them as "not there" (Gould seems to do this quite often on social issues). As one of the articles about his review is that modern IQ tests are not quite as simple as they make out (though they still reduce it to one number). Basically it seems there are several camps on the use of IQ tests, if you fall into one of the diametrically opposed viewpoints of them you will hate the book. The genetically based IQ was what they were trying to show so it doesn't count. And finally immutable IQ's don't necessarilly invalidate what they said, unless they are drastically changable (like from 95-130, some variation is expected but not that serious)
or another example
for early intervention in education
might work to boost I.Q. permanently,
he accuses authors of no proof and then makes a statement like this, yea it might, and it might not - didn't proove anything. At least link to some study that shows this, it's like saying our current theory of gravity might not be correct because somewhere in the universe it may not hold. Well, yea, that's true - but that doesn't mean that the current gravity theory is wrong either (nor should we ignore it becuase of that). I don't know enough about IQ studies if it is shown that IQ's fluctuate signifigantly or not, but the twin studies The Bell Curve uses would seem to suggest a strong genetic influence and relativly immutable, at least show evidence to the contrary or I have to assume Gould is just being a hack.
next he goes on to dicuss inheritance in things such as height, and is totally correct. What he failed to address was the use of identical twins study, and what I at least took as the bulk of the bell curve. As the authors stated the sample is still quite small and there are other problems but no real showstoppers. Again Gould has always seemed to have this trait: ignore stuff he doesn't think is relevant.
After reading Gould refutations I'm basically repeating them, they were much more insightfull than his (and one was critical of both the bell curve and Gould).
basically when I read statements like the one I responded too it's usually someone who has not read the book. My phsych teacher was a Phd candidate and went into a 15 minute tirade about the bell curve one day, all completely wrong. I said that that is not what the book said and with a triumphant smile she asked had I raed the book, yes, twice though the apendicies only once. I then asked if she had and she said, "well, I raed the introduction but that is all I needed to read". Basically she listened to what the news complained about and reiterated it.
The other one that drive me nuts is how often Adam Smiths The Wealth of Nations is misquoted by people who have never read it, and the last one is charles darwins Origin of the Species.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
A number of people who weblog are introverts in person, and that's the real issue. In a lot of work environments, getting ahead (or keeping your job) actually has a lot to do with how well you socialize with others at work, and not just how well you do the stated tasks of the job.
Seriously. It's not something to complain about, it's the unwritten rule: you have to play well with others. Most people, if they have to choose between promoting (or keeping) one of two equally qualified people, will keep the person they feel most comfortable and at ease with.
This is also true when people are asked to recommend others. You don't think about the guy in the cubicle next to you who only talks to you when he wants to show off something he downloaded or wrote, you think about the girl across from you who always asks how you're doing, shows you the new piercing she just got, and hopefully invites you to her next party. Sure, he may actually be a better coder or better at fixing customer issues, but that girl's pretty friendly...
There are books on "Networking Essentials." But the ones in the career section of the bookstore are as useful as the ones in the computer section, know what I mean?
Get off my launchpad!
So does blogging cause unemployment, or is blogging an outlet after you've been unemployed?
Btw, check out my blog. It makes me feel special. Especially if you have a job for a dude that has 4+ years of C++ experience and 2+ years of OpenGL. Not to mention other stuff in my CV.
Obviously Andrew Sullivan is the exception, no the rule. But how likely is it that a community of unemployed could muster $80,000 in donations during Mr. Sullivan's recent pledge week?
What about blogs run by authors of books, or people running little companies, churches, and other entities using the blog format to get their information out w/out having to <html> and FTP their brains out?
I want to see some hard numbers before I believe there is a correlation.
--- have you healed your church website?
E/N stood for Everything and Nothing, a "timewaster" page about silly news articles, bizarre Flash movies from Japan, and other amusing stuff the author finds on the web, plus commentary and rants that put them in context. badassmofo.com is a good example, as he's a tech worker who has time to kill scrounging the 'Net. His page used to be considered E/N a few years back, but now would be thought of as a blog.
--All your stolen base are belong to Rickey Henderson
..While reading the paper. There's nothing like blogging the first thing in the morning, reading over the Business section while you have a steaming cup of hot coffee sitting on the sink.
That said, I've noticed people who weblog usually do so in four distinct categories:
1. Manic depressives
2. The unemployed
3. Certain technical people
4. Normal people
In the case of #1, well, I hate to disappoint these people, especially since they're obviously suffering from mental disease, but.. No one gives a damn about you, your cat, or how you think the world hates you. The rest of us know the world hates us. Deal with it.
In the case of #2, many of these people simply have far too much time on their hands since they've been laid off. Some of them actually do something useful during that time - IE, forgoing whinejournal and creating their own weblogging software, thereby aiding them in retooling their skillset. Some of them tend to bitch a little too much about the economy, but hey, can you blame them?
#3 is an interesting group. These people might as well be writing changelogs as opposed to weblogs. Their ramblings are filled with tales of cool new features and damnable bugs that have taken far too long to track down. I don't know why, but I enjoy reading these sort of logs.
The big #4 - the largest source of weblogging. These tend to be people who simply don't have any interest in paying for possibly expensive or ad-ridden webhosting. They don't have the time for hacking away through the black morass of conflicting standards known as HTML. Yet, they want to keep their friends updated as to what's going on in their lives without constant e-mailing. Solution? They sign up at one of the many weblogging sites and go nuts. (These people tend not to go on an "Look at me! Hear about my cat!" kick. They write to let their friends know what's going on with them, and if someone else stumbles across it, good for them.
Now, does unemployment cause weblogging? No, it doesn't. Since the inception of HTML, people have had pointless webpages where they spew crap that no one cares about. I've had one in my day, and I suspect that many of you have, too. About the only real effect that unemployment has in this domain is that it gives more people more time to write about trivial things. These people could be out looking for jobs, playing with their Playstation 2's, fragging people in Quake, but instead, they've chosen to utter their words upon the world wide web, perhaps hoping that someone will read them and care.
Well DUH, WTF else did I have to during my 39 weeks off? You think I was going to wade through the billion bullshit postings filled with disjointed acronyms and technologies that don't go together?
A favorite. I saved it.
"Must know Exchange 2000 on Solaris 8."
What? And when I asked that question on the phone after tracking them down like the fugitives they were the HR troll said:
"If you're not qualified why did you call?"
This
Of course, IMHO, the other "surprising legal constraint" is that proprietary material should not be divulged. "Thou shalt not steal".
The ins and outs of today's laws vary from one jurisdiction to another, but not the age-old principles of right and wrong...
It's hard to tell if having a blog and my recent resignation are related. Certainly not a cause and effect thing, more of a symptom that my job did not fully utilize my capacity to do work. Bored at work I filled my downtime with PHP code, learning new integration techniques (XML-RPC, SOAP, etc.) and mastering SQL and various stored procedure languages. Nobody at my day job minded much since I was the go to guy when the really tough techincal questions came up, but that only happened 2-3 times a year... So having and maintaining a blog was a side effect of being stuck in a slow day job.
The counter argument is that by maintaining a BLOG my new employer was able to keep tabs on me and we've come to an agreement that I should return to a more technically demanding environment... So my BLOG helped me get out of a dull job and into a better one.
I offer this simple rule while blogging: NEVER writing anything about work that violates NDA's, slags the company or client, and remember that your boss may be reading what you write...
www.jmagar.com
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Note that I said Gould was "entertaining" not "right." :) I haven't read the two arguments closely enough. Gould was arrogant but very bright. One of his best points was simply that 90% of the reviewers refused even to try to understand the statistics -- which is scary.
My 2 principal objections are pretty simple. First, I think Herrnstein puts way too much faith in the single-number IQ, and no subtlety of testing can compensate; also, because the IQ tests are strictly observational they provide nothing but an unproven inference of immutable IQ. I felt that Herrnstein discussed the problems with IQ testing in an insincere way, to defuse rather than answer critics.
Second, and much more important, their speculations on public policy are ill-founded. Humans are so much more complex that their native abilities (yes I think these exist) and we have yet to properly appreciate the effects of motivation and environment. People who brush off environment stun me -- I am college-educated, read a lot, have kids, and spend a lot of time teaching my kids; it's disturbing to be told I don't make a difference! I think an intellectually active environment is enormously beneficial (and fun), and that these benefits would carry over the adopted kids. That IQ is somewhat inherited does not mean inheritance determines IQ -- though many will assume it does.
Frankly, I'm even comfortable saying that should these IQ tests be demonstrated highly reliable, they should not be used. The human tendency towards bigotry is too strong. If our real intention is to better society, subtle improvements in education will be dwarfed by the social divisions. Let people prove themselves as individuals, not as members of labeled groups reminiscent of Brave New World.
Personally I am much more interested in performance, and have seen that it often runs independently of ability. the stereotype of the traumas of putting kids in the wrong tracks begs the questions of whether we're messing up on tracking -- the simpler courses are often boring for everybody. If you want to know what children are like, get to know them, don't engrave a number on their foreheads.
I think Herrnstein should have stopped with the material about IQ. With Herrnstein's death it will be interesting to see what if any future his work will have. I think it will be little.
Again Gould has always seemed to have this trait: ignore stuff he doesn't think is relevant.
Well, we all do that! Have you had your IQ checked recently? Yes, I understand what you really mean.
Wish I could get eighty fucking grand for my slashdot journal! Oh well.
bravo!
Yeah, it would be much better to spend all that blogging time hitting the streets knocking on doors begging for a job.
You've got to wonder if the traditional media feels threatened by the blog phenommena?
I mean 2 somewhat negative stories in 2 days is a bit much.
Sort of reminds me of the papers after the "shiney! new!" take on the web wore off and increasing numbers of people were web surfing instead of watching TV or reading the papers. There were a whole bunch of "evils of the web" stories back then as well.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
I've been unemployed for almost a year and I hardly ever update my LiveJournal :o)
We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as
supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type
programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close
communication.
-- Dennis Ritchie
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