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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."
"Blogging", besides being an extremely annoying term has way too much attention paid to it nowadays. It's just not that interesting a phenomenon.
... 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.
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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.
>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.
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I can just feel the -1's already...
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
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"
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
the web looked much more interessting and much less boring 2 to 5 years ago
Do you really remember the web 5 years ago?
Let me refresh your memory:
"This site designed for Netscape" links
Animated mailto link gifs of a letter going into an envelope
"Under Construction"
"Do you like my new high contrast background image??? It is the same color as my text!!"
"Here is the current weather"
Javascript popup: What is your name? Hi $name!
Frames.... need I say more?
Here are all the meaningless awards this site has gotten. (Slashdot is still guilty of this one!)
500K index.html with anchors instead of using multiple pages
More animated gifs than characters of text
No google
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The list goes on... my point is, the web is better today than it has ever been in history. There is more information than ever, the pages are designed much more cleanly and usably, etc.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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!