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."
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.
I hope that made sense. =p
Would agree!... I think.
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
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.
I wouldn't worry about not getting a job with someone who is that judgemental about people who keep personal journals. Granted, many bloggers don't do anything useful with their blogs besides whining or socializing, but many others use them as tools to better themselves.
They ended up hiring me anyway, but it was really strange to be on that kind of unequal footing.
...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....
I agree at least the "BLOG" is an annoying term, but if you think about it new terminology pops up all the time.
Take "IM" or "PM" for instance. Instant or Private Messages have been made popular by AOL, MSN, and YAHOO. ICQ was more popular than any of these services, though, and it was just calling them "Online Messages". Don't believe me? Install an old version of ICQ and try to send a message. The Window will say SEND ONLINE MESSAGE.
I remember back in the old multiline BBS days (when I ran a 10 line BBS, that is) the software I was running refered to "Instant Messages" as "Online Messages" or "OLM"s for short. (Cnet Amiga Pro was the software, for those interested). Now days if you say "I'll O.L.M you later" to someone they just give you this blank stare. In my circle of friends, though, OLM is the term we used from 1990 till about 1998 so "IM" is still kind of new to us. Old habits, and all that.
My point is, terminology comes and goes. So while I may not like new terms, I accept that they will be coined. What bothers me more than new terms that are annoying is when people take well established terms and misuse them. Esspecially annoying are people who are under some serious misconceptions about something or another, or idiots trying to sound like they know more than they do. There are a lot of both types going around and it bothers me to no end.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
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?
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!
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
It's just not that interesting a phenomenon.
Are you kidding??! Do you realize how coveted correspondence, diaries, personal logs and photo albums are from 50 years ago? 100 years ago? 300 years ago?!
We are changing the way history will be written. We are creating an army of primary sources, the people who don't write about history - they are history. In 100 years, people will be able to formulate insights about our lives, not based on their conjecture, their agenda, and a few scraps of preserved-information (probably from the ruling , literate classes); but based on the daily records of hundreds of thousands of people from many walks of life.
Weblogs are democratizing history. Or open-sourcing it, if you prefer. And right now the history that's being preserved is by-and-large that of the geek elite that always runs ahead of the general public curve. But ten years from now, weblogging will be as ubiquitous to the average American as the Internet is today. Give the rest of the world time, and they'll catch up with us. You won't get everyone's story, but you'll get many of them. Too many of them to conveniently gloss over the unpopular truths of our time. Will anyone in the future ever be able to write that our country united with a single voice behind the humanitarian, populist, environmentally-sound policies of the Bush Administration? Not as long as there are archives of the weblogs that are being written today.
I see weblogging as the most interesting thing to come out of this whole Internet experiment. Err, I mean, the most interesting thing after slashdot. =)
I think it was Bernard Malamud who said something like "any man writing honestly about his own life is interesting." I agree...