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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.
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.
>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)
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!
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"
... 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...
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.
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...
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
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
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.
...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....
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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!
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