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.
... 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."
>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)
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.
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.
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
"Blogging", besides being an extremely annoying term has way too much attention paid to it nowadays.
I always get a kick out of seeing this kind of comment on Slashdot. It makes me wonder what the poster thinks a weblog is... because by most definitions, Slashdot is one.
Yeah, it's now a multiple-author weblog with a very well-established comment system, both traits somewhat unusual, but it's a weblog. Many people use Slash to run more traditional weblogs.
Does your post count as part of the "too much attention" paid to it?