Slashdot Mirror
ABC's 'People of the Year' - Bloggers
Sammy at Palm Addict writes "ABC News have declared Bloggers to be their 'People of the Year'. 'A blog - short for "web log" - is an online personal journal that covers topics ranging from daily life to technology to culture to the arts. Blogs have made such an impact this year that Merriam-Webster named it the word of the year. This week, their influence has become readily apparent.'"
Matt Drudge's site could be considered to be a blog... that means bloggers have been influencing news events since at least 1998.
This is /. News for nerds. Do we _really_ need to be told what a "blog" is? We do not have lack of long-term memory where we have to be told again and again the meaning of "blog". Save it for when you're writing to an audience that's first being introduced to the term. Stop insulting us.
[/rant]
Okay, now that I got that out of my system, I can start the new year fresh =D
We're just realizing that some guy with a computer and an internet connection is doing our jobs better then we are.
I don't reply to ACs
Face it, 99% of all the blog material out there is shit (my own included). We need better blogging out there, not more of it!
They should have held up one or two exemplary examples of blogging done right - good content and timley information (and a lack of words like "dat", "ur", "OMG", "LOL", and "ROFLMAO")
<John Stewart>
Stop, please stop butchering language. You're hurting our vocabulary and you make yourself sound stupid
</John Stewart>
Bush is back in office. The Iraq war still rages. Non-business interests are losing ground in most intellectual property conflicts.
Yeah - I'd say the net effect of bloggers is... well, a lot of interest, but few positive results as of yet. Here's hoping next year is better.
Ryan Fenton
philosophy, and not Zen Buddhism.
I should be modded up for this, but ACs don't seem to get modded up.
Ah yes, the dark side of Movable Type:
Blogs are infinitely more successful than Kuro5hin and the K5ers are going to stamp their feeties and hold their breath until they turn blue!
Kuro5hin: News for losers. People who don't matter.
It's without a doubt that not all blogs are of the same weight, BUT...
Who or what will determine if your blog does matter? Page hits? Comments? Flames?
I guess it's all a popularity thing to me.
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
Precisely. No talent clowns running software where they haven't the first clue of how it operates so, to camouflage there true scourge to humanity, they invent a hip synonym for "journal."
All those asshats can keep modding me down if they're so insecure but I'll still classify blogging as THE MOST OVER-RATED CONCEPT OF ALL TIME.
Laws are for people with no friends.
I dunno, using the "fuck you" relevance index, GWB comes out on top.
(That's the number of times you say a person's name after "fuck you" during the year, as in "look at this fucking weak dollar. Fuck you, Bush". Or "Damn, Joe's unit got hit by a suicide bomber and Joe's not coming back. Joe was a good guy. Fuck you, Bush.")
Thanks for defining blog for me. I couldn't figure out what it meant until I went to the homepage of slashdot.
The Television Wiki
> I'll still classify blogging as THE MOST OVER-RATED CONCEPT OF ALL TIME.
Really? Visit a few high-quality news blogs on a daily basis, and suddenly you're bypassing the Mainstream Media, who have had a stranglehold on information dissemination for decades.
Seems pretty significant to me.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
According to BlogShares, the number of blogs has grown from 1 million to 2.3 million over the past 6 months. It seems like information overload. It also seems like the number of blogs isn't really relevant - most of the attention ends up being focused on a very few blogs run by people already in the media (like Instapundit).
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
"But for Verdi, it is the simple pleasure of knowing that someone is listening that makes blogging worthwhile.
"On my blog it allows people to post comments, and I have gotten comment upon comment upon comment," she said. "It makes me feel really good that somebody else cares about what I have to say."
"
That pretty much sums it up - blogging for a feeling of self importance. Blogging turns people into serious attention whores. People start getting upset when nobody comments on their blog.
No wonder we're now seeing t-shirts that say "Go cry about it in your Livejournal."
A blog - short for "web log" - is an online personal journal that covers topics ranging from daily life to technology to culture to the arts.
Did we really need 'blog' defined in the blurb? This is Slashdot after all...
~Lake
...Is the fact that politically-conservative blogs made a huge difference in the 2004 US Presidential campaign.
I cite two reasons for this:
1. Conservative blogs spread the message of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "527" group far beyond what was possible in the past. I mean let's face it: because most media outlets ignored this 527 group, it took the power of conservative blogs to spread the message, along with conservative radio talk shows and the Fox News Channel. Of course, it didn't help the Kerry campaign that Senator Kerry reacted woefully too slowly to the charges of this group.
2. Conservative blogs in a matter of a few hours revealed that the Texas Air National Guard memos supposedly critical of President Bush's Texas ANG service that CBS News used were fraudulent. And it also made people much less trusting of the mainstream press and also why it may have hastened the decision of CBS News anchor Dan Rather to retire one year earlier than he originally planned.
I mean really, who reads these things?
I'm an engineer and work with a bunch on technically savy people. I know of one one person who commonly reads blogs. He is a ultra conservative, very religious, weirdo who uses blogs as a way to confirm his own beliefs. Other than that cares.
Most of them are crap. The only ones I've ever come upon that are even a bit worthwhile are ones where people log cool techno projects. These aren't any different than written descriptions that have been on the web since it started. Nothing new here.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
Interestingly enough, it is this characteristic that Jakob Nielsen has been harping on about for years:
Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience : users spend most of their time on other websites.
Web design and this notion of looking different to every other site is overrated. It is going against what people find usable. There are a lot of well structured blog sites out there - I hesitate to use the word design, since blogs really goes right down to the information architecture layer and get it right from there.
By giving up the "need" to design sites and by going for a templated approach, that gives web site owners, who now become bloggers, more time to focus on content.
Thankfully the days of great looking but content-less sites are fading fast. Content is still king.
It is a pity its with blog software (and tools like wiki) that Tim Berners Lee's original conception of the web of being an updatable resource is starting to come together. Blogs and wikis are making up for the deficiencies of browsers and web servers.
Ditto for Slashdot
No, Slashdot is still good at digging up interesting geeky stories. And even now the comment threads still turn up good points and worthwhile discussions.
The real difference between Slashdot and blogs is that there are millions of blogs. About half of them are complete crap, and 99% of the rest are only of interest to the author and a small handful of other people. But that still leaves tens of thousands of good, interesting blogs.
Slashdot is good. Blogs are good too. Hey, Usenet is good, and I've been on Usenet for 20 years. Good things don't fade away when something new arrives on the scene, but they do settle down into their own particular niche. Television hasn't killed movies or radio or newspapers, but it has reduced them somewhat. So with Slashdot - it will continue to prosper, but its relative influence will probably diminish.
Kuro5hin, on the other hand, is for weenies.
Bloggers can do good work, but there is no institutional/programatic/architectural assurance that they're telling the truth.
.max
Bloggers can post anything they want, w/o refutation, or consequence (barring libel suit, natch)-- there's no way to proximally refute a blog's BS. Journalists, at least, are held to some standard, and their outlets -- papers, magazines, networks, have to at least occasionally genuflect at the altar of veracity. A journalist who lies and is caught becomes unemployed; not so the blogger, who can spew and rave unchallenged.
A much better modality than blogging is usenet news.
Yeah, amazing, isn't it? Look at the web itself; the internet didn't really take off until the web did, even though we had TCP/IP, DNS, FTP, e-mail, gopher, Usenet, and so forth before anyone knew who Tim Berners-Lee was. All the web did was add a simple mark-up language and tie it all together with hyperlinks.
It truly is amazing how far the little things go in this world. For another example, look at today's music and movie piracy situation. It's always been possible--I'd been scraping FTP sites for MP3s years before P2P was around, and people have been taping songs off the radio for longer still--but it took Napster to make it just a little easier and make the whole thing explode.
Now, here are the givens that too many Slashdotters won't admit to:
You want to tell me you popped out of your mother's womb and started coding Perl before you could crawl? Please. We have all ascended a tech learning curve -- and the smart ones are continually looking for new ones to climb. Blogging is in its infancy in terms of both form and tools -- it will evolve for the same reasons you're not still coding COBOL -- people, left to themselves, will find increasinly efficient ways to communicate and transmit information.
But you know what? That big issue of finding a community of one's own isn't limited to geeks -- it's indicative of the prevasive loneliness that may be one of the most dominant characteristics of modern, first-world society.
And blogs have had a huge impact on that.
Today, there are thousands (perhaps millions) of interconnected online communities centered around blogs. No, they're not running FUDforum or other bulletin board software, but they still fit the core definitions of a community, whether online or off. Millions of people are learning more about how the internet works and information that was isolated is increasingly communal and (wait for it, RMS...) free.How can that be a bad thing?
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
As Homer J would say, it must have been a pretty slow year!
What number of these blogs do any research either? It seems to me they mainly all just link to mainstream articles as their source. So what's the difference? You have the occasions where people will get their own information and then post it on a blog, but then, what's special about a blog for that? Any publication would have worked. I have a strong suspicion that blogs are not popular for their functionality, but for the fact that people feel more involved with them, and that's it: a sense of empowerment. A self-esteem promotion for an alienated population. Really they have no positive effect whatsoever, unless you consider giving the bloggers power trips* and the commenters information boners a positive effect.
* The sheer number of blogs that I've read where the blogger repeats something like "we're really changing the world here!" makes me say this. I don't believe they're changing the world much at all, unless they do something particularly special. And I don't know of one blogging event that has been of any significance(don't even mention the Rather thing -- he was an ineffectual, empty, shitty television personality, and he'll be replaced by an equally ineffectual, empty, shitty television personality). Really all they're doing is linking information and adding their own shitty opinion through spin on the story. And then everyone who shares the blog's fundamentalism gather and make comments to each other that can best be described as intellectual fellatio(they'll get blue balls if they don't settle the hard-on the original posting gave them).
But apart from my rants, I'm happy with seeing this proliferation of blogging in the public sphere. Bloggers as a whole being given awards. "Blog" the number one word. One million and one blogs. This proliferation can only mean one thing: its total move into banality. The media of the masses is always banal: it pretends to capture much, but it has far too little to do so. The proliferation will be blogging's own argumentum ad absurdum against it.
Actually, the classic question is "If a tree falls in the woods and there's nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound".
Your misquote asked "If X happens, but a property of X is not observed, does X happen?"; in this case, either the statement "X has happened" is questionable (meaning that X may not have happened at all, thus no observation), or the question is redundant since X DID happen, as stated in the question itself. This question is not philosophical, merely lacking self-referential logic.
Besides, why should whether or not someone HEARS the tree falling determine it's state, since it would be possible for a deaf person to SEE the tree falling without hearing a thing. In fact, since fallen trees are to be found in the vast majority of forests (where people are rather few and far between), I would contend that the transition of state from upright to fallen does not rely in the slightest on anybody seeing or hearing the event, making the question entirely pointless as a thought exercise. Anyway, testing by empirical means is very staright forward: survey a forest, close it to the public, come back ten years later and see if any trees have fallen. See, not a philosophical question at all, but one that can be answered by simple experimental observation.
Anyway, the point of the original question is to ask "does a phenomenon that relies on human senses for verification exist when there are no humans present to sense the phenomenon".
The answer to the real question is really quite simple (although pedantic): No. A tree falling will cause vibrations in air molecules, that is fairly certain. "Sound" is the name given to the perceptions caused by air vibrations stimulating our ears (just like "colour" is the name given to our perception of different wavelengths of light). So without ears to perceive the air vibrating, there is no "sound". QED.
And yes, technically the "speed of sound" is a misnomer, it should be "the speed of wave propagation through air" (the speed at which an acoustic wave propagates is determined by the density of the medium, for those lacking basic physics).
Mortal embarrasment? The geek's version of Mortal Kombat? I dunno what the big deal is, you liked her in middle-school. You might even think she's attractive today, big deal. Happens billions of times every day, just part of being human. I mean, what's so terrible about hearing from her and saying, yep I thought you were cute. Even if she doesn't reciprocate, there really is no shame.
And all bloggers ought to thank Jerry Pournelle for starting the original blog, although back then he called it a daybook. His site still has his original content going back many many years.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/#blog
Nonsense.
Deliberate lies, misrepresentation and lies by omission happen every single day all throughout the Big Media without penalty. --The most effective lies being those which the journalists have themselves been sold on. There is a LOT of state mind-control and propaganda going on. Most of what people see in Big Media is designed to manipulate and control and weave falsehoods.
Now, it is of course true, as you point out, that no single source on the web can be automatically trusted. However. . , an individual with information is able to post without restriction, through blogs or other means. And when the reader takes the responsibility of cross-referencing information and above all, THINKING for his or herself, then a picture of the true objective reality can begin to emerge where blind faith in Big Media makes such a thing much, much less likely.
-FL
The whole thing stunk to high heaven and nearly everybody bought it because they had been trained to believe that the talking heads on TV were smart and wise and good rather than being a bunch of state-owned propaganda dupes. -Amazingly, this was all largely done in the same style of tactical manipulation employed by other great psychopathic power mongers throughout history.
And the Big Media pushed and sold this bullshit. 'Freedom Fries', anybody? (Does everybody still hate the French for not being as gullible? Nobody likes to be shown up as stupid after the fact, so I bet most people do still hate the French.)
Anyway, my point is. .
The ONLY place I was seeing the opposing message in any force during those horrible 'watching a train-wreck in slow-motion' days was on the Web, --primarily through individuals posting their views and research on simple web-pages and discussion groups. Like Slashdot.
-FL