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.'"
I assure you, somebody WILL read it. Once I set up a livejournal that I never told ANYONE about, but made the mistake of using the same screenname as for instant messenger. Compounding this folly was the post in which I confessed to a middle school crush on a girl I hadn't seen since graduating high school. Well, guess who calls me up a few weeks later after getting the idea to plug her friends' screen names into livejournal? Yeah.
...it has a good side and a bad side. There's someone on Kuro5hin who's documented the dark side of Movable Type and, subsequently, Xanga weblogs. It turns out that in addition to "empowering" people's abilities to communicate, weblogs can also be used to stifle them, especially in the insidious case of Xanga. We always need to keep in mind how new technological advances have negative side-effects in addition to positive ones.
I mean, yes bloggers have become a trend.... but 99,9% of the blogs I've read are absolutely senseless to anyone who doesn't know the people in question. You might say the same about homepages - 99,9% of those were useless to outsiders as well. And there's no easier to find the people who actually have something sensible to say. I'll just place this under "if you take a big enough sample, someone will have something interesting to say"... which kinda reminds me of slashdot, oh well ;)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
How about soliders, researchers, volunteers, or teachers?!
This way to the egress...
Except drudge doesn't usually write anything, so it's not really a blog. Usually just posts links to news articles already out there. He also posts pictures on his main site that are on other servers. He doesn't generate that much original content himself.
Still, I go there quite often just because the links are sometimes pretty interesting.
I'm getting really sick of searching Google (and other search engines) for stuff only to find nothing but blog hits (usually from some self-glorifying twit with some catchy emo domain name) cluttering up the results.
Even worse is when it's the same "Trackback" crap, and none of the morons have bothered to retain the original article they were linked to, and it's link rotted.
Blogs *are* the most over-rated and overhyped thing of 2004.
I agree.
This is why editors are valuable.
A group of linguists declared "blog" to be a word they want stricken from the English language and I couldn't agree more.
:(
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6773907/
Other previous hated words:
metrosexual (2003) -- although it made a funny South Park plot
chad (2001) -- the little piece of paper that chose our President
paradigm (1994) -- sadly, still used in 99% of business presentations
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
"Dylan Verdi, an 11-year-old known as the world's youngest videoblogger, says she covers "things that I've seen that I like or that I've heard of, or just anything that happened to me that day that I'm thinking.""
"videoblogger?" great, another buzzword. I wonder what her "videoblog" is about - what 11 year old girls really like? Oh brother, that oughta be a hoot.
A chick named "Dylan?" Now that's a new one!
But *that* is something that Time considered worthy of "People of the Year?" An 11 year old with a video camera talking about what she likes? (they failed to link to the blog, though)
There are so many other people that are far more deserving of the title than effin *Bloggers* - blah.
For a while I thought blogs were stupid, but thats just because I had looked at live journal sites published by 15 year old girls. I like the services that blogger.com offer, and even use textamerica.com for its picture blogging service. I just wish I could have this all on my own domain and not be tied to a company that might not be around in 10 years. Are there any open source packages that I should check out? I've got experience with PHP.
Happy New Year
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
It's significant that, out of a mountain of garbage, there are a few rare gems. Statistically, that will happen. It still doesn't change the reality of blogs. Like everything else in our society, blogs have been co-opted by the system. When a dork like Chris Matthews becomes a "hard" blogger, the party is over.
Laws are for people with no friends.
When the Web was introduced to the masses, everyone down to the last AOLer talked about building their own websites. But up until now many of those sites have been poorly updated piles of rubbish, a far cry from the web of individual voices and opinions around the world that many people thought the Web would bring.
So here we are in 2004, where blogers are now "people of the year" and when we look back at what's changed, it's almost nothing except for one thing: content management systems. You give people Frontpage or Dreamweaver, and they'll put out a poorly done site that's too complex for them to convienently update, but all of a sudden the simple blog-style of content management is introduced, and all of a sudden that vision of voices around the world is coming true. Was this the only thing we were missing the whole damn time?
I'm finding myself slightly stupified at the prospect that the only think keeping this vision from coming true is that we needed to take away the ability for users to make their own site, and then make the whole thing a little easier to update. We still have things like blogs about cats, so I'm not sure the content has become any better, but was this really all the user really needed? It boggles the mind.
The most important blog this year, bar none, was http://www.kevinsites.net/. You can't top it.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
> You're reading this on slashdot and expect there to be an AND??
Hey. I like schadenfreude as much as the next guy.
So many people here seem to want to reiterate that this is a site for "nerds". That we're supposed to make a difference. But in the same breath, they bash others for using "l33tsp34k" or net abbreviations. They'll bash a teen LJ user for posting their virtual diary, but put forth the fury of crap on their own site and tout it as a masterpiece. What's crap to you isn't crap to others.
/. used to have a pretty decent sense of community. About the only time you see people being a group is to bash M$ or team up for the new dsitributed.net project. Yes, we've always disagreed... that's part of a community. But either I've grown very old very quickly, the /. populace has becoem extremely immature, or the community has just broken down for no apparent reason.
As for blogging in and of itself, why could it be considered bad? If Xanga allows for these types of issues, perhaps the creators of Xanga need to be blamed, not the trend of blogging. Blogging can be such an interesting look into the lives of others. Some of you are so far into nerddom that you are antisocial and don't care what others think. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But those of us that are curious about other people, or... God forbid... outgoing or extroverted, blogs let us see what's on the other side... the other side of the bridge, the city, the state or the world. How can this ever be a bad thing?
Yes, yes... almost everyone that comes to this site knows what a blog is. Maybe somebody doesn't. Maybe they are a neo-nerd, fresh to the community. Are you ACTUALLY offended that the term was described in a quote on the front page? Seriously... some people need to get over themselves. There are plenty of things that occur, are said or are shown on the internet that I feel are ignorant or ill-advised. But generally (this post, of course, being an exception), I just let it go.
It's sad really...
am i so busy
that i don't have time to say
one more syllable
-w
I enjoy some blogs, although I have to admit that the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad. Here's a few which I personally find interesting and read regularly. I'm a neuro, space, and robotics geek, so the list is biased as such.
* Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) News: The most thorough spaceflight blog around, focusing on reusable systems.
* NASA Watch: A well-known site with regular critiques of NASA.
* Free Republic: Like slashdot, but for ultra-conservatives. I sometimes like to go there to get a better understanding of what goes through the heads of people who think differently from me.
* Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log: "Quantum fluctuations in space, science, and exploration"
* Democratic Underground: The extreme left's version of Free Republic.
* Instapundit: The slashdot-equivalent of political weblogging, with a somewhat libertarian slant. Known for causing "Instalanches" on innocent web servers, analogous to "Slashdottings."
* Daily Kos: Probably the most influential liberal blog.
* Transterrestrial Musings: a libertarian space analyst who helped me understand why it's possible to be intelligent and support the war in Iraq at the same time. He sometimes posts some fantastic satires.
* theferrett's livejournal: sometimes writes some very insightful and well-composed essays
* spacexploration livejournal community: Space-related miscellany and discussion.
* politicsforum livejournal community: Sometimes has some pretty intelligent political discussion.
* robots.net: Robotics news
* Space Politics: "Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway"
* Rocket Man Blog: Rarely updated, but has very insightful and informed analysis of spaceflight and rocketry.
* Howard Lovy's NanoBot: Nanotechnology news and commentary