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.'"
My first award ever! *tears*
"E-mail" is our person of the year!
Matt Drudge's site could be considered to be a blog... that means bloggers have been influencing news events since at least 1998.
If a blog is updated and nobody reads it, does it actually matter?
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
...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.
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>
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.")
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.
Soldiers, scientists, and other people that are providing services to humanity are probably shaking their heads at this, but meanwhile a thousand camgirl bloggers are saying "OMG Time called me "People of the Year!!" LOL OMG!!!"
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
The Man/Person of the Year is named by influence, not as an endorsement. Hitler, Stalin, and Ayatollah Khomeini all were Man of the Year too.
"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
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.
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...
Translation:
My personal agenda hasn't gained ground. Therefore blogs aren't working.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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.
Another link, to one of his first site entries:
e w/view1.html
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives/archivesvi
The date is June 4 1998. This is not the day of the first content on his site, and he had already been creating content for BYTE magazine for many years before this, but it's a sample of his archive.
He also has reader mail from back then.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/ancient/mail1.htm