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Blog reading up 58% in U.S.
mshiltonj writes "Americans are becoming avid blog readers, with 32 million getting hooked in 2004, according to new research, showing that blog readership has shot up by 58% in the last year."
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blog readership has shot up by 58% in the last year.
And 90% of that is due to Slashdot posting Roland Piquepaille Blog Spam "Articles"!
Figures that most are teens too, like me. They are obsessed with each others lives. Oh well, what can I say? I guess it is interesting and others are technical and informative!
_
Free 27" Sony WEGA TV
"Despite the explosive growth, more than 60% of online Americans have still never heard of blogs, the survey found."
Blogs, journals, etc. have replaced mailing lists for my friends (aged 26-35) as the way of keeping up to date with each other and arranging social events. Sure, we still email for 1-1 conversation, but for broadcast blogs just seem more efficient.
My Journal
Just another useless survey - imo. And the facts are telling that 60% still didn't hear about blogs.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
In Soviet Russia, blog reads YOU!
I wonder what's the case about -writing- blogs and how many blogs out there aren't read even once.
Anyway, blogs definitely -should- have some kind of mark to help filter them off from Google. Sometimes they badly ruin search results.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Interesting peice of information, but rather redundant. All this says is that people in the US are just that... people. Internet use is up, why is everyone always so surprized?
Although part of that is due to the fact that some blogs don't appear to be blogs. You can use blog software to create sites that handle news and multiple users more easily without proclaiming themselves to be blogs.
Oh, and if you want to see what my blog looks like, just check here.
My .02 worth...
is still zero.
That's because America is a cult of personality. People love following other people and drooling all over them and knowing everything they do, including when they take a shit or all of the drama about how their doctor is switching them from xanax to klonopin and how they got wasted the night before with some dude they met at a club that had some percosets to share. Honestly, who cares?
.
And nothing has changed, except that we have renamed "home pages" to "blogs". There is no difference between a blog and a person's home page, except that one usually is now automated (as far as having an interface to use for adding content) and the other is manually done by editing HTML files.
This is like calling murder and rape a "misdemeanor" and claiming that "felonies are down!". No, they aren't. You're just calling them something else now.
Personally, I dont' read ANY BLOGS, unless you count Slashdot. But slashdot is hardly a "blog". When friends or acquaintances offer me their livejournal (or other blog) urls, I tell them "I"m sorry, but I don't read livejournals". It's nothing intended as offense toward them. I just don't waste my time reading things that I don't care about
The thing that offense ME about blogs is that you should take the time to have a conversation with ME and tell ME about your life and what's up. Rather than plastering every daily event and thought to your blog that all of your real life and online buddies read hungrily like little cult followers, take the time to have a conversation with me one on one and tell me things that you want to share with me. Blogs are distant, impersonal and filled with crap. Filter out the crap and TALK WITH ME.
People have always done this, but the trend has gotten more pronounced. I sometimes imagine that we're going to end up as completely distinct logical entities that happen to share the same geological space. Imagine two countries with exactly the same borders, with different tax structures, different social benefits, different foreign policy.
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
I think that five years down the line, someone could compile a dictionary on the mutations of the word "blog".
This is the only word that i refuse to pun about.
Harrumph.
This probably explains why so many more people seem to be talking about so many more topics these days, but have less to say than ever.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
These days when searching for stuff you get a huge percentage of blog entries as opposed to legitimate* information. Not saying that blogs are bad, it's just that for a pure text based search it really raises the signal to noise ratio.
Say something like video card doom3 - gets 600k hits, whereas
video card doom3 -forums gets 333k
Blogs are useful, but I'll be glad when google separates them from the normal search results.
* as legitimate as is possible on the net anyway
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
Never heard of 'em.
Four out of five people think the fifth one is an idiot.
Laws are for people with no friends.
If news sites like Slashdot are also counted as blogs, I'm not surprised the number is increasing.
Personally, I don't read personal blogs much. Most are low quality.
Last year 90% of Internet users just didn't know what they where viewing, until some jackass decided to call it a 'blog'. Now they have a term for what they read.
.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
Is anything more self-absorbed than blogging?
That anyone would think their life is important enough for the world to read is the height of hubris!
--
Check me out on http://www.livejournal.com
But in general I have little use for personal blogs, blogs that are about someone. There are six billion people on this earth. Many of them have fascinating stories to tell. Once they have truly fascinating experiences, I'll be glad to read about it in a biography or autobiography. But until then, they can keep their day-to-days to themselves or others who like to pore over meaningless details. Want to know what I had for breakfast today? Dude, not even I am interested any more.
I do like blogs that are news aggregating sites. That is really useful to me, so it's not as if I ignore all blogs. But blogs as "home pages"? I ignored those too back in the day. And by the way, for a while I tried running my site in parallel as a blog along with the regular URL. It was fun to get comments on the headlines, but it wasn't really blog material. Just felt out of place. So I dropped the blog.
If blogs speak to you, that's wonderful. Have fun. I'll snooze this one out.
I'd rather read BLOBs
Seems to encourage a hands-off type of socialization, while separating people by yet another degree doesn't it? I mean, how many people have others on their buddy lists just to "check away messages"?
The only thing that could have made this story funny is if it was a blog article being backed up by a web poll. I was kind of expecting the link to the article to go to some blog.
I love useless statistics. When something is this new, a "58 percent" increase means zilch. An increase from what?
If someone told me that TV viewing was up 58 percent that would mean something, as we have a well-established base of what's normal. Blogs are too new to track in any meaningful way.
It's like saying private spaceflight is up 40,000 percent since the flight of SpaceShipOne.
In RatherGate, it was blogs like Little Green Footballs and Powerline which actually broke the story, quickly determining that the RatherGate documents where not only frauds, but poor, obvious frauds at that. And it wasn't TV news "experts" who made the determination, but real experts out on the Internet chipping in their particular bits of knowledge about computer typographer, Air Force National Guard procedures, etc. Tens years ago, CBS probably would have gotten away with it. Now they can't.
In the case of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, here was a story the MSM didn't want to touch with a ten-foot poll because it went against the narrative the had already decided on ("John Kerry, War Hero Turned Protestor"). (Just imagine if there had been an organization with some 80-odd National Guard vets swearing that they witnessed Bush shirking his duty; there would have been an hour-long prime time special...) Since no media outlet was covering their ads, it was the blogsphere that carried information about the group. It's ironic that the Swift Boat Vets spent about 1/100th what Moveon.org did, and was still 100 times more effective.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
This stat is likely influenced by the massive numbers that went out and read political blogs during election time. I can't remember hearing about blogs on Hardball or Crossfire in 2000...
Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that.
I've been seeing a tremendous increase in traffic to my blog, Mischief Mayhem & Pornography over the past year from people all over the globe. I wish textamerica would enable some sort of geotracking so I could figure out where the hell these people are coming from.
ozskier (Digital Dave) www.mischiefmayhemandpornography.com
I think what's really made blogs (and now other outlets) take off is the use of RSS/ATOM feeds and RSS/ATOM readers. There's Straw for Linux, SharpReader for Windows, and even online aggregators like Bloglines for those who are always on the run.
It's easy to know when someone has updated without having to manually check every site. Reading content is also a breeze, by virtue of having a unified interface. Personally, a large number of my regular readers access my weblog through an RSS interface. And with big outlets like Yahoo News and BBC providing RSS feeds, it's not much more effort to simply add a personal blog to your daily reading list.
Titus Barik
32M is still a relatively small number compared to the overall American population (~300M).
I find most blogs so bland and boring that I don't see the reward in trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in them. Sure, some are funny, or informed, or insightful, but SO many are just pointless ramblings mixed in with malformed thoughts and opinions.
Blogs are one of those things that I am absolutely shocked have gotten so much attention.
-This sig intentionally left blank
since when are forums blogs? Forums have been around for ages. I was posting in forums nearly 20 years ago, on various BBS's.
My sister is at college in another state. I read hers (and she knows I do it...and she hasn't killed me yet) so I can keep track of what's bothering her.
Seems to me that there's a greater percentage of simple journals/diaries rather than event or otherwise one-time use blogs. True, the latter often recive the greater publicity, but the truly "dynamic threads" (that's an excellent phrase, kudos to Lonesome Squash) are the ones that cover more than just "My breakfast was [sic] egges, h4m and bacon" or "This is the [Insert Desired Event Name here] 2005 blog."
When traditional media in USA become more and more controlled by suspicious interests, blogs offer a unique free approach to journalism. But writing on a blog can cost you your job or even land you in the court, as the BBC says. When blogs will become more popular, the media empires will understand that they are losing ground so they will try to attack the bloggers over various excuses such as "innappropriate images", "published sensitive information", "libel", "innappropriate use of trade marks" et cetera.
I will usually put more personal or goal related information that's not important to anyone but me in my journal. Things I would just as soon not be out in public (sadly there is nothing really scandalous in my journal though).
In my blog I post things I find interesting that I might want to reflect back on in the future. If it's interesting information to other people, so much the better, and that's why I post it publically.
I also post things that other people might find useful. I have a couple of hobbies and I know that when I search for information if I can add my own out there I'm helping give back to others with the same hobbies. Mpix is a perfect example. I blogged about my good experiences with them and just the other day received a comment on my (very) lightly read blog thanking me for the tip.
I feel good knowing that maybe I was able to help someone else out.
32 million people admit to having such boring lives thzt they have to be overly informed of everyone elses'.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
Misinformation in the US is up 58%.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
It's interesting to see the reactions from people who still associate blogging with LiveJournals and angst-ridden teenagers. While 90% of blogs are crap, to borrow from Ted Sturgeon, 90% of everything is crap.
Blogs offer a huge amount of valuable information. Blogs helped fuel the fire in the Trent Lott affair. Blogs debunked the CBS Bush-ANG memos hoax. There are blogs being written by Iraqis that offer a perspective into Iraq that you would never get anywhere else. Blogs are proving their worth in the tsunami relief efforts as well.
Blogs offer a level of immediacy that the media does not. Rather than allowing a few selected gatekeepers to control the flow of news, blogs offer a wide range of views in a system that acts as a kind of meritocracy. Bloggers tend to be voracious in taking ideas apart. Something like those crudely-forged Bush documents that Dan Rather flogged for weeks were almost immediately debunked by bloggers. Stories that don't have merit are filtered out and stories that wouldn't normally be widely disseminated get far more readership through blogs.
Blogs are nothing less than a distributed form of newsgathering that is having a major effect on online journalism. They're much more than just vanity sites.
In a country where almost all my fellow citizens show more interest in watching The Simple Life or WHO'S YOUR DADDY than most other television programs I can't say I'm completely shocked at this statistic.
... like the number of people online or the number of "eye balls" on a site each week - marketing can just make up the numbers.
:)
Of course, making up numbers to boost computer and software sales is nothing new. Blogs are just the latest carrot to dangle, doesn't matter that, in truth, Blogs aren't read any more than anything else online.
That's what's keep this IT bubble going for so long... bullshit. Bullshit is 30% of the US economy after all.
The survey was conducted during November and involved telephone surveys of 1,324 internet users.
1324 is a pretty small sample, relatively speaking. They didn't mention what the sample was in the study last year either. And why telephone surveys? This is internet users, right? Why not use On-line polls?
AnimeNEXT anime convention
The whole CBS fake-document situation gave a big boost to the blogs and made many realize that Old Media has tons of problems. It's best not to rely on them for your sole source of information, given their idealogical slant. I would also say that's a good idea given other problems besides the political slant you get from them.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
The article is misleading. First of all, a lot of people read aggregator sites like FARK, Slashdot, Metafilter, etc. I don't know if those count as blogs.
But when they say "people are reading blogs", what does that really mean? I would never read a personal blog of someone I didn't know. But my friends? Yeah, I mean, I have a reasonable interest in the lives of my friends, so I would check out their blogs from time to time. I honestly think most blog-reading is just friends reading each others' xanga or livejournal. Most people don't really care about the lives of people they don't know unless they have something interesting to say, and that is a very very small minority.
Most bloggers cant write and lead incredibly boring lives. However, a few good blogs have been around since the beginning of Web. Then they were called other names such as frelance journalism or web diaries. I read a few of those every week.
Here is a related article about people loosing their jobs because of what they have posted to blogs. It raises interesting questions about freedom of speech.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Sorry, but while people rave about "the blogging phenomenon", they generally forget to mention that most blogs are either dull as hell if they're lucky, or more likely just abandoned when the author got bored.
:o)
Sure, there are the few excellent ones that stand out, but 75% are just dead livejournals or blogspots with
Of course, I have one myself, so I'm hardly entitled to comment...
Can somebody list at least 5-10 * interesting * personalities that are news worthy? I use to "finger" a few gamers over 10 years ago but not really anymore....
They're usually focused on a specific area that the author is interested in. Joel on Sofware, for example. Or Dan Bricklin's blog. Or the various Microsoft blogs by people working on .net. Or the Lambda programming languages weblog. Or any of the popular writers and musicians who have weblogs.
This is what people read. Not teenybopper angst and love lore.
I used to think the blog wass little more than a packet-switched version of CB radio, destined to fade as rapidly as did that particular "gives the little man the same voice as the corporate man" phenomenon. However, I've come to realize that the internet generation has the power to engage in self-selection more than any of those that came before. Witness the rise and popularity of Fox News despite surveys demonstrating that the network frequently provides factually incorrect information. Not the interpretive stuff, but who said what when and where. Nonetheless, the network tells people what they want to hear, reinforcing prejudices and supporting ideologies. And yes, NPR does the same for those of a different political bent, though their fact-checking is a bit more robust. A bit.
My point is that once upon a time, in the before-time, in the long-long-ago, people's options were limited. If the town's newspaper editors weren't of the same stripe, tough. Subscribe or don't. But now we have a zillion newspapers and people can get their "news" from some guy using Moveable Type to explain how welfare queens and/or oil barons represent a threat to all that is decent, true, and American. Or Canadian, or Majorcan, or whatever. The rise of the blog is the rise of the finger in the ear, the shut eye, and the "nahnahnah I can't hear you".
Well, that and a few million people boring the shit out of us by writing about their trip to the Gap with a swing by Starbucks on the way home.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Bloggers like Salam Pax (an Iraq living in Baghdad during the war) weren't doing original reporting? You mean the hundreds of bloggers who were in the field for the recent US elections weren't doing original reporting? You mean the many current and former US soldiers who were or are in Iraq aren't doing original reporting?
There are plenty of blogs worldwide who do original reporting, nor are they any particular secret.
How can Big Media make money off this phenomenon? And which laws will have to be changed to make it hard for everybody else?
to the question, "What if there were 20 million cable channels, and they were all either 24 hr news, bad reality tv, or ugly girls gone wild in a desperate plea for a father's attention?"
After a recent slashdot article I looked on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog). By this definition slashdot itself is indeed a blog.
I find this ridiculous. By the definition on the site almost every site I look at is a blog. The base definition seems to say that any page that has some element of chronological order is a blog. This certainly doesn't fit my view of what a blog originally was.
So, no wonder blog readership is up. The definition of a blog has been expanded by 58%!!
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
I worked on Fark before I had even heard the term 'blog', and the nature of it has changed so much since then, that it's say if it's now more or less like a 'blog'. [hell, we even looked at advertising back then to offset the costs, and we got rejected because we didn't generate content, only linked to other people's content, of course, that was before readers could comment]
Here are a few independant parameters that no one can seem to agree on in their definition:
- Personal vs. Group Administered
- Personal vs. Group Contributors
- Frequency of Updates
- Ability for Reader Comments
- Type of Funding
- Amount of Editorial Oversight
- Broad / Narrow Subject Focus
- Generated vs. Linked Content
- Opinionated vs. 'Neutral'
In the early days of the term, it seemed to be more of the 'online diary' type pages, but came to include sites that were collaborative efforts. I'd have listed anything that updated frequently, with a relatively narrow focus (even if that focus was 'things that Bob finds interesting'). Of course, that definiton would have included sites like AlertBox, ScoopThis, or The Onion.These days, the media seems to use the term to apply to any site that posts opinionated information without vetting, and updates on a semi-frequent basis, and in this case, I'm guessing it was whatever they needed to prove that it was a potential 'growth industry' to support whatever agenda they might have.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
just wanted to know your opinions on this: can /. be termed as a blog?!
makes a change they are watching lives rather than taking them
Let me write this on my blog.
I can think of all sorts of valid uses for blogs.
Were it not for blogs, there are many song lyrics that I would have been unable to discover. People without the know-how to find webspace and design and create an entire website have sometimes painstakingly determined and written out lyrics to songs and then posted them to their blogs. These lyrics would have been otherwise unavailable, as the artists did not choose to release them. For example, a favourite group of mine, Metric, created an album "Grow Up and Blow Away" that was never released but is available for download in various locations. I spent an afternoon satisfying my own curiosity and determined the majority of the lyrics to the songs. After posting these to my LiveJournal, I've gotten tons of comments from people who either were able to contribute and help me fill in the gaps that I was not able to figure out myself, or messages of thanks from individuals who were interested in getting their hands on these.
That's but one example of the use of blogs: providing information that may have limited scope of appeal, and that may not be otherwise available.
Additionally, the idea of "community blogs" as offered by LiveJournal is tremendously useful. I don't know how many times asking a question on LiveJournal's mathematics community has saved me hours of googling and interpreting obscure definitions in order to answer a question.
Thirdly, I've met many fascinating people through my blog, both online and in person. In fact, that's how I met my life partner.
Let's use the popular informal definition of blog.
/. is sorted by categories, and doesn't have a visible calendar to see the previous entries (you have to get inside the "archive").
/. users' journals, well we enter a fuzzy gray area.
A web log maintained by only one person about something he likes.
We should state the difference between blogs, forums and normal webpages... a blog has a log structure/layout, and is sorted by date. In contrast,
Now if we go to the
Regarding the signal/noise ratio, perhaps google should add a "blog" category into their search.
"Don't get me wrong - I read about six blogs a day, and I truly believe they're the future portal of the Internet. Without blogs, the WWW is mostly comprised of organization websites (companies and universities being the top two), and frankly, that's hideously boring."
Uh huh. So I guess all those web pages that people have been putting up for years are just chopped liver?
I often find useful information on forums myself....
Besides, as another poster mentioned, forums != blogs
"is that it's easier than ever to get news and views that support your opinion without being exposed to those that challenge it."
Welcome to the moderation that's Slashdot.
I think that accounts for most of it.
That which does not kill her only prolongs my agony.
LONG before some sick fuck decided to publicize this horrible term for a horrible practice, we *nix folk had .plan files. Need to know what joe is working on? finger joe@hisdomain. "Blogging" is not a new thing, folks.
Blog = Brain Rot
"So only one of your two examples is a positive example. The latter shows the danger of blogs, and how insubstantial or inaccurate information can grow into something dangerously powerful."
CowboyNeal isn't wearing any pants.
No. I raises interesting questions about why people would say and do things that would embarrass their employer, publish it on the Internet, then expect their employer not to find out about it.
The article mentions a woman who was fired for publishing nude photos of herself. Is that substantially different than posing for a nudie magazine? Would many bosses be comfortable with the latter (especially given the hyper-paranoia about sexual harassment where said employer could be sued bankrupt by the woman should one of her male coworkers happen to mention that he saw the photos that she put on public display)?
This has nothing whatsoever to do with freedom of speech. It is still perfectly legal to publish just about anything you want (short of the obviously illegal stuff), but no country's law says that you won't face the consequences for doing so.
We make fun of people adding "over a computer network" to an old patent and being granted a new one, but we'll happily add "over a computer network" to an old activity and act surprised when the new activity is subject to the same laws and penalties as before. Put another way, if you think your boss would fire you for writing something in a letter to the editor of a newspaper, then why would you think he'd condone your writing of it in a blog somewhere?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
To say that the "MSM" sources you reel off gave "breathless and uncritical support" to Kerry, or the corollary claim that they tried to bury the SBV, is to deny reality. In fact, most TV and print media gave "breathless and uncritical support" to Bush's made-up war hero image
Honestly now, that last line is hogwash. The second, the absolute millisecond that plane landed on the carrier, paul begala et all raised holy hell about it. Likewise when Bush snuck into Iraq, and had the Turkey photo-op. I could hear the whistling in Chris Matthews ears from the west coast.
But what about a substantive issue, such as Kerry's false testimony that he spent Christmas in cambodia? Not a word from the mainstream media. Not a peep. The fact that it got out to the public is a testimony to how vioently the internet is changing the reporting of events.
I'm going to give you a hint. The days of denying slant on behalf of the major networks/major metropolitan dailies is over. Oh sure, you can attempt it if you like, but the sound you're going to hear is that of eyes rolling.
Thank you for your service, but your political analysis is suspect.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Why is the parent post rated as a troll?
"There is no difference between a blog and a person's home page, except that one usually is now automated (as far as having an interface to use for adding content) and the other is manually done by editing HTML files."
The ability to submit comments about a blog post surely differentiates the two. I find greater similarity between blogs and USENET groups.
Average intelligence in the US is down 58%
People are becoming more boring and vapid, and for some reason simply have to let everyone else know how boring they are.
Read my blog! Read my blog! Read my blog!
Hehehe. :P
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Ah ha! Found the shirts.. :D
http://www.cafepress.com/blogwhine
blah blah blah mundane story blah blah blah blah blah useless blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah nonsense blah blah
What made you decide to have a separate blog and gallery? Wouldn't the two be logical to combine? And why is your wife's family reading your blog but not your side of the family?
I tend to see blogs as being similiar to Reality TV. Instead of there being the sensationalism to it like on TV though, you're just hearing people's opinions by reading 'em.
I personally can't stand reading blogs. The few that I've read just remind me of individuals getting up on their soapboxes and wanting to feel important. Plenty of them also feel like people just ranting about things they can't do in RL, or don't know how to.
I can't see myself ever being a fan.
"I've got 13 million channels of shit of the computer to choose from..."
The question isn't so much taking responsibility for what you say (and the consequences thereof), it's someone else adding more consequences to the equation to fit their agenda.
It's almost like saying you have the right to free speech, but every time you speak, a tax of $1000 will be levied against you. You can still say whatever you want; you just have to deal with the consequences. Is that really free speech?
Take the uber stupid example of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. How is that much different than the president saying "Iraq has WMD"? The person in the theatre gets to deal with consequences way beyond having a dog named shithead. Funny those rules don't apply to the people enforcing the rules.
I could write a blog about stealing office supplies as a means of detailing how to stop office theft, or my "boss teh suck' as a humorous send off of my boss. No statement implies context. I wonder if I wrote a blog detailing my difficulties in coming to terms with manic-depression if you would still support my boss's decision fire me out of embarrassment? What if my latest depressive episode was caused by my job? Should everyone at EA be fired because of what some anonymous wife wrote?
And suppose my boss writes a blog about how lazy his employees are? The degree of being held responsible for what you wrote is a bit unequal. Why should this be?
If you really want to go the route of work at will, fine, but how about some readdress for every indignity from pissing in a cup to a credit history check.
Inasmuch as my life at home doesn't interfere with my work (and I admit there is a lot of grey), it is none of your business. Even if I blog something unflattering, it is up to you to prove how this is negatively affects work. My right to free speech and privacy precedes.
I've read a few BLOGs and quite frankly I've found them to be quite boring. My life is not a lull-you-to-sleep novel but it's not interesting enough for me to write about. Yes I have a BLOG, it lets me spout off my opinion on one subject Home Automation (http://linuxha.blogspot.com/), nothing else! I honestly don't think others will seek it out and find my BLOG but I realize that it might get read. So no embarrassing stuff, I watch my P's and Q's and I try to maintain a professional persona. It's basically a place for me to practice my writing and listen to others comments on the subject.
Some of the other BLOGs I've seen appear to be random thoughts (gibberish) or personal diaries (do they know others can use that info to impersonate them). Some of the BLOGs are just a waste of space and show just how ignorant people really can be). But there a few that give us ideas or show us the way the rest of the world thinks or views events. Some of them we may not agree with and some we want to argue with but it gives us a view outside our own perspective.
Now the big question: How much of this is fact and how much of this is fiction? How do we know when to trust what we're reading and when to ignore it as personal bias or just plain junk wrapped up in a pretty wrapper?
Neil Cherry - Linux Smart Homes For Dummies
This post is important - the safety and well-being of a twelve year-old boy may be in serious jeopardy. http://www.kubed.org/blog/archives/2005/01/04/tsun ami-amber-alert/
Blogging is for people who just can't resist pulling out their soapboxes whether anyone's listening or not, people who just don't know when to put a sock in it. If you blog, tell me this doesn't describe you:
logorrhea
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/
Freedom of speech is a great thing, but the fact is most people don't know what the hell their talking about, but are feel free to spout their opinions anyway. If you're an expert in a given field and have something to offer, that's one thing. Most bloggeers aren't and can't. This is no different than the explosion of "look at me" webpages in earlier days of the Net.
I run my own egotheque and i couldn't give a whit about who reads it. It's for my own eyes and blowing off my own steam.
The fact that it's out there brings some voyeuristic/exhibitionist pleasure to dumping my mental drippings on a page that may or may not be read, or that someone may or may not find amusing. Just the thought that it -could- be read brings the aforementioned pleasures to doing so.
My struggle to stop smoking is my own. So is coping with my pathetic life in general. It's kind of therapeutic writing about it in public.
*shower*
It takes the concept of seeking out only what you want to here to a new level. No one wants facts, they just want to here what they already believe.
Vote for Pedro
And for the same reason, I don't feel the need to read every tiny detail of someone else's life. I have my own to think about!
I think it's the same with soap operas. I've never watched any, apart from a couple of weeks' worth of one, because a friend asked me to. He was convinced I'd be hooked, and couldn't understand why I didn't care what happened to the characters after that. Maybe I'm a cold, uncaring person, but I can't understand why people keep watching, why they feel the need to follow all the detail of those fictional characters' lives just because they're familiar.
So that's my first worry: don't all these blog readers have lives of their own???
My other concern is that blogs are a very impersonal way of communicating. They may be convenient, but they're hardly a substitute for a real live conversation, where you can ask questions and discuss issues. They're probably great for impersonal and technical matters, but blogs are by definition personal, and putting out all that personal information in such an impersonal medium, where there's no tone of voice, feedback, or even handwriting to convey expression, seems quite perverse.
(The woeful state of most native English-speakers' spelling, grammar, and other writing skills is only a sub-worry on that front.)
Have I misunderstood what blogging is about, or do these issues worry anyone else too?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
I don't think it is fair to our President that Dan Rather and Maureen Dowd are meerly subjected to dehumanising torture and indefinite confinement for their unpatriotic speech crimes.
Save the internet, append -inurl:blog to all google searches!
WRONG
First, IANAL but I link to a lawyer's blog below.
Second I am a Navy Veteran (FTN & PAPERCLIP awards) whose skin crawled when Kerry gave his lifer "reporting for duty salute" ... something is not right with this dude ... thank you SwiftVets and POWS for Truth for confirming my gut feelings as a Navy Veteran about Kerry
BULLET POINTS: Kerry Lies -vs- SwiftVets Factual Data
why no Kerry libel/slander suit? Because Kerry has no grounds to sue - everything SwiftVets has said/published about Kerry is TRUE. Kerry is terrified of the discovery process that would occur during such a trial ... Kerry's full and complete military service record (except medical records) would be released to the general public.
Swift Vets & POW For Truth have ALL their Tar Baby ducks in a row ... they were and are ready to go to court.
There is a book Unfit For Command referencing:
... documenting Kerry's exaggerations, distortions, and lies regarding his Vietnam-era SwiftBoat naval service and his postwar activities with the enemy
(1) Kerry's own authorized biography
(2) limited official Navy Records
(3) the Congressional Record
(4) sworn affidavits signed by people who served with Kerry in Vietnam
There are now five (5) mini-documentaries, explaining the minutia of the various Kerry combat engagements. Animations, maps and eye-witness voice overs are utilized. These are very useful for explaining to non-Navy types the ins&outs of what was going on during various SwiftBoat naval engagements. Basically Kerry was/is a serial exagerater who "lied while good men died"
please note John Kerry NOT released his naval records to the general public via a signed SF-180. What was published on the Kerry website was a subset of his official records.
There is a photograph showing Kerry with 19 of his fellow Swift boat OICs (Officers In Charge) in Coastal Division 11. Only three of Kerry's 23 fellow OICs from Coastal Division 11 support Kerry ... why so few support Kerry ... maybe Kerry has a problem? Perhaps we should pay some attention to these OICs who do not support Kerry? Maybe they kno
I believe Juanita
Bush as ChickenHawk ... visit the Wingmen For Bush Website
Mocking the Heroism of Kerry (Part 1) ... read the Kerry vs Benedict Arnold essay
Mocking the Heroism of Kerry (Part 2) ... view all five Swift Vet mini-documentaries
Turning on your own, like McCain, when they challenge the Master Plan ... read these two letters addressed to Senator McCain one and two written by veterans turning on McCain because McCain deserved and deserves it
I believe Juanita
Not sure how you are arriving at that conclusion.
The reality is that instead of the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth telling me what I wanted to hear they actually:
told me things I did not know (e.g. Kerry did NOT release all his Naval records, recalling the Form SF-180 issue)
provided supporting documentation to back up what they were saying (e.g. Kerry's own statements to the Senate while he was a Senator, recalling the "Christmas in Cambodia" issue)
demonstrated the power of the internet to short-circuit the Main Stream Media "memory-hole" (e.g. kinda hard to shutdown a message that is available via C-SPAN archives, particularly the Kerry vs O'Neill Debate on the Dick Cavett Show)
Hope my explaination helps.
BTW, when you fall asleep tonight or tomorrow, remember that
I believe Juanita