Slashdot Mirror
The Rise and Fall of Blogs
i-Love-to-blog writes "Blogs have revolutionized information delivery. They not only made the world much more smaller, but a lot more personal, united and un-afraid as well. Events like the September 11 attacks and the Iraq invasion made news channels take a back seat. Wired claimed blogs to be what Napster was to music. They even have a wager on Weblogs outranking the New York Times Web site by 2007. People got paid to blog. Then they got fired for that. Some lost money for blogging their ideas. Most just hand out links these days. When was the last time your favorite blogger talked sense? Have blogs reached a saturation point? Blogging burnout is a humorous look at the rise and fall of weblogs."
Seriously, the guy's daydreaming or something, as no matter how much he should wish for it to be so, blogs aren't going nowhere (unless, of course, the masses of bloggers somehow manage to cause the internet to collapse under its own weight -- which i doubt. But even if they do, then i'm sure someone will still start a LiveJournal-on-a-cow or something like that). They might not retain their current form, but still, blogs are here to stay. The traditional media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- will be the ones to go, if they don't adapt to the new situation. And this should please anyone that considers themselves a liberal person.
- [tt]
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
This idea of a burnout sounds good.
BURN THEM!!! BURN THEM ALL!!!!!!!!
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
It's a feature not a bug
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Logic, macros, and more
My comments can be found on my blog
How the blogs about saturation of blogs have reached a saturation.
Free XBox, PS2
The term might be. Eventually, we'll once again refer to them as "journals."
Do you like German cars?
The real question is how many blogs are actively maintained and is there any useful information in those blogs that are maintained? I started "blogging" per se back in 2001 making irregular entries up until February of this year, when I decided to post more regularly. However there is content there that gets an incredible amount of traffic. I get several hundred Google hits/day for everything from specific images to reviews I did for Macintosh specific stuff like CPU upgrades and commentary about the science of vision loss when using Viagra. Surprisingly, there are many search terms where my blog comes up in the first three Google and Yahoo searches, and my site is a very small personal site where I write mostly for friends and family. Friends blogs that cover more specific issues such as venture capital or more common interest subjects garner traffic in the thousands to hundreds of thousands of hits per day. However, there are many blogs with infrequent entries, and low traffic levels that may in fact contain very useful information. The trick (search companies know) is to find that information and rank it according to its usefulness, playing off of the Long Tail Model of Chris Anderson.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
that's some very much bad grammar
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
You mean the world doesn't want to hear about the latest dress you got, or your personal problems with your boyfriend/girlfriend?
What a shocker.
Maybe next they'll take reality TV off the air. Nah, that's probably a bit much to hope for.
I don't have anything against the idea of blogging (I recently set one up myself), but my opinion is that it should be kept as professional as any good magazine. Once that professionalism is breached, it becomes nothing more than a massive IM topic.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
What we need is the Newsmaking Industry Association of America to start heckling them, then. I mean, it's their news. Who are we to take it from them? I say DAMN the news pirates, for grabbing good American newscasting from the hands of major broadcasters!
I regularly report MSN spam to the Hotmail admins.
All the blogs on the web could go away tomorrow and
a) very few people would notice
b) even fewer would care
As long as we have a free (as in speech) and open Internet.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I would have submitted this as "FREE SHIRT" to the first 5000 people.
Get them while you can.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
I think blogs are still at an early stage, and their full potential has yet to be realized.
I like the idea of a future where virtually everyone is putting their ideas down for others to read. As the internet generation gets older, I think it will be more common for everyone to keep a weblog. The benefit to business is huge... imagine if every office worker was required to spend a few minutes a week on a company weblog, posting their ideas for managers and others to look at, or maybe if there was a company message board setup like Slashdot?
I realize some people love them.
I am luke warm.
I never had a problem with putting up a web page if I had something to express.
I never found people's personal blogs to be interesting.
I find it annoying when blogs are used for interactive exchange instead of web board software.
A blog is a web site. Slashdot is a blog. I use a "blog" to communicate with my clients. Most of the sites in my RSS reader are "blogs". If I want to help somebody set up a "home page" today, I just send them to blogger.com or a similar service.
If you don't like the term "blog", just call it a web site. Okay? Maybe we can avoid these pointless "blogs are democracy / blogs suck" articles.
Blogs will come, and blogs will go. But as an overall media, they will always be with us as long as the Internet is around.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
The bet is part of the Long Bets project, which is run by the Long Now foundation. The permanent URL for the bet is http://www.longbets.org/2.
Some can be entertaining, some border the ridiculous.
Overall I see many blogs as a person's soapbox so they can try and have two things:
Their 15 minutes
The ability to use their site as a conversation piece.
The next time I read/use blogs will be if I decide work on a degree that entails some type of social engineering.
There are good blogs, but those are few and far between - most of them are just "OMG I WUNDER IF HE LIKEZ ME HEART HEART" and such. It's nauseating.
I honestly don't see the point of an online diary. A diary's something you write in a lock up, not post online for the world to see - and if these kids can funnel this kind of energy into writing shitty blog entries, why the HELL can't they at least learn to write with proper grammar and spelling?
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
All we have is this crummy journal. Which is totally not the same thing.
really.
it's accurately named
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
Even companies are jumping on the "blog bandwagon" by starting "personal blogs" of their upper management. For what purpose, I cannot ascertain, except probably as an advertising avenue.
I hate it when CNN or some major news channel reports "happenings" from the "Blog world" or "Blogosphere" and waste my time, the viewers' and their own....time that could be better spent on reporting something worthwhile (not that they would anyway).
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Sounds like we've got a blubble.
When I first heard the term "blog", I thought it stood for brain log, which was kind of cool and represented what they seemed to be. Random thoughts and links elsewhere for reference. "Like, I saw this thing. Here's why it caught my interest, and you can look at it too."
When I found out blog was short for "web log", I was quite disappointed at the sheer lack of originality.
Anyone else hate this word?
Blogs are to the internet as reality shows are to television. They're far from gone, but far from worthwhile.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
I pay little attention to blogs because there is no accountability. Here is an example:
/. a while back was a 'story' that Congress had passed a bill that made some law that the /. crowd was sure to be upset about. I went to the story - it was on a blog. It was supported by links to three other stories - all on other blogs. Those stories cross-linked to one another to support themselves. Finally, I went to the Congress' website and searched for the law. The true story: A subcomittee passed a resolution to send the bill to the general floor for discussion.
On
I am NOT claiming that print or video media is better. Once a story gets in a newspaper, it quickly becomes fact. I am also NOT claiming that the public is incapable of having accountability. Look at Wikipedia. There is plenty of accountability with peer oversight. Blogs, on the other hand, do not have any oversight. They don't have to get past an editor or fact-checker. Then, the general public is too lazy to check the facts. You end up with a large group of people believing some idiot's blog-rant to be fact.
I think that is truly it for me - idiots becoming dumber by getting their facts from bigger idiots.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
We have just registered ourselves as unhip?
Just checking...
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
Maybe a million monkeys at typewriters can't produce Shakespeare after all. I think blogs are like almost everything on the Internet. They start out small, get hot, mainstream, and they are all the rage. Then people realize they aren't really adding value.
Blogs change the publishing path, but changing the path doesn't make the content any better. Blogs have enabled people with something intelligent and relevant, who didn't have a way to before, to get themselves heard. Unfortunately it has also allowed a lot of people with nothing to say a way to spew more junk for everyone to filter.
Changing the medium doesn't automatically make better content.
Here's my all time favorite blog and the last comment he made "that made sense" was on Saturday, April 10, 2004, where he said that he was taking a hiatus.
Read it if you haven't already, it will engulf you. It gives a unique perspective on the Iraq war by an Iraqi in Baghdad (who happens to write good English).
http://dearraed.blogspot.com/
I think that this is a good example of where someone with an interesting story to tell could reach a wide audience without having great resources. Without the blog phenomenon I would have never known this story.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
I think any estimation of their demise is a little unrealistic, at least as far as serious news and policital blogs are concerned. I run a caption contest, on a voluntary basis, on OTB. Even though my role is more frill than substance, the blog itself contains a lot of serious news and commentary. A couple of others that seem to address a serious role in politics, news, and sometimes entertainment are: Wizbang Poliblog and there are a number of others more popular than these that seem to address politics and news in a more or less serious manner. (Just check some of the links from the ones above for
Instapundit
Michelle Malkin
and others
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Many personal blogs are of little interest to the wider population. However there are some corporate blogs that interest not only it junkies but general news getters as well.
Eventually people run out of things to talk about. So you'll find a log of poorly maintained weblogs and whatnot. New era in journalism indeed.
I can see the downfall of many political blogs. Soon enough we will see politicians paying for the creation of blogs that support their cause. Of course they will look like a "grassroots" effort, even though they'll be funded by the Big Business connections of said politicians.
Instead of the citizens of the US lobbying politicians, it will be the politicians lobbying the citizenry through such shammery as the aforementioned types of blogs.
Now, I predict that many will not fall for such a scam, and will stop reading political blogs. That will be the downfall of many legitimate political blogs, unfortunately. Without the hits they won't be able to generate the revenue necessary for their survival.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
"The traditional media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- will be the ones to go, if they don't adapt to the new situation"
:)
I highly doubt that. There are billions of people on the planet that have never read a blog and have absolutely no desire to, but they still get 'traditional media.'
To say that traditional media will just fold if they don't adapt to blogs is.. well, a rather typical self-serving blogger thing to say.
A somewhat relevant example is that the MPAA/RIAA hasn't gone away yet. They haven't adapted to the new situation, but they're still wielding a mighty sword.
The traditional media isn't going to go away, no matter what bloggers think. The two will exist in their own realms, appealing to the appropriate audience, if anything.
Please, tell me what is wrong with that statement. Try this:
Honestly people, I have no problem with grammatical errors if the statement is a statement. That sentence is a complete waste of my time, and shame on the editors. Shame indeed.
I'm sure someone with a psychology degree can offer more insight into this...but...
Blogs are just a way for someone to avoid the confrontation of dealing with it in real life. You can talk about that girl you like...and you know she's going to see it because you have the link in all your profiles. You can finally say what you really think of that jackass who picks on you because a friend of a friend will let him know the link. And of course the "OMGLOLBBQ!!!!111ONEHUNDREDELEVEN!!".
I have had an online dear diary that none of the real-world friends know about. Online friends do because they're removed from the situation and as long as I give an unbiased description they can give unbiased advice. That whole "ohhh I hopehopehope she reads this because it's in all my profiles and I announce to everyone when I update it" is a bunch of creepy, insecure crap.
Blogs have proven to be a very effective tool in the fight against tyranny, not only in America but in many other nations (such as China, Mozambique, Indonesia and Burma). Indeed, it has been said by many economists that had it not been for blogs, then the open-market blitz experienced in China over the past few years would never have occurred. Blogs can unite and coordinate the ordinary citizenry like no other tool, and that is why they have been so helpful at fighting back against tyrannical government structures.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
O rly? Cock goes where?
Blogs have revolutionized information delivery
Oh please. Blogs are just the next step in vanity publishing, an industry that exists because a lot of people think they have something worthwhile to say and are willing to spend their own money to say it. And while a slim few actually do, most of it is pointless blather or just links to other blogs.
The day that a blog gets more hits than the NYT is the day that the Intarweb is past saving.
Events like the September 11 attacks and the Iraq invasion made news channels take a back seat.
I'm sorry but blogs *are* the back seat. CNN, Fox, and other mainstream media own the coverage of big events like the above. Where blogs are useful is: (1) In fact checking as we say with the 2004 election coverage. Previously people who knew that the reporters did shoddy work or got it completely wrong had no outlet, now they do. (2) Covering small stories that the mainstream media has not interest in.
At least to my mind, a "journal" is an online diary, intended primarily for yourself and your friends. A "blog" is a soapbox or editorial page directed at the outside world. The difference is the size of the target audience.
Sometimes there's news in a blog, too. When news happens to a journal-keeper (e.g. you suddenly find yourself living in a war zone), your journal may well become a blog. A blog could also have news if it's for something other than world news. When a sourceforge developer posts daily news updating his progress, I'd call that a blog rather than a journal. Same with a politician recording his daily meetings.
The smaller the target audience, the more I'd call it a "journal" and less of a "blog". Most people think of "blogs" in terms of world news, for the largest possible audience. Since 99.999% of journal keepers live where there is little news of interest to the outside world, those who wish to be bloggers mostly get to write opinions rather than news. Those can be interesting, especially if you happen to find one who is very insightful.
The difference becomes one of the writer's attitude rather than the actual content. I keep a journal, and sometimes post political analysis, but it's only for my friends, and it's mixed in with other personal or random crap. The same political analysis, word for word, posted with the intent of attracting attention and discussion, would be a blog.
I'm not getting these definitions from a dictionary; it's my analysis of how I've seen the words used. YMMV.
In an era of information saturation, apathy for opinions will be what rises up, as we can't be troubled to know all of these things.
;)
It's simply a case of mental bandwidth... and sad as it may be, wit and opinions, no matter how interesting, there are other interesting opinions and commentary. These things are a dime a dozen.
Blogs won't ever go away and there will probably always be a 'flavor of the month', some interesting blog... but the draw will be steadily smaller.
===
In short, I agree... this sort of rise and fall happens with anything that is given over-inflated interest... it eventually levels out
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
When was the last time your favorite blogger talked sense?
It's been a while here on Slashdot...
If I hear that four letter word (which is the last four letters of the word "weblog") again I'm going to start leaving steaming blogs on people's desks.
I can't say why, but it just grates on my nerves. Kinda like some people cringe at the word 'cunt'.
Three dits, four dits, two dits, dah!
Radio, radio, rah rah rah!
weak with the language this young blogger is, I sense much mistakes in him.
"Blogs have revolutionized information delivery. They not only made the world much more smaller, but a lot more personal,"
They sure haven't helped the grammar problem in the United States. Come on people, that's simple English Grammar. And this is coming from someone who hates English classes!
"I am an ordinary netizen suffering from repeated overdoses of junk blogs."
Then stop reading them.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Come on, I'm sure there are more interesting "Netcraft Confirms: Blogs Are Dying!" type articles out there. If you want anecdotes, here's one for you: I read over a dozen blogs daily (not always closely, of course), and all but a couple of my regular reads over the last couple of years are still going strong and putting out generally good and interesting essays. In fact, several have even gone pro or semi-pro, and their output has gotten better and more frequent (especially the reader-supported ones).
Does this prove anything? No more than TFA, certainly. But its relatively small size means you've wasted much less of your life reading it than TFA.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
Hrmm, let's expand the contraction so we get:
Applying some very basic logic, if we accept that blogs 'are not going nowhere,' that must mean that they *are* going somewhere. Agreed?
Now, your next assertion:
*must* be false if we accept, as you have stated earlier (although somewhat illogically), that blogs are going somewhere. The blogs in question can not simultaneously 'not go nowhere' and be 'here to stay.'
Now who's doing the wishful thinking, hrmm?
Is it just me, or do all the senseless blogs encompassing the few good ones remind anyone of a previous trend? I seem to be recalling the early years of public internet when search engines couldn't find much of anything relevant for you because half the sites that turned up were some poorly written/designed AOL or GeoCities page when that a new thing.
I suppose that, like many of those pages, we can just hope for the amateur bloggers to fade away in a few years and we'll have some new annoying web trend in its place.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
What is this message about? Is there a point? How the hell did it get published on slashdot? I have some opinions about blogs, but since I don't have a clue what the "article" is trying to say, I have no idea if they are approriate, on topic, or what. In the future, don't start vetting until you've had you morning coffee, CmdrTaco...
Is that like a text or HTML file full of slanted and uninformed opinions masqueraded as fact?
no matter what, people still fundamentally want to put their entire cd collection list on their websites (remember that trend?)
people are self-absorbed and think they are interesting.. when in fact, most are not... but it does not stop them from trying..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Some new technology failed to change the world and usher in a new utopia, so instead of blogs nestling in and finding their place in everyday life, anyone involved with blogging are tearing their clothes and gnashing their teeth, wailing out loud "Why?! Why oh why did we ever BLOG?!"
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
TheHuffingtonPost.com
the site is a place where many independent journalists and other like representatives and senators blog. it also collects a lot of interesting news stories.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
The day the Internet died as a source of fact and information is the day that web logging became popular. The current signal to noise ratio on the Internet renders it useless at it's intended function. I don't know you. Your opinion means nothing to me. You are not an authority on which you speak. I weep for anyone who takes your opinion as fact.
For people who have a hard time getting their point accross, (like me) I wonder if there are any other blogs out there that offer a little better service to their subscribers, such as not cutting them out of the picture because some "Balls-Gone" modifier didn't get what the person said about this "Stuff That Matters".
I haven't really found another blog to get info on, and this one seems to dupe as often as the fucking traveling circus.
Can anyone help a brother out?
Proving my point like this, is about the same as slashdot headlining about blogs, isn't it?
I had a vacuum salesman at my house a couple of months ago. He was cleaning my carpet with some "specially formulated" foam. In an effort to amaze me, he said, "This foam is 90% air so it dries more quicklier!" I was amazed, alright.
http://nerdfortress.com/
I've never read nor maintained a blog. I'm kind of antisocial in non-personal mediums.
However, I'm thinking of starting my own blog. I consider myself a professional shopper as I know the basics about every kind of product out there. Would people be interested in a blog that talks about what brands to buy and not buy in every category from cars to soda?
Between excessive duplicates and ranting, lightweight articles, Slashdot sure seems to have started sliding down the slope of excessive success. Just because it's a slow newsday doesn't mean you have to post fluff like this.
I remember an episode of Transformers where Grimlok said:
"Me Grimlok think this much more gooder!"
2nd sentence reminded me of that.
rooooar
... and it's just started. The good blogs are anchoring for a longer stay, the boring ones (and all those with fewer users) are getting left out. It's just like there are search engines around (a good number of them), there are directories around - on the net, but call this "natural selection"; which is what is happening in the Blogging World. I'm pretty sure Blogging is here to stay, and you've only see it begin. And what makes me think the title is from the history books - The Rise and the Fall of (Rome|The Third Reich|...) and yet, we're talking about something in the present.
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
umm.. sorry, but Corporate news is crap and is corrupt. Blogs are the way out.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I agree with the comments about the blog being here to stay. However, where the blog is going is anybody's guess -- and what the mainstream media will do to keep on top of things is another can of worms.
I think the fictional story about the future of Google is pretty timely at this point.
http://oak.psych.gatech.edu/~epic/
The truth is, the major online news outlets may in fact head in that direction -- news aggregators bringing a particular slice of the blogosphere to your desktop.
--- Dan
Really? The FEC is trying to control blogs and poltical speech on them. (So much for the 1st Amaendment, thank you senators McCain and Feingold). In a few years statements like the previous will probably get me fined or jailed!
Remember, politicians don't try to suppress that which is dying all by itself!
Blogs will be corporate, too (unless it is always just one guy). Just about any time you get an organization of more than two or three people, it will incorporate (i.e. become a corporation) somehow.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
About 99.9999999% of them are written by angsty emo attention seeking cutters and have absolutly no worth while content.
The very few good ones seem more like personal websites focusing on a specific topic, rather than actual 'blogs'.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Oh, blog burnout, that is simply stupid. Big stupid.
What is really happening is that people are learning to write on the most massive scale in history. Those that write crud will be lost in the bowels of search results while the cream floats to the top. There will just be a lot more of it.
Scientists are already presaging their publications in their blogs because the traditional publishing cycle is so long - I know.
I have a text book chapter that was accepted into 2002 for a major scienctific publisher and the book is still being edited, so I have moved the ideas in my blog recently where people can find them, now. The paper that the chapter was based on was written in 1995 and accepted in 1995 but took until the summer of 1997 to see print.
Yesterday, a raw blog entry that was the synthesis of a decade of thinking made it through the online peer review of kuro5hin. It took 36 hours.
Blogs are fast and viral and have changed the world and will keep changing it.
Blog burnout? Never.
Let's try again, class.
Blogs are to news, as green lasers are to music.
1) Sometimes they're cool to look at and add to the experience.
2) They get old quickly.
3) They can distract you from the point.
4) They can cause eye damage from prolonged exposure.
5) You smoke pot.
Some bloggers are journalists, sure, and some journalists are bloggers, but being one does not automagically make you into the other. Likewise, Blog != News. Some blogs contain news. Many blogs link to news, or to blogs containing links to news. Some blogs have no relation to news whatsoever. And that's fine. Nobody is holding a gun to anybody's head, forcing them to read Aunt Millie's blog. These blogs will hopefully reach their target audiences. If people outside that target find it, they are free to never return. This is not a bad thing. Blogs will never replace the news. They will (already have) replace(d) diaries, journals, etc. That is all a blog really is. A blog from Iraq is no more "news" than a paper diary or compilation of letters to home from Iraq. Especially since the people blogging have a vested interest in keeping certain information out of the public arena. Their lives depend on it.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
I've never really understood this sentiment. Blogs aren't like TV. They're not pushed to you. If you like someone's "What Scruffy the Cat Did Today" blog, you can grab the RSS feed and get your daily dose of Scruffy amusement. But if you don't like it, it's not like there's nothing else on the Internet.
The beauty of the blogging medium is that what you read is up to you. You can go with soley corporate-sponsored blogs. You can read obscure rants from marginally intelligent blogs that have only three readers. You can concoct your own mix. However you choose to make use of blogs, the tremendous variety of thoughts, opinions, and stories is what makes the phenomenon so powerful.
I'd hate to see blogging become just another means of obtaining pre-vetted "useful" (as defined by whom?) information from the usual sources.
I'm not going to be reading the Scruffy the Cat blog any time soon, but I'm happy it's out there.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I agree with you there, I think there's some internal business applications here that are being missed both in blogs and in wikis. I know at my job now, I'm constantly trying to piece together the motivations and logic that went into decisions that were made before I arrived in my position. Were I to have a better understanding of how certain decisions were made, I'd have a much better understanding of where the latitute stretches.
:::: the insomniac's digest
Thats what I learned from reading blogs.
But every other language besides English allows and encourages the use of the double negative. I know it's hard for a programming-hardened brain to understand, but Boolean logic is not really a big part of the normal human's thinking. Let's allow a little imprecision, get off of our high horse, and allpw people to say what they intend to say without busting their ass because they don't feel the need to conform to the rules of some arbitrary seventeenth-century prescriptive grammarian. You understood what the original poster meant, didn't you? You're smart, aren't you? The double negative has a grand tradition in spoken and literary use; if it was good enough for Chaucer and Shakespeare it's good enough for me.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20040612
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
Let's point out the obvious too: the FEC was taking comments recently about whether or not to exempt bloggers from campaign finance laws. It became an issue because citizen media are getting too big to ignore.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
I wager that long bets will only be a remnant in Google's cache before the blog bet finishes.
There was a great chart I saw a while back that describes the popularity/adoption/maturation curve on new technologies. It may have come from one of the "pundit companies" like Gartner, but was an insightful description nonetheless.
.NET, XML, etc. are all in various stages of this. How many managers are, right now, saying, "Just make it XML and that will fix it."?
What it described was how tech goes from invention and obscurity to rapid adoption, to overapplication to final maturity. The last 2 steps are where managers, media pundits and others try to apply the new tech EVERYWHERE they can and the whole buzzword saturation happens. As those people who never really understood the tech start to be let down (by tech that never promised to do what they thought it would), the technology matures and settles into its natural niche.
OOP, Java J2EE,
Blogs are at that saturation point. Everyone is being told they need to use a blog for marketing, customer support, news gathering and dissemination, personal diaries, project management, and cleaning the kitchen sink (just checking if you're paying attention). The likely reality is that blogs are NOT the appropriate tool for much of this and will fail miserably. Then, blogs will mature and fill their natural role.
I'm not going to try to say for sure what that role is, but it certainly isn't "powering everything on the web".
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
"blog" has got to be the gayest word ever invented... what kind of asshat made up that word and why do we keep using it? cocksuckers
They've got this 'do it all' software which includes blogging alongside other features like file sharing, IM, photo sharing and other tricks. http://blogs.imeem.com/ Are these kind of hybrid services the next place that things are going?
I never cared about blogs in the first place.
And don't forget, AP, Reuters and BBC have RSS feeds. The so-called mainstream media of paper and TV is going to die, save for the ignorant Luddites.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
car chases two states away, fires half way around the world, and a lot of useless information designed only to scare the bejabbers out of me so I'll be a good sheep and live in fear.
I'd rather read a genetics textbook.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And my guess is you won't find much "sense" on Hulk's Blog ... but then again, did you really think it was a Big Green Monster writing those things?!?
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
From the blurb: Blogs have revolutionized information delivery.
And blogs also revolutionized disinformation delivery as well. The question is; which blogs can be trusted? Moreso, which ones even matter. Blogs made an easy work around for more legitimate forms of web publishing. Kinda like Slashdot; how many trolls do we have here? How many would bother to create a webpage with their same bullshit? This is the same problem with blogging.
And it's even more unfortunate that those who'd use blogs with good intentions are undermined but the jackasses on the net.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Funny thing is, I never understood the whole blog thing and I still don't.
What's the point of keeping a public diary? Attention craving? Really, no matter how much you surf, the amount of interesting and valuable information you can share with the world really isn't that much.
A nice, organised list of links, much like your bookmarks, yes that makes some sense.
Writing about how your cat is feeling today? Definition of "pointless".
And about the "developer blogs". Personally, I'd rather the guy writes some code.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Canthros
A secondary problem, one which afflicts Slashdot, are posts which link to blogs, rather than a primary source. (Roland the Plogger comes to mind). I suggest that the Slashdot editors act to discourage this.
This is the voice of Moderation. We wouldn't go so far as to say we've seized the radio station...
Wired claimed blogs to be what Napster was to music.
Can I get a little help here? I haven't completed analogies since I finished the SATs.
Blogs *are* going somewhere. Everything else has hit a dead end.
That's like saying that "journals" or "dairies" are going to go out because of oversaturation. People will always like to talk about themselves and/or events and this gives people a simple yet effective medium to do so. I think we'll see blogs around for a good while.
This just in! 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.
nonsense. You may as well ask if pen-and-paper have peaked...its just a new media and better media, not evolution of users, will determine when it is eclipsed.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
there is nothing inherent about corporations. the corporate media TODAY is corrupt and going out of its way to NOT deliver real news that affects the people in the US in favor of the crap that keeps us citizens oblivious to real goings on. MJ's trial, the run away bride, the teen in aruba.. come on... this has what to do with my life?
Big corporations want people to be dumb because they, along with the world bank and the US government are creating a world empire based on economic enslavement. for info on this empire, read Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Dumb Americans who have no clue as to what is really going on mean that they can be manipulated to keep those who benefit the corpritocracy in power.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Did that guy pay you for the link? It was one of the most uninteresting articles I've ever read. The guy droned on and on for paragraphs w/o saying a damned thing.
I want my five minutes back!
but all the blogs I check daily DO make sense, and DO check stories before they post them. They are not going away any time soon - that's just more wishful daydreaming on the part of the Powers That Be.
Sorry, folks, but this guy's got far more than just a screw loose.
Lemon curry?
http://obacht.blogspot.com/ TEST
I don't find even the other 2% to be all that interesting.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Is it just me or does the phrase "...I was reading the blogs the other day...." sound almost precisely as desperately trendy as "...I was surfing the web the other day..."
Does anyone who actually USES the internet regularly use these terms, or is it only my mom?
-Styopa
...is a blogger bitching about blogging...
Your two biggest mistakes:
1)assuming some sort of conspiracy to "keep stuff secret". A conspiracy that exists in imagination only.
2)your overestimating the taste of the public, not not realizing that the big popular media is successful because it DOES deliver the news people want.
"....government....world empire based on economic enslavement...world bank"
I'm wondering why you did not mention the Bildeburgers, Elvis in a flying saucer, and black helicopter.
"Dumb Americans who have no clue as to what is really going on mean...."
Except for you. You know all about those Jews running the banks, all about those UN prison camps being built in Wisconsin, and all about UN plans to confiscate American guns, right? Is that it?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I've had a personal web site since 1994, when it was hosted on "studsys", a Sparc cluster at Marquette University. I also had another side on Marquette's VAX/VMS system. My web site has mostly been a repository of my thoughts, ideas, and interests (just like every OTHER personal web site). Most of us who've been maintaining web pages for more than a year or two have been blogging since the beginning, although we never called it that. Mine was called "Jim's Diary" until somebody accused me of copying the Onion (which I'd never heard of at the time), so I changed it. Anyway, it's been around forever, it's what people enjoy doing, and it's not going to go away or vanish because of waxing and waning in its popularity. I don't read anybody else's blog because I haven't found anybody else who is interesting to read. Well, except for one guy whose blog I read when I was going through my divorce, because this guy's psycho wife made mine look like an earthbound angel. Anyway... I was disinterested in the rise of blogs and I'm equally disinterested in their "fall". I'm pretty sure nobody reads mine either, but I don't really care. It's a history of my changing opinions, ideas, attitudes, and a repository of links, resources, and photographs. It ain't going away just because blogs aren't cool anymore.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
It's just a pet peeve of mine. Also, I enjoy being an asshole :)
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
I suspect that the MSM will go the way print media has gone with the advent of TV and radio proliferation. Print media used to be THE only source; then broadcast media and radio took a lot of their market share. Likewise, I believe that blogs - in a future format perhaps - will significantly overwhelm the MSM as news sources.
As has been posted in other comments, many, many blogs are little better than personal diaries - of no interest to most people. Of course most small, home-town newspapers are in the same boat. But the significant few blogs are beginning to make a greater and greater difference, especially in how the MSM does its reporting and fact-checking. They are also quite effective in calling-to-task the MSM over their many gaffes and outright lies (both by Commission and Ommision). The old paradigm that "the MSM is the only source" is being nibbled at bit by bit.
I feel that this is for the better - you can't have too many sources of info. It just makes sorting the wheat from the chaff a tiny bit harder.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
This guy's extended whine sounds like an old argument I've been hearing since the 80s:
"We've given these Tools to the hands of the Unwashed Masses, and now they are using them to produce Shoddy Work in Great Quantities!"
This has been said about desktop publishing (remember that quaint little technology?), about the design of web pages, about all sorts of things.
I thought we've already come to grips with the effect of widely-distributed technology: more users = more dross and dreck to wade through before you get to the Good Stuff.
P.S.
I *finally* got rid of that annoying hangnail! And I've decided to paint my house white! Read all about it at sabme.myblog.com ("the ONLY blog that matters!")
I try not to be a grammar Nazi, but the original post is exactly why most blogs aren't worth reading: they are poorly written.
Just try: "They not only made the world smaller..." instead.
This is an incomplete thought. Try: "Wired claimed blogs are to information delivery what Napster was to music. And it's still an awkward sentence, but more complete now.
Outranking the New York Times web site in what? Google ranking? Hits? Readers?
This seems counter to the rest of the post, which indicates an orgasmic love for blogs and blogging. If this is meant to be the real subject of the paragraph, the preceding sentences should support it with examples that lead up to the idea that once-revered bloggers now talk nonsense.
Spoken like a true blogger.
The biggest reason Blogs have become so very popular, and why they are here to stay in growing numbers is because they made publishing online easy for everyone. Blogs don't require you to know HTML before you can publish your ideas online. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically.
So, Blogs dramatically reduced the "friction" to publishing online. Millions of non-geeks now have their say.
If you mentally replace the word "Blog" with "Home Page" in any article you read online, it'll seem like you've stepped back in time to the dawn of the Web. That's how people talked about the web a few years ago.
Blogs have accelerated grass roots democracy, leaching the "Mass" from Media, splintering it into untold numbers of demassified niches. The impact is very big and will deepen.
I've just finished a piece on the impact of new digital media upon the mass media and entertainment industry in an article called: "Is Big Brother Dying or Just Being Born?". It makes the case that the digitization of media will force mass media in all forms, to take it's rightful place as another niche.
In a nutshell, Mass media will be good for mass events. But Blogs represent the birth of grass roots media. Aggregated through RSS, they'll soon out-perform mainstream.
Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence
... you certainly make some grand sweeping statements of dubious correctness. Or maybe that's your whole strategy - that way you'll attract the pedants you're such a fan of?
Double negatives are not "allowed and encouraged" by "every other language besides English". Granted, some of the latin languages, notably Spanish, use a double-negative construction as the *only* allowed negative in some cases: It is correct to say "no lo he visto nunca" (literally "I haven't never seen it"), but incorrect to say "lo he visto nunca" (literally "I've never seen it"). This does not mean you are free to add in double negatives whenever you feel like it, it's just correct Spanish. And just to pick a random counterexample to your "every other language" statement: None of the Scandinavian languages allow any sort of double negative.
Basically, the double negative in English is just plain wrong, and the fact that some other languages feature what become double negatives when translated literally to English does not mean we should start using them in English.
Oh, and... please don't tell me you speak the way Shakespeare wrote?
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Everything is going somewhere; the Earth is nearly halfway through its annual orbit and the Sun is busy flying around the galactic core.
blogs are here to stay
"Here" is clearly a relative value. Blogs will maintain their general location above the surface of the Earth until such time as off-planet blogging catches on ("The third moonrise this morning made me think of the fragility of life, upon which I shall now expound for the next eight pages.").
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
For that, I'm adding you as a friend!
The biggest reason Blogs have become so very popular, and why they are here to stay in growing numbers is because they made publishing online easy for everyone. Blogs don't require you to know HTML before you can publish your ideas online. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically.
So, Blogs dramatically reduced the "friction" to publishing online. Millions of non-geeks now have their say.
If you mentally replace the word "Blog" with "Home Page" in any article you read online, it'll seem like you've stepped back in time to the dawn of the Web. That's how people talked about the web a few years ago.
Blogs have accelerated grass roots democracy, leaching the "Mass" from Media, splintering it into untold numbers of demassified niches. The impact is very big and will deepen.
I've just finished a piece on the impact of new digital media upon the mass media and entertainment industry in an article called: "Is Big Brother Dying or Just Being Born?". It makes the case that the digitization of media will force mass media in all forms, to take it's rightful place as another niche.
In a nutshell, Mass media will be good for mass events. But Blogs represent the birth of grass roots media. Aggregated through RSS, they'll soon out-perform mainstream.
Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence
Then check out his new blog and grassroots journalism projects.
Slashdot crashed when I submitted but apparently didn't care :)
Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence
All the works of Shakespeare consist of millions of letters. It is merely up to the reader to arrange those letters in the proper order.
(In other words: Read it, compare it, judge it, learn from the differences.)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Blogging is Reality TV for the Internet.
Somewhere (on a blog) is a person who says that the modern Media empires play a gate keeper role for information with the vast majority of people relying on these gate keepers to manage their information.
Reading blogs is the equivalent of going to a new gate keeper. They simply publish content as they see fit with whatever comments they want to add.
In theory, that sounds pretty exciting, but in practice people will still rely on the media empires for "important" stories. (ex. Watergate scandal)It is a kind of "trust" filter.
More importantly, it would be the exception to the rule blogger who would explore a single topic long enough to define an issue with any objectivity. BTW, how many readers would stick around for it anyway. Then they would need the gate keeping media empire to get the story through most consumers "trust" filter.
Well, the gate keeping media empire won't take too kindly to having Joe-Blogger steal their eye-balls. So they'll make Joe's story their own and if it's different than Joe Blogger's version, well "Joe just didn't get the facts right because we have more resources to do the story right."
So there may be millions of new gate keepers, but they won't stay on a topic long enough or shift media empire agendas.
Blogging does make publishing information to millions around the world very easy. That is a good thing.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Here's the thing: aren't blogs just websites that get updated with people's opinions? Lots of websites get updated regularly. I'd like to know why this particular use for websites has been given its own terminology and become a sort of phenomenon.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
*gouges eyes out*
Thank God Vanna's on Wheel of Fortune too, though. Dare I sayit: I'd hit it.
My favorite phrase on the blog so far: "[...]I was saved from a tragic mistake years ago when I noticed my son's baby stroller warning: 'Remove child before folding'." That can only mean one thing: T3H NEW SIG!!1one
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Everybody is always waiting with baited breathe for the next great thing that will completely change their lives and solve all of the worlds problems. It's a natural impulse that snake oil sales men were able to take advantage of, and it's the same thing Enron marketed. Blog suffered from the same sort of 'it'll change your world forever' kind of hype.
.com companies were going to change the world, and once that didn't work no one believed that they could work at all. This reactionary view, is of course also wrong (witness google and amazon).
The problem is that they, like most other things, do not change the world over night. In reality, revolutions are hardly ever based on a single product, and if they are, it doesn't happen over night. It took almost 50 years for computers to change the world, it's the blink of an eye for a culture, but when compared to these miracle cures that are supposed to change everything instantly, it's too long of a time to advertise.
But at the same time, when people realize that a new technology isn't the ultimate salvation, they tend to completely dismiss it altogether. For example, the dot com boom and bust. At first
So will blogs change all of media for ever: NO
Are all blogs doomed, and will never amount to anything: NO
The reality is some where in the middle.
Add Columbine to that summary, and you've got a Jon Katz story. Sheesh.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Actually mine was Slashdot and Slashdot is a blog. I don't watch TV and I get most of my news online. Slashdot happened to be the only news-ish website that wasn't buckling under the weight of the traffic on 9/11.
D-
read the fucking book before you toss my claims aside. it is true and the book and this man (HE FUCKING DID THIS SHIT) are the proof.
I am a liberal, you are mixing up your conspiracies. that racist UN crap is just that.... crap.... the proof of this world empire is everywhere including, most of all, this book.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
It is run by an LLC, which is a quasi-corporate type of business.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
why anyone would pay more attention to blogs than to marketed media alludes me. granted, i am not saying, LISTEN TO BIG BROTHER! YES, the media is skewed and biased, but at least they are governed by laws restricting them from flat out lying and if they do, they are repremanded for it.
blogs are completely void of fact checks. or spell checks for that matter.
Anyone can write an "I Am James Bond" book.
"I am a liberal, you are mixing up your conspiracies. that racist UN crap is just that."
The "corporate conspiracies" fictional stuff is almost as bad. Almost, but not quite: I commend you for not being racist like other conspiracy wacks. I've known many liberals and conservatives, but few in each camp were conspiracy True Believers (tm).
"the proof of this world empire is everywhere including"
Ah. the secret empire. No evidence of it, but we must believe!!! Believe!!! By the way, this "Hitman" book is published by.... you guessed it.... a corporation.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
First it was all about Linux... now it's all about Apple. First blogs were revolutionary... not their just the mindless rants of emo-kids. What will slashdot turn its collect back on next? Google? NEVER!!!
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
But I do get to keep in touch with my friends from high school, and friends from college, using blogs. Especially since I've moved 3000 miles away from them - it's nice to read about goings on in their life (promotions, hard days at work, changes in relationships, moving to new places) and then leaving a comment for them. It takes just a few minutes a day to read their posts, and to write some sort of insightful comment back to them. I find myself to be much closer now with those folks who keep a blog than those who don't, despite not being that close when we knew each other in person.
I have several blogs, each with a theme. My personal one is used for communication with family and friends about my goings on in life (parties, concerts, conventions, etc.). One of them is for my foodie obsessions and is used as a log of the restaurants I've been to, and then I have one for talking about videogames - what I've played, what I'm playing, and comments on the industry. No specific audiences (I'm not looking for a wide one) except my friends who are interested in any of those three topics. There has been a slight "rise" of blogs, but I don't think that they'll "fall" any further than the usages that I've mentioned. Blogging grew popular because of the community aspect that it gave to its users, and that is something I don't see fading for quite a while.
It does seem like many blogs are nothing more than links to other Blogs and sites. BoingBoing and Metafilter are like that: great sites, but, just links to other sites and Blogs.
That said, I'd like less links and more pictures of the Go-Gos!
that is the most annoying blog I have ever read...
"blogs aren't going nowhere [...] blogs are here to stay"
What amuses me is that you went through trouble of italicizing nowhere - the very word that "technically" has you agreeing with the author. Well, at first anyway. I suspect anywhere is the word you are looking for.
Like any new industry or social phenomena there is always an initial glut, followed by a shakeout and consolidation, followed by a period where the major players are the best and most dedicated ones. It's a recurring phenomena that has happened in autos, aviation, radio, TV, tech, Internet, and perhaps now blogs, if you believe the article. Nothing new here folks, move along...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Instapundit and daily kos are shitty. I'm tired of reading political "insight" from ("former") lawyers paid by large organizations to influence opinion.
When the large organization decides it wants something and hires a slimy weasel to sell it to me, why would I want involve myself? Gee, sign me up for that community...foot soldier for the evil and greedy.
And no I'm not a communist, socialist, luddite, or crackpot. I just hate finding out who's pulling the strings. They'll steer the ship right into the fucking iceberg for a price...
Finally. I've never blogged and I could never understand the drive behind it.
:)
<personal feelings> Most blogs seem to be written by dumb rednecks who don't know anything beside the few feet surrounding them. </personal feelings>
Good riddance to a technology that didn't bring anything to this world, except the pain of reading somebody else's problems.
...*must* be false if we accept, as you have stated earlier (although somewhat illogically), that blogs are going somewhere. The blogs in question can not simultaneously 'not go nowhere' and be 'here to stay.'
The is obviously false, through observation I can see a blog *here*, yet also one *over there*. Thus blogs in fact are staying and going somewhere simultaneously.
I think your problem is that you have not cought up on the latest in Quantum Blog Theory which states that blogs exist simultaneously as a disturbing wave of commentary (dynamic and profound) and also a picture of a cat (static and useless). They exist in both states until you collapse the probability wave and thus get either a political missive rippling through the blogosphere or a friday night cat-blogging.
Interestingly reading the blog from the story link was so lacking in meaning or interesting content that I'm pretty sure the whole blog was, in fact, a clever steganographic encoding of a picture of a a cat.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Blogs are not a terrible source of news. The idea that the monolithical, 'report the same story' news services is all there is worth reading or listening to is foolish. When the riots were going on in China recently and try as I might I could not find any deep analysis or reporting on those anti-Japanese riots I looked for relevant blogs to fill me on on what I was missing. Like URL:http://angrychineseblogger.blog-city.com/ and URL:http://pekingduck.org/ which not only gave me a chinese point of view, they also posted pictures not available on the usual news sources. Pictures and commentary from those riots taken by someone there at the riots and who posted those pictures on a chinese language blog. Sure you are going to get a lot of tripe but you'll also get pointed to news and discussions you wouldn't have otherwise found.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Taken from my blog at: www.michaelrighi.com:
Over the past few years I've seen the popularity of web logs grow faster than the mold in my fridge. I really get a kick out of four year crazes. Don't get me wrong, I think that web logs are profoundly important and here to stay. But right now web logs are experiencing the hype of a four year craze. Hear me out.
My first experience with the World Wide Web was circa 1993. On the weekends my father would take me into work and plop me down in front of a Silicon Graphics workstation while he accomplished work worthy of a weekend visit. I'm proud that my first web experience involved Mosaic, and when it went live a year later, Yahoo. I can't imagine what it would be like for a child's first experience with the web to involve Internet Explorer. That must be like learning how to drive on a Pinto. I digress.
Back in the day, when the workstations weren't in use, they ran this thing called a "screensaver" to keep the monitors from suffering burn-in. Specifically, they ran a screensaver named PointCast. Pointcast LogoPointCast was a program that featured Push technology. Basically, with Push technology, servers would send data to the client rather than clients requesting it from the server. Hot damn and hallelujah, push technology was going to change the world! I mean, can you imagine it!?!?! Push instead of Pull! Ingenius! Not since Columbus discovered the world is round... blah blah blah.
PointCast pushed stock quotes, news and weather to the computers that subscribed to it. I never really understood PointCast. I mean, if it ran when the computer was idle, then who was there to read the stocks, news and weather? I want my stocks, news and weather when I'm sitting at the computer thank you very much. These silly problems didn't matter back in the early to mid-nineties because PointCast's graphics were stunning (for the time) and there weren't that many choices for a screensaver if you didn't like flying toasters.
Somehow the enthusiasm for PointCast's pretty graphics translated into euphoria for Push technology. Of course Push has a place, but after about four years the hype behind Push technology gave way to the common sense benefits of Pull. Push is in use today, but its perceived importance settled down to a realistic level. I guess you could say that gravity pulled Push back to Earth.
In the late nineties, portals were king. If you didn't have a portal then why were you even bothering with the web? For those of you not aware, portals are aggregate web sites that pull together content (such as stock, news and weather) all into a convenient, customizable web page. Every search engine turned itself into a portal, with Lycos and Yahoo being the biggest that I can remember. The word Portal became synonymous with the web. Eventually the good people at Google showed that congested portals could be slayed by a clean interface tied to a fast search engine. Of course portals are still around today. For example, some of my current work uses IBM WebSphere Portal. But again, after about four years of hype, their perceived importance has settled down to a realistic level.
Over the last couple of years web logs have become all the rage. In fact, web logs have become so popular that I think they deserve a shorter name. I suggest we start calling them "blogs" for short. Blog. I think it's kind of catchy, what do you think?
Anyway, blogs have become all the rage.Trent Lott Unlike with push and portals, blogs actually have some power to their punch. In fact, Howard Dean almost lost to George W. Bush instead of to John Kerry thanks to the grassroots effort largely organized through his blog. Trent Lott would probably still be in office today if it weren't for the power of bloggers and their blogs. Blogs transfer the power of the press from the mighty publisher to the puny peon. Powerful stuff.
But wait a second, didn't HTML and the World Wide
Is anyone actually going to sit there and tell me in all seriousness that their primary source of news and info on 9/11 was somebody's blog?
Not me at least. I see blogs as an excellent vehicle, though, for issues that require "groundswell"- involvement or reaction on the part of the community. I think this is at least one aspect of blogs that worry entrenched interests - like politicians. A well-written, well-researched blog is great for staying in touch with an issue, garnering support from concerned readers, and initiating corrective action.
Along these same lines, they can be a valuable resource for "after-the-fact" tidbits that might be overlooked, or simply omitted from Big Media.
it is published by a private publishing house.
and the proof is everywhere. read the book, it is not a "james bond" book, this guy's job was to inflate projections of economic growth that showed 3rd world and developing world governments that the debit they incurred from the world bank would get paid back by the growth in the economy.. which never happened. these countries would never be able to pay these loans back and were forced to let american corporations (due to agreements to avoid defaulting) plunder their resources for almost no return to the country of the money gained from those resources.
this crap does happen, this crap is WHY these countries HATE the US. look to South America for this.
you disregard this out of hand, but the facts are right there in plane site.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
No, I don't hate blogs, I hate the word blog. Every time I hear it, it annoys me. Its not a good word. Please choose a new word.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
On my site, I'm guilty of reporting news that's essentially summaries of (and links to) other news reports too. But that's because my site is all about discussing and debating politics and other world events with people from all over the world and from all political perspectives-- so the story is just a means of sparking a debate. I quite often reprint Wikinews stories in their entirety (they gave me permission).
Occasionally, though, I (and others) post personal blogs on the site, which are editorials/opinion pieces. I wish there were more of those. If I had the time, I'd write more of them myself.
I still wonder what will become of my site. I had visions of it one day becoming a megalithic forum that everyone on the planet knew about. But building up a new community from scratch is hard. You don't get a lot of comments with out a lot of users, and you don't get a lot of users without a lot of comments. I still haven't hit upon the solution. But I do think that ultimately, a major web forum will exist, whose userbase dwarfs that of any web forum existing today.
Looking for political forums? Check out "The World Forum".
I don't know what I'd do without blogs. I mostly follow blogs of artists that live in NYC and do the kind of work I do. I can live in Dallas but stay in the loop on the cool stuff going on there. And artists I'm interested in usually post about the stuff they're researching and working on, so you can see new stuff in progress before it's actually shown anywhere.
-paul
Oh lordy.
If "I-love-to-blog" has any point at all it's unintentional. The real point is the composition of the original post. Try reading the whole thing.
Sadly this is the future (end) of the internet. Any half drunk, caffine injected, teenage austism monkey can string any five random thoughts on any topic, load in into his/her blog-o-canon and launch... Exploding like so many IQ-reducing MIRVs some of the fallout is destined to get absorbed previously worthwhile sources of information. (Shhh! The editor's are watching!)
I feel stupider already.
PS: Note to I-love-to-play-with-bloggies: You can't soberly quote Wired as a serious source. Or People magazine, or Jerry Pournelle, or George Lucas. And no, not John Dvorak. Or any Scientologist.
My blog is a little burned out, but I never got into it much in the first place. I post most of my writings on dynamic Boards, and my writings are generally lost and known only to a few. It's not really a "log" that way, only Web.
The bloggers who burn out though will be replaced by up and comers.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
As also expressed by others, I don't think blogs are going anywhere. They will evolve. What I see is that PodCasts are continuing to grow, and in a way are an extension of blogs. They don't just extend into the written media's domain, but also radio and soon television/video (not yet enough momentum on this yet).
I seriously doubt they're going anywhere!
-Alex
The problem with most blogs, like most personal websites, is that they violate ESR's first rule of making a good website:
Have something interesting or important to say.
I am officially gone from
Heck, half of them can't stand to hear anything that could be negative about the blogosphere..
An earlier post went from +4 Insightful to 0 in less than an hour.
Moderation 0
50% Insightful
30% Overrated
20% Flamebait
Extra 'Insightful' Modifier 0 (Edit)
My blog is there to keep my friends up to date with what I'm up to, organise outings and exchange gossip.
I don't see that as a bad thing.
My Journal
...and a poorly written, poorly researched blog is great for submitting to slashdot. Most likely it will run on the front page and get flamed into oblivion by posters who obviously have more sense than the editors who accept such submissions. Often more than once...
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Blog news is crap and is corrupt. There is no way out.
Alternately it's a good way to learn from people who know what they're talking about and want to share. There is a very capable Arabic speaking professor of history from U of Michigan who monitors the Arabic press and posts his findings online. That link goes to his site.
Both pieces of advice above were given by my professor. In contrast, Judy Woodruff, who is now visiting professor at my university, gave a public lecture where she said that in the future, blogs might be a threat to the current news paradigm, but she didn't know how. That's because she's not that bright despite her reputation. I don't know why anyone would use blogs as an important part of news gathering. Sounds like trend following to me. As I have tried to argue here, blogs are important, but only for specialized needs.
As a consequence there arose an undergound publishing network that used photocopiers and mimeograph machines to distribute writings not sanctioned, this was called samizdat.
It seems we are in a similar situation today. The major media decides what is newsworthy. The counter media is becoming the blogosphere. So to see Rep. Sensenbrunner's shutting of Patriot act debate in congress your best source is a blog that has captured the C-span broadcast.
Similarly, the Downing Street Memo was first available (in the US) online. And most of the followup clamor has been there as well.
This is both a good thing and an indication of how far the press has drifted from their role of shining a light into the dark recess of government and commerce.
What is lacking is a way for all the bits of information to be preserved and made available in a coherent fashion. For example, there is:
http://www.thememoryhole.org/
But, this seems to be basically a one person operation with limited funding.
A parallel concern can be illustrated by TPMcafe's request for a list of good history books. Such a list (especially annotated) can be a valuable resource for people trying to learn from the past. However, right now, it just a bunch or random comments in a blog. A formal bibliographic site would thus be much more useful.
-- Robert D Feinman Landscapes, Panoramas, Photoshop Tips and Musings on Society
Doesn't anyone else find it pretty ironic that the article links to a [i]blog[/i] talking about how blogging has become too saturated?
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
The blog with the highest signal/noise ratio I've ever seen is Jerry Pournelle's site. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/, with daily updates on his "current mail" and "current view" pages. No fancy bling on his pages, just the well thought out views of a former presidential advisor on space and military technology, a global traveller, BYTE magazine columnist, and a popular science fiction writer.
Wow! I'm barely though my "wannabe" status as a blogger, and already I'm a Has Been! Talk about the blurry pace of the modern world! LOL!
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Why didn't the part about "much more smaller" chafe your ass as well as the double negative? I thought the purpose of "smaller" was to avoid saying "more small." Isn't the word "much" for adding emphasis in unquantifiable terms just as can be done using the word "very?"
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
News blogs are the main source of news for me.
I am currently interested in youth street crime
and the established media censors this news
to "prevent confirming prejudice".
Did you email any of the blogs with a correction? Most blogs owners are quite willing to put up corrections, which is why I read them - not because they are nessicarily more accurate out of the gate, but because over time they are far more willing to post corrections and thus wind up FAR more accurate. It's also why I see no point in reading newspapers at all anymore since they do not seem to be as careful as they should be considering they are embedding words in a lasting medium.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Before you mod, my thoughts:
- for-the-sake-of-linkable-content-y -badgerisms' can go and die.
The bad blogs, were, well bad. The good blogs were, well, good, but bad. How so?
Well, blogging became a trite and annoying word, and those who could have had sane web content published to their site using automated means, whose instead to label this technology as an action.
The fact that the verb was the technology is an irkish trait.
The verb should have been removed from the underlying technology, the whole process of writing has been around, suddenly a technology comes around that does... nothing... one day all these forum / im / chat processes were relabeled with a piece of jargon, and everyone wanted to do it.
If you trace the ancient entymology of 'blog you will find an antique phrase:
web log
web is a protraction of world-wide-web, a name given to the http related protocols that run on the 'net (route: english, from word 'Internet' from older phrase 'interconnected network'). log is the same as the ancient word 'log' meaning a piece of felled tree.
The act of web logging means you kept a series of diary like thoughts. However, most were not diaries, but link dumps, or a way of changing the front page content of a website. Which makes sense.
But, althought you write a diary on a diary, and a newspaper on a newspaper, and a tv guide on a tv guide, and a sightseeing book, in, a , erm, sightseeing book, they are not all the same thing.
You can call it publishing, but blogging has other roots, and the misuse of the term is like garlic salt on an open eye wound.
My favourite blog was my friends, it was unpretentious, only about 5 people ever read it. I preffer that.
Basically, write an article if you have something to say, if you want to write a how-to, write a how -to.
Don't blog a how-to, or blog a hack.
And weblogs.com can die, as can any other 'auto-content-blog-content-write-for-us-
content
google-friendl
Making it too easy to publish things that went into the global conscience of the web, just made it easier for the people who saw little value in what they wrote to just write more of it, and make it EASIER (or more difficult for google) for them to infect the mainstream.
Blogging was one hell of a signal/noise screw over, and for that, they can tongue my sweaty starfish, the bastards.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
While Blogs may have changed the way information can be distributed, I don't thing it's changed the way mass media is/will be operating that much. Let's face it, nearly all blogs fall in two separate categories, Personal Blogs and those that are commerical after a fashion.
All the personal blog's have done is create a new way for some individuals to open up yet another window into their lives for others to view it through. Sure, some of those blogs may be boring, uninformative, or otherwise uninteresting in some way. But thats perhaps the norm for many peoples personal lives. And many people will read them just for that purpose, to get a view into other peoples lives, nothing more. Expecting anything else from them would be silly. And this is probably where alot of people are currently expressing disappointment over blogs. Because most personal blogs sort of devolve over time, unless a person is really dedicated to keeping it up to date, and on subject/track over the years. So, from an outsiders point of view, a 'bubble' is seen, where the personal blogs are at one time all the rage, and then seem to slowly die off as the less dedicated people drop out of routine of updating up their blogs. Hence a (percieved) 'Fall of Blogs'.
But the other kind of blogs on the other hand, if their lucky enough to create a more of a grassroots style of communication, or some kind of community involvement, (These are the ones that many people would liken to a journal or maybe a online magazine) those will likely thrive and continue to exist as long as their audience are kept in rapt interest. And there always be community involvement online at some level or another. So for that reason I don't forsee those kind of blogs going away anytime soon. Most likely they'll just morph as new technology comes along, just like the community BBS's of the 80's & 90's did.
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
Try "Most Stupidest."
I totally agree. Blogs are basically how I keep up with my out-of-town friends and what they're up to, not to mention out-of-town siblings. Only problem is, my mother is reading my blog now... *wry grin* The way I see it, it's her choice. We always had a tacit agreement growing up that there were things she knew existed in my life that she didn't want to know about. If she doesn't ask directly, I don't volunteer information. If she asks, I'm perfectly honest. Before, she had my little brother read my blog (he has one of his own too), and asked him to relay tidbits of information. Apparently me making a post about having a prospective girlfriend broke that trend for her, and she's actively reading now.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Would everyone who writes their prediction about whether blogs will die just write in the same comment whether they said Apple will never switch to Intel CPUs?
Actually, I'd like a truth meter about all posters so I can read only the +25 insightful. I think this will keep Slashdot professional.
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
Remind me of a (probably apocryphal) legend about the government worker who finds he's bored, so he starts a Flypaper Report, detailing the number of flies caught in a nearby piece of flypaper each day. Day after day, he did this to relieve his boredom, posting the reports publically much like any other. Legend has it that the employee retired, resulting in several irate generals calling up his office and asking what the Hell happened to the Flypaper Report they read each day.
'Course these days, he'd probably be brought up on charges for revealing information that could be useful to terrorists... Heh, and that reminds me of the story told by my computer professor of how several news companies found that the easiest way to find out when something big was happening in the Pentagon was to keep track of pizza deliveries. When something big was going to happen, employees would stay late and order pizza. I don't really know what it had to do with software, but my teacher was like that with his stories.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Dude. Anyone who knows anything about LiveJournal knows it would be LiveJournal-on-a-goat.
Despite being a voracious and compulsive web user. Never seen one. Who gives a stuff what some self appointed no-it-all to the world thinks?
Until blogging "matures" it's not likely to be as big as predicted, currently 70% of all blogs just lay dormant and take up space, of the remaining percentage few have anything decent to say, not unlike traditional broadcasters ;)
"If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low
My favorite meta-blog site is Economics Roundtable which has links to blogs by many leading economists.
My take: Blogs are here to stay, but they're going to fade a lot from the public mind. "Blog" is one of those words like "hacker", accidentally discovered by some brain-dead mediadroid and then accidentally falling into the cultural echo chamber, until all the media sources began parroting the word back and forth to each other, with no real understanding of what it means, as is usual for the public's treatment of esoteric technical terms. "Blog" just happens to be one of those words you can't utter without sounding terribly hip and with-it.
At the bottom of it all, though, blogs are just another form of personal web-page, with more flexibility. They serve as a convenient place to dump your writings, showcase your open-source code when it's not major enough for Sourceforge, hone your HTML skills, and run a mini-discussion forum all in the same place.
You can quickly tell what idea the owner has of blogging by looking at their blog. The genuine make an effort to make the blog as solid as a commercial website. Those who have something to offer the world post their own original content.
Those who copy a template from another blog, and then do nothing but post links and pictures with little comment, are the ones who are just there because they were told over and over how K001 blogs were, and they didn't want to be left out.
Never have I seen a medium with less to say about it and more said than the blog. If you view the source for a few blogs, you'll see that they're just regular old web pages with some scripting services provided by the host.
This is why I try to avoid using the word "blog," and I absolutely refuse to acknowledge it as a verb. I'm not "blogging," I'm writing.
http://brownpau.com/archives/2004/05/unblog
A Blog entry with a link is as much "news" as a /. article.
Unless a blog has pictures of cute kittens, it's worthless.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Or tell us who you are so we can identify the penis.
I guess the dividing line is between those blogs that allow comments and those that don't. Those with comments can provide far greater fact-checking ability than the mainstream news, assuming, that comments aren't selectively edited or deleted.
How many times have you read a newspaper article or seen a report on TV and wished you could immediately correct something the reporter got completely wrong?
Slashdot is just a blog, after all, and I think issues usually get a more thorough treatment here than you'll ever see from the likes of CNN, Fox, et al. Certainly those who are completely full of shit get called on it.
To quote Richard Feynman: "What do you care what other people think?" Mayank Sharma may be referring to specific blogs but on a whole I completely disagree with him. Who says blogs have to deliver anything, much less have a purpose? Who has a right to set standards on free speech and expression? IMHO, the "blogging phenom" (ew...) is a natural evolution. It provides info, sure, but it also provides a window into people's minds, what they think and what they'd like to say. Sure there's lots of drivel. Of course there is! Check the average median IQ of an American citizen or the average amount of 16 year olds who spend most of their time online and it makes sense. It's beautiful, whether you like it or not, whether you read it or not. It's there, it's someone and all you have to do is find them, that's what's important. Real free speech is ugly but at the same time it's exhilaratingly gorgeous.
but many of the personal blogs are funny, amusing, and can gain quite a bit of popularity. the fact that many personal blogs look like this:
"
WE WENT TO MY FREINDS AND I PLAYED WITH JOHN!!! OMG!!! HE'S CUTE!!!! I ALSO WANT TO A PARTIE WITH JANIE!!!
"
some of us are actually quite eloquentand amusing. it's kind of like a way of knowing people, but it's different.
My new blog
I always talk sense!
http://www.michaelgorsuch.org/
but its English hasn't improved much.
The author write "Blogs have revolutionized information delivery..."
That's absolute bull-crap! Has any so-called "blogger" successfully overthrown a government? It seems everything these days has to be "a revolution" or "revolutionary" or have "revolutionized" something.
The internet is a serious threat to the power held dear by certain governments, thus it is definitely "revolutionary," but certainly not to the extent of a significant group of individuals who actually overthrow a government. The internet also didn't cause sudden or monumentus change, although there was a lot of change throughout the technologically advanced civilizations around the world (and pressure on others to become more advanced).
But the author simply gives way too much credit to bloggers, just like religious fanatics give too much credit to their imaginary friends (e.g., various gods, god's children, etc., and no, the bible does not constitute proof as it is merely nothing more than a story book filled with an interesting mixture of philosophy and violence).
I once attended a seminar in which the presenter had the audience participate in a hands-on manner, and in his conclusion he declared everyone's efforts as "more than a movement, you've all just experienced a revolution, congratulations!" I, of course, yelled "bull-crap" and was escorted out for my objections - it seems the presenter wasn't interested in my point of view on the matter even though this was a hands-on presentation (I guess I presented a "threat to overthrow his credibility" which could have been deemed as a true revolution within the confounds of the presentation hall).
Anyway, that's my two cents. Maybe I should become a full-time blogger. Anyone hiring?
You get half the truth. The other half is mass promotion of blogging, simply out of world security. If you write out how you feel, and all the little details of your life, you can be better controlled, exploited, plus the chances of you secretly flying off the handle are less, so those in charge are less weary. Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear. I'm afraid there may be a day when NOT blogging will be a crime, just like not going to confession in the Catholic church is almost like a sin - do you have something to hide? Perhaps you have terrorist thoughts?
think of the historians and anthropologists.
Moreover, think of the pain of the poor grad students that are going to have to read all this!
haahah!
the blogs is fine.
-pyrrho
Never forget that advertising is big media's customer, and we, the viewers are the PRODUCT. This is why blogs are so interesting, relevant, and refreshing, because they aren't tainted with corporate ass-kissery.
Most of what passes for "news" in the corporate media is just prepackaged press-releases and "info-tainment". It's repetetive nonsense. You mentioned NPR, too bad they have lost their funding and must now sell advertising to stay alive. This has given them a very pro-corporate, pro-establishment slant in the last few years.
Just about all print media, newspapers, network and cable news have suffered declining viewership in the last few years. CNN has a suprisingly low audience, and exists mainly as a propaganda outlet for Rupert Murdoch's conservative political views. IMHO, it's because their quality is getting lower and lower. People are tired of tanned news models spouting pointless mindless drollery. I'd give a million news-tainment models for one Walter Cronkite.
Blogs are basically all I trust these days. Without blogs, how would we know how bad Iraq is? How would we know about all the lies surrounding 9/11? How would we know about stolen elections? etc. Sure there is a lot of crap, but you have to read and decide for yourself. In the end, this is much better than someone else deciding for you.
Visit the best Liberal Blog: DU
You're thinking about this whole thing in the wrong way.
First of all, you should dispense with the term "double negative." The term that's normally used in linguistics to describe this sort of phenomenon is negative concord. Negative concord the phenomenon where, under the scope of a negation, various words across the sentence need to appear in a special negative form. Your Spanish example is a good starting point. Essentially, if you have a negative clause, there must be a negative word before the verb. In your example sentence, no lo he visto nunca, the verbal negator no is doing this job. But it could be done by other words: you can have nadie lo ha visto nunca 'nobody's ever seen it', where it's the subject nadie 'nobody' that's satisfying the rule; or nunca lo he visto, where nunca satisfies it.
Now, the key observation is this: All varieties of English have negative concord. The difference between Standard English and the "double negation" dialects isn't that the latter has negative concord and the previous one doesn't. If you state the rules for negative concord in both varieties of English explicitly, you'll find that they're the exact same except for a minor detail: which word forms are used for negative concord. Take the word something; in Standard English, its negative concord form is anything; in "double negative" dialects, it's nothing. That's all there is to it.
And here's a useful crosslinguistic generalization on this point. There's two kinds of negation; one of them is called "constituent negation," and applies to a single word, or to a phrase smaller than the sentence. For example, a not small amount of effort has constituent negation on small.
Then there's the other, more relevant kind of negation, which is sentential negation, which applies to the whole sentence, both in terms of the meaning and the form; the way sentential negation is expressed in a language can involve many words over the whole sentence that's negated.
This last detail is why "double negation" is the wrong way to think about the grammar involved here. What you're doing is negating the whole sentence, and in most languages all over the world, this requires changing the whole sentence, not just popping in a word in one place.
PS it's possible to have both sentence negation and constituent negation on the verb phrase in a sentence at the same time: Mary couldn't not visit her friend (i.e. "no matter how hard she tried to refrain from it"). There's even examples ambiguous between both kinds of negation: Mary could not visit her friend (i.e. "she has the choice, and can exert it either way").
I've already written too much in this forum today, but I did want to add that Google, page ranking, and SEOs have had an affect on blogging as well. I don't mind teenage angst blogs. They don't come up in my searches and if they do I can ignore them easily. MLM and adblogs are easy to spot as well. But nothing is more irritating than lousy SEO spam blogs coming up at the top of a Google search when the blog offers nothing to the subject except keywords. When Google began ranking blogs higher (perhaps around the same time they bought blogger.com?), they made blogs attractive to SEOs as methods of increasing page ranking for their clients. Google adsense (which I use on my blog, I should disclose), also added into the mix creating a market for reams of digital crap whose sole purpose is to keyword web patrons to death with pages filled with text ads and no relevant content. Look into the fiasco the WordPress guys ran into last March (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050331-475 9.html)
How is this all Google's fault? As I see it, they have a responsibility to guarantee the relevance of their service by filtering out abuses in a timely manner. They don't have to do this, of course, and nobody forces me to use their service, but Google cannot choose the consequences of their actions. What Google deems as important affects our daily web experience. Like it or not, they shape the Web. If Google allows sites to poison Google's search results then Google not only dilutes the value of their search and blog services, but inconveniences the web as a whole.
Rant all you want about the late comers to blogging ruining things for the "real" bloggers, but some girl's rant about her girlfriend's lipstick isn't going to spoil your internet experience or ruin blogs for you. I read blogs based on content. I'm sure you do as well. So I avoid those blogs like the plague. But when blogs are being used to promote Google's page ranking and Adsense revenues, thus making it harder for us to find legitimate content, then Google has a responsibility to separate the wheat from the chaffe and restore some much needed enlightenment to the blogging world.
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
I'm much more stupider having read that article.
This post is rings loud and clear with me. But maybe you are searching for information from the wrong end. I`ll give you a personal example.
Ages ago I wanted to resurrect a old `486 to build an OpenBSD firewall. Anyone familiar with old hardware will tell you that, `Its the little things (like *&!!@#$ BIOS) that matter` when installing operating systems. So I read all the manuals, man pages, catalogued the hardware (down to the serial numbers), read every Google, Yahoo newsgroup I could find and formulated a post detailing what I found. Most give up around the Google part.
The key insight I can give you, is to gather what you know into a meaningful format, then dump it onto a knowledgeable group and write up your results. In my case it was misc@openbsd.org. Having given a detailed account of what I wanted to know, I drew out those who had a clue of what was going on. The result was I got that firewall installed, but not without a lot of effort and some very helpful advise. You can read about it here [0], here [1], and here [2].
So the answer is out there, but inside someones head in terms of experience and knowledge. It is up to you to learn as much as possible about what you do and dont know and approach the right domain of knowledge. If you post your knowledge (and verify it) to a list, write it up, then blog about it, the chances of someone else finding the write-up via Google may have better luck.
So if you want to distil this into a repeatable process
- define your problem
- read the esr faq on how to ask questions the smart way [3]
- write up what you know/dont know carefully
- find your expert knowledge domain
- post your question carefully to a newsgroup, forum etc.
- write up the results with meaningful heading, summary.
reference[0] Peter Renshaw, openbsd on old i386: http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT19 1842.html
[1] Peter Renshaw, i386 install cont ...:
http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT20 1637.html
[2] Peter Renshaw, i386 obsd install problem : http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT23 0736.html
[3] Eric S. Raymond, How To Ask Questions The Smart Way http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
In the 80's, the buzz word was "multimedia." Then in the 90's, it was "interactive." Now it's "blogs." I personally do not read blogs. What do I care what some joe-schmoe has to say? If I wanted public opinion, there is the Usenet or the many bulletin board forums on the web.
What is with all the hype surrounding blogs? Frankly, it's a bit on the annoying side. Maybe I don't understand the concept completely, but what I thought a blog was for, was a daily, hourly, whatever, type write up, for either a specific topic or subject, or as in the case of Livejournal one's personal life. Just before the whole blogging craze kicked into a gear awhile back, a friend of mine got a LiveJournal account, and I considered getting one, too. It'd be cool, I thought. Then I realized the truth of the matter; I'd post a little bit, nobody but maybe a couple of friends of mine would read it, I'd forget about it, and it would ultimately be abandoned. I suppose I don't understand how this replaces standard means of writing such as talking about one's day, using for example, the essay. Personally, I would rather read something in an essay style writeup, and be able to read right then and there what happens next rather than wait a day, a week, or whatever for the next installment in said chronicle. True there are some definite possibilities for suspense in something like that, but it's not enough to get me blogging. For the record, I don't blog, I have read some articles on blogs, about things which I am interested in, but I don't subscribe to or read any on a regular basis, nor do I post to them. I don't think I have any friends who blog either, although, I could be wrong on that one.
It's funny, though, because when you start writing, typically no one is reading unless you've gone to some pains to advertise the fact that you were starting the blog. Therefore, you get kind of a guilty pleasure out of airing all of your dirty laundry, all of your private thoughts, because you know that the only people who'll read it are complete strangers who don't know you personally. Then, one day, you're walking down the hall at work when a co-worker who's going the opposite way remarks casually, "Nice blog," and your blood runs cold as you realize that you've been caught with your wedding tackle waving in the wind. *wry grin* And then you get cases like one friend of mine who had excerpts from her weblog about lighting up with her parents used against her during her truancy case. Or, in my case, I found out that a good portion of the people at my local community theater read my weblog after I posted a heated entry about a particular director. {shakes head ruefully} You think no one reads it until one day, someone does.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Phew, I'm glad you pointed out that those were URLS.
Blogs don't have to have some main focus, or any focus, or any requirement to even be particularly interesting, for that matter. My mom checks my blog daily. That's probably more often than I update. My friends from High School use it to see if I am still alive. I use it to ask people what their opinion on which riding mower to purchase, and to complain about what I see on the news.
It's a synergistic relationship, I guess you could say.
VOTE!
Blogs serve an interesting and occasionally useful purpose, but will probably always lack the relative objectivity of good news sources such as NPR.
Bad news, comrade: Washington Post | Congress seeks to end funding for PBS and NPR within two years
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
The Amazon listing mentioned it as an a book from Audible Inc..
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
what the hell are you talking about?
under product details on Amazon it has the correct publisher....
namely Berrett-Koehler Publishers
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Look before you "the hell" post. Amazon offers this book as a sound book from the Audible corporation. BK's web site does not say whether or not it is also a corporation. Chances are, it is.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I did not say that corporations in general are bad. I am not some communist. Large Multi national corporations are the ones perpetrating these injustices. Large media corporations are the ones that are not willing to report on these things in the US.
Bechtel, Haliburton, Brown & root, the World bank, Oil companies, Lumber companies, large international economic consulting companies Other large resource consuming companies and construction companies and the US government are the ones involved in this. The large media is either complicit or so corrupted by marketing that they do not run real news worth anything (the BBC and the CBC provide much better news coverage than the crap that the Cable news companies and the news papers put out in the US)
Read the book, heck, I mean, 15 bucks on Amazon is not bad at all. If you truly are an open minded person then you will read it.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Yet, they are. Most of the "Project Censored" stories were actually reported on on the "large media" before being placed on the (heh) "Censored" list. Can you name a few stories that the "Large Media" never reported on?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Downing street. That story alone should have been huge and it was not reported on.
How about the crap that is going down in the Judiciary Committee? That should be above the fold but it is not. How about all the illegal dealings that Delay has had with fund raisers and lobbyists? How about the corruption of the Ohio officials that were in charge during the election?
none of this stuff gets mentioned in more than a passing on the cable news stations and is not even below the fold on the news papers.
printing some blurb in the nation section, or doing a quick report on it in the 30 minute news briefs on a cable news channel is NOT reporting these events. This is stuff that effects ALL US citizens in a large way.
If Watergate had gone down today in this environment, I doubt there would have even been an investigation.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
It is not huge, since it really does not matter (in the end, the intelligence was not fixed, and Bush gave Saddam plenty of chances to comply with the cease-fire requirements: something he would have never done if he really wanted war). However, CNN has reported on it. As has Fox News. Hard to get more mainstream than this. Got another one to try?
Ah. Tom Delay. The stories about him and the scandals in the big media are extremely numerous. Judiciary committee? Do you mean Arlen Spector? Which story?
", or doing a quick report on it in the 30 minute news briefs on a cable news channel is NOT reporting these events."
Yes it is. The fact that you don't care about it as much as the rest of the public is the real matter. At least you are backing off from your claim that this stuff is not reported on. Do you want links to the mainstream media widely reporting these stories?
"This is stuff that effects ALL US citizens in a large way"
In your view. The Downing Street memo means little. Getting rid of Tom Delay will change nothing in how Congress does things.
"If Watergate had gone down today in this environment, I doubt there would have even been an investigation."
There probably would have been a big investigation, and a Special Counsel spending $40 million on it.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
You are nuts if you think that the DSM is not a major item.
It is proof that the intelligence was a flat out lie.
and FN's and CNN's "reporting" came over 1 month after it was released. The reporting on it again was hardly as rigorous and the teen in aruba, the run away bride or Michel Jackson, on top of which it was taken from a point of "it is meaningless so we should not really talk about it anyway". that is not discussing the DSM, that is deflecting it.
I will not respond to the rest of your post because I am tired of hearing your ditto head responses. live happy in your cloud of denial. when the end comes for the US because of all this crap going on, please do not try to act shocked.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Did the Downing Street Memo direct Senator Kerry, Bill Clinton, and the French Government to detail Saddam Hussein's WMD efforts and to warn of the danger posed by them before Bush was even (s)elected? Of course not. The intelligence was real. I guess if I am nuts for properly considering the DSM, discussing it and then dismissing it as irrelevant, than so is just about everyone else. It's just a pet project of a die-hard partisan fringe.
"I will not respond to the rest of your post because I am tired of hearing your ditto head responses"
If anything is tiring, it is seeing (even if for the first time) the idea that if someone is not a conspiracymonger, they are a ditto-head.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Lets look them up, and compare the results at huffingtonpost.com (your good media) and foxnews.com (big bad media)
Neither reports the DSM story on its main page (cover up!). But when you look on "downing street memo", you will find that Fox News indexes it in its search 39 times, compared to 31 times on Hufffingtonpress.com
This is kind of interesting, and turns claims of big-media coverup and "the people's blog exposing the real story!!!" on their head.
Then you can move on to other stories. tom delay scandal produces many times more hits/links on the Fox News site than Huffingtonpost does. This is Fox News, with its conservative edge. CNN (also big mainstream media) appears to turn up even more links
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Sorry.. I called you a Ditto head because I actually am a lib who listens to Rush and you speak right from his playbook. I have even heard him say word for word some of the things you have said.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Are you referring to the stuff about the "non neo-cons" speaking of Iraq WMDs and the danger? I actually remember when these guys (especially Clinton) were making the claims. No doubt Rush was on the other side then...just because it was them.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The difference was that back then, Saddam DID have them, the Inspectors actually found huge stockpiles of them.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
How did they vanish in the matter of a few years between the middle of the Clinton administration ("back then") and the early Bush administration? Is there any documentation of Saddam using them up, destroying them, or selling them to another?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.