Monday, January 8, 2007

I'm a Blogger and I'm Not Afraid to Admit It

Here are a couple of leftovers from last week (remember, the sooner you start falling behind, the quicker you can start catching up), which I belately found had a theme of sorts. Well, except for the first item, which I just thought was funny:

* A New Take on Citizen Journalism: Wanted -- citizen journalist to cover court case. Must have experience as a sex-worker. Bonus: The gig doesn't pay anything. Ahh, those wacky Canucks...

* Ceci n'est pas une blog -- News of the Weird's Chuck Shepard wants you to know that his daily update Web page is not a blog (scroll to "housekeeping"). Despite that whole "living on a blogspot.com address" thing. And the RSS feed and the archives (which say "Blog Archives"). Look, see: No comments. Can't be a blog. Nope.

Some people are still afraid of the whole "blog" nomenclature and what it represents to them. Don't ask me why.

In extreme cases, these blog refuseniks will have a Web page that they update daily (or more frequently). They may even take feedback or comments of sorts. They just don't have the other useful things, like built-in searchable archives, feeds and alerts.

So they'll basically have all the hassle (daily publishing) and none of the benefits.

I would call out the person I'm thinking of, but his "not a blog" is on hiatus for now. (GeneWeingarten
GeneWeingartenGeneWeingarten)

I'm not sure what's worse -- someone who has a blog and refuses to call it a blog, or someone who doesn't have a blog, but says they do.

(The "Ceci n'est pas une blog" is a high-falutin' reference to this here René Magritte painting.)

* In a self-negating blog entry, commentator Adam Felber says, "Blogs suck. You should never,ever trust anything you read on a blog. Not even this."

He makes a number of points, including one that says bloggers, especially political bloggers, love talking about themselves, and that the blogosphere as a whole is pretty much useless because it's full of crap.

If you think this made a few folks nice and frothy, you should have seen...

* "Have something to say? I don't care": L.A. Times columnist Joel Stein said he didn't care what his readers thought, and that he didn't want to hear from them. It was pretty much a W.C. Fields-esque "Go away kid, ya bother me."

I saw the item via Metafilter, and in the discussion thread, they didn't have particularly nice things to say about Mr. Stein.

Of course, Mr. Stein is a humor columist, so perhaps one should have read it in the spirit in which it was offered. Not to say he's necessarily a good humorist; not being too familiar with his work, I was still asking "Is this guy for real?" before puffing myself up with righteous anger. But at least I did some checking before I opened my mouth.

So yes, I do feel superior to all those folks who fell for it. Nyah.

Anyway, to be clear:
* This is a blog.
* I am a blogger. (Among other things.)

Thanks -- Joe

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

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Anonymous said...

Joe, having copied and pasted some newspaper editorial's and stories, I have now been accused by one person of "plagarising"..not true never, but I was also advised by somebody that copyright could play a role in my blog..do you folks have experiences in this field, or other bloggers?  Nice subject to get into I think..

Thanx,

Larry

http://journals.aol.com/larryt39/LarrysThoughts

Anonymous said...

Joe, are journals ever going to work properly again.  When I go to Hometown which I did to search for another journal and under my name Jeanno43 nothing was listed, just a web search came up.  I tried file manager and was taken to the web again.  File Manager as you know only works occasionally.  It is not worth continuing with my journal if all these problems are going to be permanent.
http://journals.aol.co.uk/jeanno43/JeannettesJottings/

Anonymous said...

Hi - Jeannette; here are my recommendations:

1. Don't use hometown search to search Journals. I'm not sure what it's searching on nowadays, but it's not current. Instead, use the search box that's at the top of your Journal (and on top of all Journals) -- you can search either within your Journal, or all Journals -- just pick the appropriate option.

2. Not sure why the File Manager keywords keeps breaking. In the meantime, you can get to File Manager directly by going to http://hometown.aol.com/_fm (for UK users, it should be http://hometown.aol.co.uk/_fm )

3. We had some Hometown slowness this afternoon, but it looks like it was only for a few minutes.

Thanks -- Joe (posted & mailed)

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