
Click for Link to The Triangle Article
As debate grows over whether technology and innovation are pulling people together or pushing them apart, an Internet sub-culture has been growing rapidly, demonstrative of the world’s increasing love affair with computers. I refer to blogging culture. For the uninitiated, blogging is the act of publishing a personal or professional online journal commonly referred to as a blog --- short of WeB log.
During the 90’s, those ambitious enough to build personal web pages using HTML or a handy WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor produced what are commonly referred to as vanity pages. These were essentially static sites detailing ones existence and providing links and commentary regarding things of immense personal interest. Typically such sites included flashy graphics, infuriating design decisions and inane, stolen, and/or repetitive childish content.
I published one such site in the mid 90’s describing my fascination with The Smashing Pumpkins and Beavis and Butthead – make any comment you want, you watched it too. These were the sites you found lurking around Geocities, or various ISP user web space areas.
My shrine to 90’s alternative MTV culture went the way of the dodo many years back when I unsubscribed from CompuServe and discovered some more adult tastes, but you can still find many similar sites alive and well across the web, though they are being rapidly replaced by the new millennium’s answer to the vanity page --- The Blog.
Rather than simply uploading images of their pets, vanity page operators began to publish regular text based updates detailing their everyday lives, much like a standard personal journal. Services specializing in the design and management of these online journals began to emerge, and have become popular among Internet junkies in all walks of life --- www.livejournal.com, www.blogger.com, www.sixapart.com.
Many consider blogs a significant improvement from vanity pages. One of the great things about the simplification of Internet publishing thanks to blogging is that it has allowed the less technically inclined individual to operate their own Internet publishing space. Wherein may lie the biggest caveat of blogging, that anyone is capable of doing it. Thankfully, the design controls provided by most blogging services make it difficult to create anything as seizure inducing as vanity pages littered with animated graphics and fantastically complex backgrounds.
Survey a few blog communities, and it will become quite apparent that many blogs were conceived in the wee hours of the morning as a means of whining about a breakup or as passive method of narrating ones high school born teen angst. Hormones + HTML … recipe for text based banality.
Many blogs, especially those described above, are of little to no interest to the average internet user. However, as blog numbers grow, many publishers are becoming increasingly topical. While some blogs focus on politics, others discuss the latest tech gadgets, headlines, social movements, fashion trends, et cetera. If you can think of it, there is probably someone out there who has blogged about it.
Several celebrities both A list (www.jeffbridges.com) and wash-ups (www.wilwheaton.com), Academics (www.lessig.org/blog), and politicians, have also found a niche in the blogging world. And where would the Internet be if we didn’t have a few adult film stars getting in on the action? (Sorry I’m not listing any URLs for that one, you’ll have to track them down yourself)
Last year, Google took the initiative to purchase one of the original Internet blogging services – Blogger.com. Analysts praised Google’s move, and see a promising future for blogging. For the business folk, blogging represents an interesting new means of getting inside the mind of the consumer. One of the methods Google uses to select and rank the news stories listed on Google news (news.google.com) is by comparing news article topics to subjects being discussed by bloggers.
Others are more concerned with the cultural implications of the phenomenon. While there are exceptions to the rule, the majority of blogs are personal in nature and sometimes contain incriminating information. What exactly is the fascination with writing about ones everyday thoughts and actions, and publishing the text on the web for the world to read? Allow me to speculate…
Ego Trippin’ – My thoughts and opinions are too significant to be limited to those lucky enough to experience my physical company. The world must have the opportunity to discover and learn from my profound existence through my blog. – I do not think this is the motivation of most bloggers, though many consider the act of blogging to be an exercise in self promotion and a demonstration of self interest.
Therapy – Whether they realize it or not, I believe most bloggers blog in an effort to vent and cope with daily frustrations. Like with the standard personal/private journals kept throughout the ages, blogs are the modern means of putting things in perspective by writing it all down, or in this case, typing it all in.
The Artist – The blog is a struggling writer’s dream. A personal environment not subject to the harsh judgments of editors and literary critics where one can create and experiment. – Many have blogged as fictitious characters that exist only in the writer’s mind, and digitally on the web. Comedy Central recently purchased the rights to a character created by a blogger and had plans to develop it into a new animated television program.
The utility of blog have extended beyond personal gratification. Blogs have recently become a trend in the business world. Executives at fortune 500 companies have looked to blogging as a means of developing a rapport with employees as well as investors. Blog entries have also been showing up in the news, as news media venues relay the opinions of what they call “professional” bloggers who are, for all intents and purposes, operating their own news service, with a personal spin.
I cannot answer most of the questions raised by this article regarding the significance of blogging in the Internet world. I can, however, in the spirit of blogging, offer my own opinion on the matter…
Despite suggestions to the contrary, I do not think that blogs are polluting the Internet environment with any more junk than was already present. While I’m not really interested in the exploits of a fifteen year old goth girl hell bent of meeting Johnny Depp before the whole world folds in on itself in a tremendous blaze of counter-culture fueled anarchy, I’m still not interested in yet another herbal penis enlarging pill – at least the disillusioned teen isn’t e-mailing me daily.
For many I think blogs are a necessary escape, though are taken a little too seriously by some, while for others this fascinating new outlet gets the creative juices flowing at a time when creativity seems to be reserved for an exploited by those in marketing departments. My blogs covers newsworthy topics and events, and does its best to avoid discussion of life events, and it attracts its own respectable amount of visitors daily who both support and criticize my spin on the events of the world.
Monstrosity or masterpiece, blogs are here to stay. Those not inclined to write are now able to publish picture based blogs called moblogs often employing a cell phone based camera to document their existence visually (www.textamerica.com). Consider checking out a few blogs and perhaps elect to make your own contribution to the seemingly endless flow in information and opinion making its way to the web daily.
*huff* *huff* *huff* ... What A Weekend
This was an interesting weekend to say the least. Friday and Saturday nights were both spent at the Main Street Pub, but it was Saturday afternoon that held the most peculiarity...
After a few cups of coffee in the morning, my dad brought in the mail and tossed a folded mailer in front of me. Enclose within was a check for $13.98 which was my portion of the RIAA settlement over a class action price-fixing case (see prior post for additional details). Check in hand, I typed out a post regarding the letter/check for this blog. While doing so, I heard a banging coming from the laundry dryer. I opened to inspect, and discovered my cell phone. Though looking "physically" pretty clean, the internals were shot. For those of you keeping track, this is the second cell phone I put through the laundry. The first was my old Nokia which after I dried out and installed a new battery, fired right up and worked fine until my contract was up for renewal, and I could secure a new phone. Nevertheless, this dead yet 'clean' cell phone problem needed to be dealt with...
I have insurance on my phone, since it is a semi-pricy camera model manufacuter by Sony Ericsson. I think it was voted "Phone-Of-The-Year" by someone in 2003. Phoning the insurance company was pretty simple and painless. The girl on the other end was knowledgable and swift with a nice sense of humor about the whole thing. She said my phone would be ready for pick-up at the Cingular location I had requested. Before leaving the house however, I decided to finish up my post regarding the RIAA check, and drop a line to SlashDot, thinking they might be interested...
...I got a new phone...Same as the old phone…
... I returned home and checked my TypePad site stats. This blog had over 5000 hits in less than 2 hours Saturday night. It turns out SlashDot had picked up my submitted article. I had been foolish enough to include links to my blog-article, and it wasn't long before hits were coming in to the tune of 20-25 a min. Though I would normally revel in the popularity, I seemed to have underestimated the appeal of my own article. All SlashDot submissions are reviewed before posting, and I thought it extremely unlikely that my submission would be selected. Before I knew it ... the main page of SlashDot has a big header titled "One Man's Check From the RIAA" submitted by c0rk. I should have foreseen this onslaught and taken steps prior to the SlashDot publication to reduce the size of this site, as not to exceed my bandwidth quota on TypePad. Needless to say I didn't... but luckily I discovered the slew of visitors soon enough to thwart additional attempt to link to this site. I republished the image and the post referenced, effectively breaking all the SlashDot links to C0rk.Blogs.com. This knocked hits down under 1000 an hour and eventually below 100. SlashDot readers would have to edit the URL manually to gain access to the site, and the re-named article. Luckily MOST weren't that dedicated. The next step was to distribute the bandwidth. I made all the images on the mainpage reference external image storage locations so that the bandwidth being used was not entirely TypePad's. By late Saturday night, hits were hovering between the upper double-digits and 100 per hour. By Sunday afternoon I was down to between 10-20 an hour, and it eventually came down to 5-15 per hour. My normal hit-rate is between 5-10 an hour, but the average has remained elevated because refferring address information shows that many SlashDot readers are deciding to repost corrected links in their own blogs and self run message boards/forums.What about the bandwidth? Did you go over? ...
Contrary to the opinion of many SlashDot commenters, I did not exceed my bandwidth quota, nor have I incurred any monetary penalties. Though this did result in the highest month of bandwidth usage by my TypePad account since I purchased the service in August 2003, I have not yet exceeded my quota, nor does TypePad/SixAppart have a billing policy regarding bandwidth overuse. (Meaning: I'm not certain I would have been billed had I gone over because although there are quota's listed by TypePad, there is no documentation regarding how to purchase more, or how you will be billed in the event of an excess.) TypePad is a very recent (August 2003) startup of the SixApart Company known for developing the popular Blogging Software MovableType. The lack of a bandwidth policy is more than likely due to the infancy of TypePad, though hardly cause to disgrace SixApart. TypePad and SixApart are both remarkable products for which the company has received numerous accolades. I'm proud to have been such an early adopter (I'm invoice #58) of the service, and relieved that I was able to thwart the events of this weekend to avoid putting anyone in a difficult position.
Now that all of that is dealt with, all my regular readers can brace themselves for more standard reading in the coming days.
Posted at 07:37 AM in Current Affairs, Dysfunction, Humor, Music, Social Commentary, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)