The TV hosts on the one of the news shows here in Denmark have started promoting their own personal blogs via the news show. This a part of the whole online movement, which is slightly behind what you see abroad (USA) I guess.
We had some friends over for dinner and we started to discuss this blogging thing, starting with the news people.
I understood why my friends (and wife) found this whole blogging thing overrated and totally unnecessary, but I had to disagree with them at a certain point.
I tried to explain to them that blogging is in general just marketing and it is a streamlined use of technology, but the features of blogging have always been accesible on the Internet, like here on use.perl, where I write in a journal. So what you see currently is that blogging as a phenomenon has been widely accepted and implemented is starting to being used as marketing tools, company blogs etc. like the ones presented with the TV hosts.
So what is the deal with this egocentric way of thinking that your opinion matter. On danish TV we see all kinds of people all of sudden being experts in some area and now their opinions are supposed to be of importance and interest to the viewers, almost like bad stand-up comedians, who start all the jokes with "What's it with this...", eh, well almost all the danish stand-up comedians do that anyway.
So I tried to explain to them the potential of the blog and the difference from the other media (not regarding the Internet as a single medium) - The blog gives you the opportunity to share your thoughts, opinions, ideas and experiences and all this with minimum effort. Where if you compare it to diverse fora like web discussion boards, BBS's, NNTP groups etc. it sometimes requires substantial work to familiarize yourself with the medium and/or its community. Where the blog simply lets you spew out your utterings, with no sense of quality, spelling and care for what other people care and think about it - this might have repercussions, where some of the more regulated media perhaps help you to not look like a complete moron, because they require at least some familarization prior to getting involved.
So blogs are freedom and this was my other point raised to my friends (and wife), blogs are just tools, which gives everybody a voice. So blogs can be one of the tools if you want to talk about freedom of speech - and believe me this is something we discuss a lot in our little danish democracy after the minor incident with the drawings.
But like I have always believed; blogs are overrated and they are everywhere and everybody writes about everything - like we care?
And then there are a few blogs, which for some reason are interesting, holds some value, provokes, teaches, reflects or give some inside information and one thing I personally find important, a human aspect. Yes many blogs are turning into markting tools and they are probably written or at least reviewed by spin-doctors prior to publication, but what the heck - the blogs are here to stay and they to will find a level and shelf on the big Internet, so we can use them when we need to and when we want to.
As a famous science fiction writer once said, "90% of all science fiction writing is crap, but then again 90% of everything is crap".
So the art is in selecting the good stuff from the bad stuff like it is for everything else, like books, music, girlfriends, clothes, friends, editors and operating systems - it is all a matter of taste/chemistry/opinion luckily there are almost as many of these as there are people on earth.
So I told my friends and wife just to ignore the blogs and the hype and the blogs they would find interesting would probalby pop-up all by themselves, like they had done for me.
And now my blog/journal has fulfilled it's purpose for today, letting me scribble down my thougts. Sometimes somebody reads it and offer me valuable advice, or a differing opinion and I learn something, but for me, the most important part - I can get this out of my head and move on to something else...
Re:90% of science fiction is crap
Aristotle on 2007-02-08T11:33:03
No, it’s no Wall joke. It’s Sturgeon’s Revelation.
Re:90% of science fiction is crap
jonasbn on 2007-02-10T17:10:13
Ah, that was who it was.
I am really bad with names, but good with faces, so quotes, articles, books and particularly module names are not my strong side.
Thanks,Re:90% of science fiction is crap
jonasbn on 2007-02-10T17:08:13
Interesting take on my take:)
I am quite intrigued with your view on communication. I am very much focused on communication myself and I am of the opinion that communication is no where as easy as it sounds.
Of all the software projects I have been on, all the problems were always communication problems or resource problems and not actually real technical problems.
Technical problems can be solved one way or the other.
One could argue that resource problems where all due to organizational problems, which again where caused by lack of or bad communication.
So I might not be going all the way as I interpret that you do, but then again we might experience here exactly what you attempt to point out to me.
