Chris Pirillo has again cracked me up with a list of 10 guidelines on how to not get fired for blogging (link at the bottom). Number 10 is a gem:
10. Cats. Write about cats. A lot.
In his post he mentions an imaginary domain - ihatemyjobandboss.com, and mentions that you shouldn’t host your blog there. This has given me an idea though… Does anyone actually want to host a blog there? I’m not being sarcastic here, I’m thinking of registering the domain and open it up to host blogs (well, maybe just give away the space, I’m no blogger.com remember).
Any comments?
Read - [Chris Pirillo]
I am really staring to enjoy this little conversation. Kent Newsome posted an excellent response to Randy Charles Morin’s A-list post, which prompted another great post from Richard Querin. I would really recommend reading these posts.
One thing really caught my eye in Richard’s post, from the last paragraph:
it’s interesting that my family-oriented blog will likely never see even 10 regular readers, but it may become just as important to me as this one.
What a great comment. That really puts everything in perspective for me. Sure, it would be fun to have thousands of hits to your technology blog, but the family is still what counts.
Intimate writing is still an important part of life. Writing a family-orientated blog is like writing a letter, and I think it is important to not get carried away with trying to be a public entity. I respect family blogs as much as any other.
Thanks Richard.
Personally, my family doesn’t even know I write a blog. If they are interested in the type of things that I write about, then they will find this site eventually. Why should I pressure them to read and respond to something that they may not care about, just because they are related to me? If I wish to talk about family things, I would write an email/letter, or follow the suggestion of a family-orientated blog. I am not forcing anyone to read this, but if you like what I have to say, please feel free to subscribe, write in the comments, email me, or post to your own blog and send a Trackback. Lets bring blogging back to the community building it started as.
Speaking of The Register, Andrew Orlowski has just posted a huge blast against bloggers using this tragedy as an excuse to promote weblogs as being better at covering the news then traditional mediums.
From the article - “For the technology evangelists, the glee is barely containable. The daily business of congratulating each other jumps to a whole new level with all the bloggers marvelling in unison at their ability to detail real-time tragedy.”
Although I’m sure some bloggers have made inappropriate comments about the bombings being a boon for weblogs (either intentionally or not), it comes down to the fact that people of the blogosphere are trying to provide a service. There are definitely a lot of cases when bloggers can get the word out quicker and provide better coverage. But do they do this for the publicity? The chance to further promote this new age of blogging? No! They do it to try and provide as much coverage as possible.
Blogging is not trying to replace other media outlets, but to complement them. What is so bad about that? The blogosphere is not trying to be “ambulance chasers”, but only trying to help people find information on tragedies.
Mr. Orlowski needs to take a step back and actually read what some blogs are trying to do with this. Self promotion? Hardly… Trying to give as much information as possible in as many ways as possible - what is so bad about that?
Read the Article
Terrorism is bad enough, but virus writers have released a ‘London Bombing’ spam bot trojan. It comes in an email with the subject ‘TERROR HITS LONDON’ and claims to have amateur video footage of the bombing, but when opened will turn a Windows PC into a spam zombie.
It just goes to show the depth some people will go, playing off events like this. Simply astounding…
Read More - [via The Register]
I would like to say that my heart goes out to the people of London. Terrorism is a plague upon this Earth. It saddens me to think that human beings could do such things.
I won’t link to all the pages that are covering this, there is plenty of that already. But I will reiterate Wikimedia’s excellent coverage.