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Blogging

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marti1900

Blogging

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IN 1440, Johannes Gutenberg unveiled his printing press and sparked an information revolution. Today, there are something like 9 million blogs floating around in cyberspace, waiting to be read. The blogging community has DOUBLED in size in the last 8 months. The Web we've come to know is mostly a collection of documents. A library. These documents don't change much. Blogs are different. They evolve with every posting, each one tied to a moment. Blogs are the presses of Everyman. A. J. Liebling said, 'Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.' Well, now everyone can own a press. The definition of media, that wonderfully plural word coined by Marshall McLuhan, is evolving. Remember his 'The Medium Is The Message'? Did you ever imagine back in the 60's that the message could be so easily and so cheaply disseminated? And if the MEDIUM is the message, what exactly now IS the message if it is carried by a blog?Ideas circulate as fast as scandal. We even have a nifty new word for the phenomenon: meme. Pronounced like 'gene', it is Richard Dawkin's definition of ideas that are contagious, like chicken pox, and pass from mind to mind, infecting one after another. Now we have the perfect vehicle to circulate these memes: the blog. A blog is a dynamic process. It can be a medium for growth, like potting soil, or a way of channeling ideas from other places, like a seer, or well, like a medium. A blog can be little more than chewing gum for the mind, or it can fuel a revolution. It can be your own internal pointless mumblings and grumblings, or it can support, energize and popularize a commercial product.So perhaps the message of the blog medium is to be found in its scale. It's little, personal, private, but available to anyone with access to the internet. You can tell your opinion to one person, or even a few thousand, or maybe even millions. Telling your opinion via your own 'press', your blog, is telling your opinion on an unprecedented scale in an unprecedented way. The up to date social question of the day is no longer 'What's your cell phone number?', but 'What's your blog address?'Marti in Mexico
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Re: Blogging

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marti1900: A. J. Liebling said, 'Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.' Well, now everyone can own a press.The problem is that there appears to be an economy to the freedom of press. The value of any given individual published work seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of work with which it is contemporary. The more of the written word that appears, the less value each published work has.And if the MEDIUM is the message, what exactly now IS the message if it is carried by a blog?In most cases, it seems to be: "Look at me! Look at me!"The up to date social question of the day is no longer 'What's your cell phone number?', but 'What's your blog address?'Given what I've just said, you don't really think I'd have a blog, do you?(madarchitect.blogspot.com/)
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Chris OConnor

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Re: Blogging

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Mad!LOL I really didn't expect you to have a Blog after all that negativity! Chris
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Re: Blogging

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Yeah, in my defense, it hasn't been updated in nearly a year, and was only sporadically updated then. But to add to my guilt, I'm thinking of revamping it. Honestly, I think blogs are best maintained as a small-audience venue, particularly when the audience is limited to people of one or two degrees of seperation: friends and friends of friends. All told, even during its heyday, my blog probably never had more then three or four readers at any given time.
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Loricat
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Re: Blogging

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I was listening to someone on the radio the other day (on the CBC), an ant scientist of some sort, who, at one point in the interview, compared blogging to ant communication. The idea is (if I can reproduce it correctly here) that as an ant picks up a piece of information, the location of a picnic for example, it is able to share that info with the other ants through its hive/community mentality (chemicals, or other signals). Blogs are the same -- one blogger finds an interesting website, links to it. Others find the blog and spread the link to their own blogs, etc. until it has spread through the relevant community.I'm not sure if I explained that very well, but it was an interesting idea.Lori "All beings are the owners of their deeds, the heirs to their deeds."
marti1900

Re: Blogging

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Lori, that sounds more like the definition of a meme.But yes, most blogs contain a list of other blogs, which also contain lists of blogs.I have several blogs, but I use them as free memory storage for lists of sites, etc.I dislike reading blogs because I like a story to begin at the beginning and end at the end, and blogs begin in the now, and really have no end, they just usually dribble off.Marti in Mexico
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Loricat
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Re: Blogging

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yup, it does sound like a meme, but the fragment of discussion I heard was from a scientist studying ant society and making connections to human society. Wonderfully weird.Anyway, Marti. I hear you about wanting a beginning and an end to a story, but there are some good blogs out there. I don't read many, just a couple that my professionally writing friends write... there is too much tripe out there to sift through.Lori "All beings are the owners of their deeds, the heirs to their deeds."
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