It was fun while it lasted.
OK, maybe not “fun” necessarily, but maybe “satisfying”, in that it was nice to make enough money off my blog to cover the cost of my VPS hosting plan plus a bit of extra spending money every now and then. But, alas, as of right now, I’m ending that relationship, despite the fact that it’s been relatively good so far.
If you have been looking for a clear, easy to understand (and well produced) visual that explains what “Web 2.0″ really means, and a reminder of how dramatically the world has changed and is changing, look no further than this video.
I think this is a must-watch for anyone interested in the evolution of what content / media means in modern times.
Thanks to The Shifted Librarian for posting this!
As an off-shoot of a side conversation Dan and I have been having here on this post, I got to thinking about the main drawback (in my eyes) of the new “subscription” culture (for lack of a better term) that RSS and the internet in general affords us. Obviously, being able to consolidate the stuff you read and listen to (news particularly) is very convenient, and probably even essential in the days of information overload we live in. The problem is that when there is so much that you have to prioritize what you can read and listen to just for the sake of there never being enough time to read and listen to half the stuff you’d really want to.
While this leads to a very pleasing diet (so to speak) of media consumption, I wonder whether it could be considered a healthy one. To extend the analogy further, no one in their right mind would plan a meal schedule that consisted only of the foods they enjoyed eating the very most, because it would almost certainly lack vital elements that would not make the top of the taste list. Likewise, when we restrict our media input to only what we consciously choose to consume, I can’t help but get the feeling that we will always be missing stuff that we “need” (or should be seeing / hearing), especially the stuff that we can’t imagine or think of being interested in now.
I’m constantly in a state of re-evaluating and trimming my podcast subscription list, because even listening to them for a good number of hours every day while working & driving, there are still too many out there to keep up with. One discipline I’ve had to force myself to maintain is to as it relates to this post is listening to the radio every now and then to hear stuff that I haven’t pre-selected and may hopefully catch me by surprise. Of course, when I say that I’m referring to non-commercial radio; I still get the occasional small dose of the mid to right portion of the dial too (since Emma always wants to listen to B95.1 these days), but like any junk food, I tend to try and stay away from the commercial stations whenever possible. 
After going through a recent round of cleanup on my RSS feeds over the last couple days and starting fresh / caught up with a more manageable sized list, I kind of feel the need to go back out and add a few more blogs and sites I don’t generally agree with to the list, or at least ones that tend to give a wide range of perspectives on the issues.
TV is notably lacking from this list and I don’t feel too bad about being “unbalanced” in leaving that out of my media diet either. It’s generally too inefficient (time-wise) for me to handle, although I will make exceptions for rare shows like Lost.
At first glance, this may seem like another boring tech post, but in my mind it goes a little deeper than that. I think that our culture in general is experiencing this same phenomena (selective media consumption) in a way that was never before possible, and I honestly think it’s a great danger to any society. Considering (even seeking out) other points of view and new information is vital to living together in any context, and maybe my perspective is whacked out but that’s something I see as seriously lacking in our culture today. Whether it’s politics, religion, or any other subject that generally divides us, there is a constant barrage of information in all sorts of formats that strives to hammer home the party line of whatever the source’s side is supporting, and if we embrace those streams that we tend to agree with to the exclusion of the others we are setting ourselves up for division and lack of understanding.
RSF (Reporters Without Borders) Handbook for bloggers and “cyber-dissidents”
Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they’re tremendous tools of freedom of expression.
Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.
Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation. It also explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicize it (getting it picked up efficiently by search-engines) and to establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles.
This is a pretty good resource; it contains a collection of good articles on blogging by various authors, many aimed at those who are overcoming censorship via the self-publishing model that blogging brings to the world.
Man, I’ve spent WAY too much time typing on here tonight.
Maybe I should sell out and give some ad space to wacko leftist lame-slogan t-shirt manufacturers to make up for my time and expenses. (ahem… Powerline…)
and corporate podcasts too.
Russell Beattie explains what’s wrong with this type marketing trying to masquerade as “personal opinion”.
This is a conversation Dan and I have had before, and Dan commented on it again recently (in response to a request by Dave to remove a comment on here), so I thought I’d bring it up for discussion.
The issue is worrying about other people reading what you have written in the future and getting mad about it.
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I brought this idea up with Dan, and wanted to bring it up here for public discussion. I’ve been listening to various “podcasts” lately (even though I really hate that term), and thinking about doing one myself, just for fun, with the help of Dan and/or whoever else would want to be involved.
For those not familiar with them, at a high-level, they are basically just MP3 radio shows that you record yourself and publish a certain way, so that RSS-capable applications can “subscribe” to your show (among others) and have it automatically downloaded to their listening device whenever they want. In reality, I think Dan summed up their true nature pretty well: “just somebody speaking their blog, instead of writing it” or something to that effect.
If I did do it, it probably would be something like that for me - a lot of the same topics that I post about on here. It would probably lean more toward the technical stuff, specifically computer security related topics (or maybe what some would label “hacking”), and probably very little political-type discussions, just because I don’t think that format really supports the kind of open dialog that that type of subject requires. I was asking Dan if he could do reviews on all the tech stuff he buys all the time and then turns around and sells on ebay (just kidding) and also he could talk about any Mac-related issues, so that I can poke fun at them. It might be entertaining.
Of course, it wouldn’t be limited to that either, we could talk about anything that came up: blog culture and technology, movie & music reviews, showcasing free music artists, etc. (maybe we could get Nathan to do the music reviews) My main question is whether anyone would listen, and whether it would be worth the time. I suspect that it would actually end up drawing more traffic here, since (at least right now) podcasts (like blogs) always start small, but seem to get popular much more quickly than blogs, just because there are fewer of them out there. What do you think?
So, I’ve been trying out / playing with Yahoo 360, the new blogging service (if that’s what it should be called) from Yahoo. Not quite ready for a full-on review yet, but so far I’d say it’s interesting, but a little restrictive compared to a system like WordPress or even Blogger, in terms of customizing your design. It has a lot of “social networking” features, which I guess have become more popular recently, via services such as Friendster, etc. There is also quite a bit of integration with the other Yahoo services, which is probably the high point, since Yahoo is the best (IMHO) “portal” around.