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Truth About Blogging Who hasn't heard something about blogging, weblogs, webjournals, channels, wikis, and other such vague words and terms? It is a web trend, as many come and go, but it is certain some form of blogging will survive, even if it is just another one of those insufferable fads that hits the interNUT regularly? Blogging was actually introduced to the net in 1998, but didn't become a fad until years later and in the Mellenium it began to grow exponentially. It is a variant of the content management system and combines a message board, instant messaging system, journal and some very bad writing. If you are a conspiracy theorist, then what better than the weblog or blogging trend to meet all the criteria of a conspiracy; a huge effort to devalue the web? But it isn't a conspiracy; it is however a killer fad and likely just another trend, like so many I've seen over the last 22 years on the net. The WEB has been the real rage, a trend that did survive, and blogging is a single element that has caught on because it simplifies what before required some knowledge of markup language. It makes it easy for everyone to publish anything and they generally do. That doesn't automatically translate into empowerment because anybody can put up a site; the trick is to get someone to visit and read it. Bloggers publish anything and much of it is silly, and without any qualities worth redeeming at all -- and generally they are hot sources of rumor, innuendo, and slander. If you are seeking the truth, you know, no matter what it is, you have to look at everything under a microscope to find even a modicum of truth on today's web. READER BEWARE! Weblogs (blogging) are journals and a form of instant messaging that looks like web pages and contain the conversational elements of message boards and e-mail. They look more authoritative than bulletin boards, but they are written with the same degree of CAREFREE DISREGARD for the facts. What make weblogs the latest trend was the easy-to-use, free software applications, which made publishing easy. Anyone, without any knowledge of web markup language can now publish a web site. Premium software is also available for a small price. In an era when search engines no longer index everything and it is getting harder to promote web sites without paying a fee to get listed, weblogs have become the solution for many to have themselves links in blogrolls (BLOG INDEXES) and some search engines, like Google, which bought Blogger.com, will index blogs for free. REALITY WEB An interesting impact of blogging has been its acceptance by newbies who think that this is what the internet is AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN all about, as if blogging always existed or came before the internet. It hasn't been around for all that long. And blogs are anything the writer wants it to be. They are hardly objective. As someone said, most are pure unadulterated, opinionated bullshit. Like reality TV, this is reality WEB. Anything goes. People speak their mind and some weblogs also become the voice of the mindless. There is generally nothing that resembles reporting, though there is a lot of RECYCLING of news in weblogs. Why not just go directly to the source for the news? If copyright infringement was the problem some thought it might be -- if the owners of literary property ever decided to litigate what is being posted in weblogs, it would be -- but FAIR USE is stretched to it's limits with bloggers in their weblogs. It is much the same way yahoogroups and topica lists have become the watering down and devaluation of forums; that is, seeking a LOWER LEVEL OF DISCOURSE, instead of obtaining that higher level of discourse, as was the purpose in LISTSERV forums. Yahoogroups ruined mailing lists and there are only a few left that are worth anything for their substance because of YAHOO, which mass produces mailing lists, their owners incorrectly refer to as listservs, not realizing that LISTSERV (tm) is a term which only refers to a specific mail distribution system and all the rest are mailing lists, not "listservs," a word never written in lower case. I compare the effects of Yahoogroups on mailing list forums to the effect that citizen band radio had on Ham Radio; it provided the death knell of real amateur radio. Blogging is stream-of-consciousness writing and there is nothing wrong with that if there wasn't so much of it. The online noise of so many bloggers is deafening and when you finish reading a few hours worth of them, it is like watching a very bad movie and you ask yourself why did you waste all that time? Hank Roth http://pnews.org/ --- / o o \ PNEWS Topic Specific Portals (Vortals) ===OO=====OO================================================= http://pnews.org/vortal/ New World disOrder and Myth Busters http://g0lem.net/vortal/ Insane Planet and Wacko World http://g0lem.net/portal/ Bad-Ass Truth and TheGolemsPortal http://pnews.org/portal/ Naked Truth and PNEWS Portal ============================================================= \_/ \_/
