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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 46,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 11 Film Festivals
Click here to see the complete report.
Filed under: blogging | Leave a Comment »
MarmaladeI’ve continued to have blogging sites on my mind, but my focus has been renewed. I thought that getting a new blog started would be a good new year’s resolution. Actually, I’ve had a number of blogs started for a long while. I just haven’t done anything with them.
I’ve been playing around with these blogs. I wanted to experiment with their options. All have similar functions for my purposes.
WordPress has pages that can be altered which the others don’t, but Blogger has categories that can be used in a similar way as pages. The concensus is that WordPress is the best option if you are willing to pay for self-hosting and put a lot of effort into developing it. As for hosted sites, Blogger seems to be better than WordPress… for most non-professional bloggers. I’m not interested in self-hosting, but still the hosted WordPress isn’t a bad option. It does have a lot of capability.
There are two blogs I had before my Gaia blog, but have only posted on either a couple of times. Live Journal and My Opera are different in that they emphasize the social aspect and have types of functions you won’t find on many blogging platforms. Both are major sites, and Live Journal in particular is very well established.
I joined Live Journal because of people I knew from MBTI forums. I belong to some groups on Live Journal, but I haven’t visited them in a long time. Live Journal is very basic in how it looks. However, I care more about functionality than looks and Live Journal has much to offer.
My Opera was the blog I started right before this one. I joined there because my favorite blogger (Quentin S. Crisp) posts there. The downside I found was that there were a fair number of non-English blogs, but that could be seen as a positive in that it attracts an international crowd. Even though My Opera is not very well known, its a major site that is quite impressive. I’m surprised that it rarely gets brought up in comparisons between Blogger and WordPress.
There are really good bloggers using all of these. A good blogger is a good blogger even on a simple blogging site, and vice versa. I want to explore other people’s blogs on these sites to see what others are doing. I’m also going to start posting on my own new blogs.
Here are the links to the 4 blogs I’m now focused on:
http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/
http://benjamindavidsteele.blogspot.com/
Filed under: blogging | Tagged: blog, blogger, Blogspot, hosted, Live Journal, My Opera, platforms, sites, WordPress | Leave a Comment »
MarmaladeI’ve been looking at my blogging options. There is a lot out there and its hard to make a decision. I’ve found reviews, but everything is always changing and so I have no way of knowing which reviews are still relevant. At least, I have an idea of what types of things are available and so have a better sense of what I’m looking for.
I want to bring my blogging up a notch as part of my wanting to get more focused on my own writing. I want a blog that is hosted by a site like Gaia, but something with more options.
I have a couple particularly important factors. I’m mostly interested in the big players in the field. Since I’m planning to put a lot of time and effort into blogging, I want a stable system with a company that won’t go belly up. There are way too many new companies popping up and not all of them will last.
However, problems can even arise with the big companies. Blogs can get (accidentally?) deleted or frozen, and depending on the customer service it might be a challenge to retrieve your blog. This has happened with some people on Google’s Blogger, but maybe they’ve fixed it by now.
Blogger does seem to be the single most popular blogging site with WordPress in a close second. Blogger is simpler and WordPress is fancier, but both are constantly improving. Yahoo has jumped in with MyBlogLog which looks promising, but I haven’t looked into it very much yet.
All these have definite advantages, but they’re focused just on blogging. Part of me is attracted to white-label networking sites as they balance tons of options with ease of use. Ning is the most popular, and is the only company in this category that I feel sure will continue to exist for many years. The problem with blogging on Ning is that your blog is in a community that you set up. You could make it a more private community, but the main problem is whether the blog is easy to find. For instance, is it picked up by a websearch like any other blog would be? I’d hate to have a blog that was simply hidden away somewhere.
The reason I’m looking at the networking sites is because they allow more complex designs. WordPress does allow more complexity, but the learning curve on WordPress is quite large from what I understand. I want to be able to (easily) set up multiple pages with categories (and possibly sub-categories). I want to be able to have multiple blogs for different topics and maybe pages for longer articles. Ideally, I’d like to even be able to set different accessability for the separate pages… some public, some private, and some viewable only to friends. I don’t know if any blogging site has these functions, and so networking sites may have more of what I’m looking for.
There are many other networking sites that are similar to Ning. Some of them even seem nicer than Ning, but its hard to tell which ones will last. There so much hype and splogging (spam blogging) that its hard to determine what info is reliable. Ning is the only one that gets consistent praise.
I’ve already joined a bunch of these sites. I wanted to explore them for myself, but haven’t yet started blogging on any of them. I was thinking of narrowing my choice down to two or three, and actually start using them. In particular, I wanted to try out maybe Blogger and Ning as they’re two very popular and yet very different platforms.
Anyways, I thought it would be good to keep two blogs going with the same posts. They would act as backups for eachother instead of me saving my blog posts to my computer. I have this fear about blogs. I’d hate to wake up one day and see years of blogging entirely disappeared into the aether.
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This continues in Part 2:
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Of course, the only blogging options I’m seriously considering are ones that are free. I don’t feel like spending money unless it was very minimal and there was some great advantage to what I was getting for my money. I’m fine with there being some advertising on my blog.
It would be simpler (in some ways) if I was willing to put the money and time into designing my own website, but I’m not that motivated or that wealthy. I don’t need perfection… just something that works good enough for my purposes. I’d rather spend my time on my actual blogging and less time with endless tinkering and upkeep. I don’t need any more distractions in my life.
Hi Ben
WordPress is not that difficult, it is rather easy, even for me. And I have never lost anything yet. Everything you are working on is saved every few minutes.
Something else to consider might be to become a member of BlogCatalog. It is a very large and active community for bloggers and a great way to get to know other bloggers.
Good luck,
Annemieke
I just checked out your WordPress blog. It looks nice. You have multiple pages. Was that at all difficult to set up? One comparison showed that WordPress has the option of both categories and subcategories. Are the pages what are considered categories? Have you ever tried creating subcategoreis?
There is another thing about some of the white label sites. Some of them have the capacity to create photo and video albums. I’m not sure if any of the purely blogging platforms is capable of doing that.
As for learning curve, how long did it take you to design your blog? The learning curve I heard about with WordPress is that it takes a lot of effort to do anything outside of basic functions.
BTW I had come across BlogCatalog. It probably would be a good idea to become a member there.
Hey, Annemieke, have you ever blogged anywhere else besides WordPress and here on Gaia? Why did you pick WordPress?
I blog on both Blogger and WordPress, but I prefer Blogger, especially if you use Firefox. Blogger can be customized on Firefox, using Grease Monkey and other scripts, to make it do a lot of stuff. With Chrome or IE you are stuck with the Blogger interface as they created it.
The “new” Blogger is easy to use, but less easy to customize unless you are really good with html.
That’s my take.
Peace,
Bill
The one thing I haven’t looked into yet is websearchability of blogging sites. I’ve seen some comparisons that I plan to check out soon. Personally, I want to be read, and so having my blog listed in relevant websearches is important.
There is another thing I’m keeping in the background of my researching this subject. At some point, I might want to start a community group for my family. I want a site that would have certain options. Video and photo albums would be necessary of course, but also a way of organizing info about the family including genealogy.
Hi Ben,
I have been having similar conversations with myself over the past few months. I now post on a ning community that I was asked to join. It is kind of cool to be part of a narrowly focused community and I am pretty much the only one who blogs there. I am not fussy about all the steps I have to do to put in hyperlinks and formating when I have pasted text in from word that already has everything.
I recently set up a blog on blogspot because it is nice and clean to link client into. But I have no idea who reads it or if anyone can search it. Not a good feeling… it somehow feels more like a post card instead of a blogging conversation.
I looked at wordpress and follow another blog that is on there. Humm… maybe I will check it out more closely.
Anyway, if you find anything that is super good, please let me know.
And thanks for posting your research.
Terrill
“You have multiple pages. Was that at all difficult to set up?”
The pages are not difficult to set up, the only thing that was a bit strange is the followup in the heading. It took me some time to find out why one showed up before another.
“One comparison showed that WordPress has the option of both categories and subcategories. Are the pages what are considered categories? Have you ever tried creating subcategoreis?”
No, the categories belong to the posts. For each post you choose one or several categories. The pages are just static on the header. I did not create subcategories but it should be rather easy to do, from each category you can make subcategories.
Some of them have the capacity to create photo and video albums. I’m not sure if any of the purely blogging platforms is capable of doing that.
I also don’t know if the blogging platforms have the capacity to create photo and video albums. I think the way to do that is to link to your own pages and posts, but the idea of albums seems more an external thing to do, I guess.
”As for learning curve, how long did it take you to design your blog? The learning curve I heard about with WordPress is that it takes a lot of effort to do anything outside of basic functions.”
It did not take that long as I just started it and I just learned along the way. Maybe not the best way to do it, but for me that usually works best. I also never read manuals very well but just start something and just see where it goes.
I can very well imagen that it is difficult to do anything outside the basic functions, but until now that has not been a problem for me because it was all very new and I just used what was available.
” have you ever blogged anywhere else besides WordPress and here on Gaia? Why did you pick WordPress?”
I haven’t blogged anywhere besides WordPress and Gaia. The reason I picked WordPress was just random. I just started blogging because at that time I read a homeopathy blog where someone said there should be more homeopathy blogs that where actually about homeopathy instead of the sceptic blogs that came up high in the search engines. And most of the blogs I read at that time where WordPress blogs so I just started there.
” having my blog listed in relevant websearches is important.”
Coming up in relevant websearches was not to hard. In fact it all worked to fast for me. I am very much on the edge of homeopathy, astrology and the periodic table and showing up there too prominent would be just provoking. I remember after my first posts I found myself all over the place. At least that is the idea I got. And I decided to leave a lot of words out of my posts and tags. So my idea is that showing up in relevant websearches is not to hard.
” I might want to start a community group for my family. I want a site that would have certain options. Video and photo albums would be necessary of course, but also a way of organizing info about the family including genealogy.
About starting a community group for your family I don’t think that WordPress or Blogger would be your best options. But maybe it would be best to seperate that and use a personal blog which you can very easily handle, to be a sort of centre, maybe a daily journal of some sort, to link to albums, videos and other family activities. Just thinking out loud.
WH – I don’t use Firefox. I’m not too excited about adding further complications to the process of blogging. I may not be computer illiterate, but I’m definitely not computer saavy. I probably could figure out using all of that, but it sounds like a lot of work. I’m an inherently lazy person who seeks the path of least resistance.
Terrill – I belong to several Ning groups. I like it, but one problem is that your profile doesn’t carryover from one group to the next. When I do a websearch for “Ning” and “Marmalade”, it shows my profile for each group separately. I could blog in one of those groups, but I don’t want to blog in someone else’s space. I even started a group there just to see its capabilities, but I have the group closed.
Your other blog on Blogspot is a good basic blog. I mostly would be happy with something like that. The main thing it lacks is multiple pages. I wonder if there is a way to create multiple pages with it. I think it does allow you to create multiple blogs which might serve a similar function.
I think I understand your view that it has a less personal feel to it. That is the difference of a blogging site and other sites that offer blogging amongst many other services such as networking. Also, a blogpost blog like you have can seem so much more plain than a WordPress blog. WordPress gives one greater ability to personalize.
If you don’t like the feeling of anyone being able to read your blog, then you’d probably be better off making Ning (or another similar platform) your main blog. Both Blogpost and WordPress come up in websearches very easily. I tried to do a search on blogs in Ning and nothing seemed to come up other than Ning’s official blog. Apparently, if you blog on Ning, you are hidden from the prying eyes of strangers.
I’d like some attention from websearching strangers or at least I don’t want to be isolated entirely. My blogs here often come up in relevant websearches. However, too much attention can be problematic. I’ve heard that if you allow comments on the main blogging sites, you might have to install some anti-spam tools and spend some time removing spam. That is one nice thing about Gaia. I’ve only had one comment here that I assume must’ve been spam.
And I’ll be sure to keep you posted. I’m taking my time in making a choice.
Annemieke – I like that starting a WordPress blog hasn’t been difficult for you. Your blog looks pretty nice and I like what you did with the pages. I’m like you in that I’d probably just figure it out as went along and hope for the best. I’m fairly good at figuring things out as long as they’re reasonably intuitive in design.
Out of the blogging sites, WordPress does seem most impressive. I have one lingering question which I don’t know if you can answer. Some of the more general sites allow multiple pages that have different levels of privacy. Is there a way of making private or friends-only pages?
You’re probably right about keeping the two separate. It might be easier to think of them as two different objectives. Although, its possible there could be a single platform that would allow me to separate them enough. Some sites allow you not only to make pages and specific blogs private to varying degrees but also allow you to create multiple groups or multiple blogs. There are many different ways I could go about all of this.
I’m glad I got all of these responses here. Its given me a chance to think out loud. I still have plenty of more research to do. I need to play around with the various sites I’ve joined. Once I narrow down my choices, I might start another blog to get at more detailed comparisons.
“Is there a way of making private or friends-only pages?”
Private is easy, you have the choice between public and private. Friends only I didn’t know, so I went looking and it seems you also have the choice ‘password protected’.
And you have the same choices for the pages.
I must say that WordPress is looking pretty nice. Between Blogger and WordPress, I was leaning more to the former. But, listening to you, I’m starting to lean the other way.
If you want some more comparison between the two, here are pages full of opinions from users. Some use Blogger, others WordPress and some even use (or have used) both.
Ben, this blog is so timely! Thank you for writing it. Yesterday I asked (inwardly) to figure out some sites for blogging. Have been thinking of doing a special “project” and writing about it every day next year. Still in the planning stages, but was trying to figure out where I might blog about it. Don’t want to do it here on Gaia because I still want to blog about other things here.
Thanks also to Annemieke for her insights! REally appreciate all of this information. Kathy
Hello Kathy! Yeah, this blog is so timely. I was just thinking about blogs the other day and then all of a sudden I saw this blog. I was like, dude, I wrote that. It was amazing. Its like I can read my own mind. 
Anyways… If I blog elsewhere, I can’t say what will become of this blog. I was thinking I might reserve this blog for less serious writing and postings of videos. This is a good basic blog.
BTW I’m not being very focused… nothing new. lol I’ve been on a massive reconnaissance mission to discover every interesting thng that exists on the web. That is my humble aspiration. )
I can’t help myself. My curiosity is my addiction. Its not my fault the internet is such an interesting place. For the past several months or so, I’ve been looking at all the ever-multiplying sites that involve: virtual reality (worlds and globes), video (tv and movies, video sharing), social networking, white label platforms, blogging sites, search engines, social bookmarking, portals, OpenID,etc.
They all start intermingling after awhile. I’m particularly interested in where these different services crossover in a single provider. For instance, I’m sure Google has more services than I’m aware of. Google has: Google Earth, Google Maps,Blogger, Google search engine, Google Reader, Lively (virtual world, social networking), OpenSocial, Google Groups, Google Books, and on and on. However, they’re not all in one place per se. Google is a rather sprawling megacorporation.
I like some of the white label platforms because they offer the diversity of services like Google but with the ability to create a niche market. The problem is niche markets are more precarious and don’t necessarily offer the best promise of longterm innovation.
Anyways, I’m looking for something more than just a site to blog. My true desire is to find a main platform that will allow me to aggregate many different services. Some sites offer their own versions of services. Other sites allow importing services or other nifty ways to interconnect with other sites. Many networking sites offer an easy way to put services such as Twitter on your personal page or automatically show your favorite YouTube videos.
A similar concept are tools that allow simultaneous posting across multiple sites. There are tools that will post to all of your blogs. And there are tools that will post to all of the social bookmarking sites you belong to.
An even newer method of merging is happening with web browsers and browsing histories. Amazon has created A9 which is a search engine that not only remembers your search history on the browser, but also includes your history from your Amazon searches. This allows it to give you a tailored search that will show you the results that are the most relevant to you personally. Plus, it will tell you which pages you’ve visited before, and I think it might also allow you to make notes about sites.
Its cool (and scary)to consider where all this is heading, but I’m at thepresent simply interested in the immediate benefit for me.
Filed under: blogging | Tagged: blog, blogger, MyBlogLog, Ning, platforms, tools, white label, WordPress | Leave a Comment »
MarmaladeI find it fascinating the hopes and expectations that fuel different people’s activities on the web, and how they express it. For the most part, the web serves a non-perfunctorial, non-essential purpose. Even the most useful blog or website isn’t exactly essential to life. And most web denizens don’t actually make money(or at least not much) in all the time they spend staring at their respective screens.
There is so much desire and idealism and desparation being bandied about. People start websites sharing their vision or their manifesto. People look for friendship in chat rooms and community on discussion boards. People check the comments and stats on their blogs hoping for aknowledgment, for approval. People look for knowledge to give them understanding, porn to give them pleasure, entertainment to give them distraction. I’ve spent many a hour jumping from one link to another. The web is addictive if nothing else.
There is so much expectation grating against expectation… not to mention mindless compulsion. So much of the personal gets lost that emotions show in such a raw fashion. This is really obvious on discussion boards. You see conflict and clanishness and everything else. And it feels so fleeting. Its so hard to really connect with people, and people you knew well disappear without an explanation. Communities form and dissolve, but the motivation that brought all those people together surely doesn’t disappear. If people were satisfied with their real-world relationships they’d probably never turn to discussion boards and networking sites… or else not keep returning to them again and again.
In observing the web, I can sense something in the world that wants to emerge. But its so confused by and misdirected into a thousand distractionss, the vital energy for change leaking into the vast expanses of the world wide web.
What is this all add up to? Anything?
(I know some of the standard answers, but I prefer the question itself.)
Should a blog, should the web be useful? Why? I suppose it was created with a purpose by the millitary, but what has it become? Even as we speak, various companies and government institutions are vying for control of this burgeoning electronic territory. Such an amorphous entity must be controlled. Terrorists. Hackers. Identity thiefs. Oh my! The fears are as magnified as the desires.
My blog is one among millions. Just another voice filling up the collective monkey mind.
Filed under: blogging | Tagged: blogging, c4chaos, internet | Leave a Comment »
The place I first did most of my blogging is gaia.com. It was orginally known as Zaadz which operated without profit as I understand, but was bought by Gaiam which was a for-profit company. Zaadz was committed to helping people create a better world which included conscious capitalism. It was because of this ideal that Gaiam bought it. The problem is that it didn’t make money. Conscious capitalism is still capitalism and profit is the one rule that can’t be broken. The sad part is that Gaiam wasn’t open about the decision and so didn’t demonstrate the ideal of conscious capitalism. A corporation is just a corporation no matter what its mission statement.
I left a while ago. I was already feeling disenchanted with internet communities in general. I didn’t put in great hope in gaia.com. It was for me just a place to blog and to meet some interesting people. I vaguely knew about it when it was Zaadz, but I didn’t start blogging there until it had been taken over by Gaiam. There was much unhappiness about Gaiam’s way of operating it. I’m not surprised that they closed it down. It is sad, though.
Fortunately, someone I knew from there visited my blog here and told me about it’s imminent death. I’ll have to spend some time in the near future transferring my blog posts over to WordPress. So, there will be an influx of posts here in the next week. If you wish to visit my former blog posts in their native habitat, follow this link:
http://benjamindavidsteele.gaia.com/blog
If your curious about what Gaia/Zaadz was all about, you can check out the new Ning group:
Filed under: blogging | Tagged: closing, Gaia, gaia.com, Gaiam, Zaadz | 2 Comments »
Here are two recent websearches that led people to my blog:
“factors leading to failure in marmalade”
“is marmalade dying out”
I wonder what this means. If I got these in a fortune cookie, I’d be a bit worried.
On a similar note, the most popular blog post I’ve ever written seems to be the following:
If anyone ever did a combined search of “marmalade” and “I’ve just pissed in my pants”, there is a high probability that they’d find my blog at the top of the search results. I think I should focus on trying to corner this niche of the websearch market.
Filed under: blogging | Tagged: blog, I've just pissed in my pants, Marmalade, websearch | Leave a Comment »
I don’t know if any other WordPress.com bloggers have noticed this. Every now and then, I get weird formatting issues.
In one blog, a large number of my hyperlinks somehow became unlinked. That is quite annoying. I’ll have to go back and find all of the links again.
I’m working on a blog now where two separate incidents happened. First, a large part of my text for no reason switched from ‘Paragraph’ format to ‘Heading 3′ format, but I was able to switch it back. The second issue is extremely annoying. I’d saved my post and when I came back to it, the top line had one of the dot’s next to it as would normally show when using the list formatting. However, it doesn’t allow me to remove that dot. Every time I try to remove it by deleting or shifting the text, the dot just moves somewhere else in the text.
What is wrong with WordPress?
Filed under: blogging | Tagged: complaint, format, glitch, issue, technical issue, WordPress, wordpress.com | Leave a Comment »
I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbol led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with truly a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang holiness is forever being created.
Joseph Knecht, Master of The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
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It’s been a long time since I read this book by Hesse, but I remember enjoying it. I read a lot of Hesse in highschool and was highly impressed at the time. This quote reminds me of a passage from Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis. PKD was describing a mystical interaction with divine information. Every thought, every question, every possibility led to infinity. There was no final conclusion. To read the this PKD passage, see my blog post PKD on God as Infinity.
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Readers of blogs like this are witnessing a shift of intellectual authority from the traditional “expert” to the broader public. This is nowhere more tellingly illustrated than by Wikipedia, which has roughly 300,000 volunteer contributors every month.
What makes the mobilization of “crowd wisdom” intellectually powerful is that the technology of the Web makes it so easy for even amateurs to access a growing fraction of the body of human knowledge. The value of traditional expert authority is itself being diluted by the new incentive structure created by information technology that militates against what is deep and nuanced in favour of what is fast and stripped-down.
The result is the growing disintermediation of experts and gatekeepers of virtually all kinds. The irony is that experts have been the source of most of the nuggets of knowledge that the crowd now draws upon – for example, news and political bloggers depend heavily on a relatively small number of sources of professional journalism, just as many Wikipedia articles assimilate prior scholarship. The system works because it is able to mine intellectual capital. This suggests that today’s cult of the amateur will ultimately be self-limiting and will require continuous fresh infusions of more traditional forms of expert knowledge.
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I would point out that the intelligence of the internet age isn’t merely parasitic, but rather is a levelling of the playing field. Instead of being passive receivers, people now interact with their media.
Two examples.
First, news media follows closely twitter and the blogosphere to catch new trends and breaking news. Reporters aren’t usually the first people to be on a scene and with cellphones firsthand reporting can potentially come from anyone.
Second, bloggers often are very dedicated researchers who aren’t limited by the financial obligations of working for a media company. Many bloggers are highly educated and trained in various fields. Even if they don’t have the title of expert, they may act in that capacity. Bloggers often do original analysis and uncover new data, and mainstream reporters do sometimes cite bloggers. Bloggers don’t often get much respectability, but neither did the early muckrakers who were the earliest investigative reporters.
By being outside of the mainstream, bloggers have a different perspective. Sometimes bloggers are reporting on issues and events that get almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media.
The value of traditional expert authority isn’t being diluted, but it is being challenged. I would, however, argue that this strengthens expert authority by holding it to an even higher standard.
Objective analysis shows that Wikipedia articles on science and history are as reliable as encyclopedias (I would argue that they may be more reliable in some ways as they’re constantly being updated). Also, Wikipedia cites many external sources that often are directly linked and so one can judge for themselves rather than solely relying on an expert. In the long run, Wikipedia will on average become more reliable than a traditional printed encyclopedia. Furthermore, Wikipedia has stringent standards and so acts as a training ground for any person to learn how to determine the validity of information.
So, the web doesn’t result in “the growing disintermediation of experts and gatekeepers”. Rather, it increases mediation and creates better methods of gatekeeping. Traditional experts still play a part, but they no longer dominate the discussion.
The above blog linked to an article by Peter Nicholson. The following blog is a response to that article. The opinion of stated below resonates with my own sense of this emerging information age.
- – -
What has led me to rant about this pet peeve of mine, is Peter Nicholson’s, Globe and Mail article, “Information – rich and attention – poor” (09-09-12). Blaming the digital age he declares,
“In becoming information rich, we have become attention poor… [E]conomics teaches that the counterpart of every new abundance is a new scarcity – in this case the scarcity of human time and attention.”
[...]There is nothing wrong with the abundance of information created by digital technology. Yes, I realise some of it is slim, but that’s okay, because there are ways of accessing deeper knowledge as well. I personally have not experienced an attention deficit as a result of the “knowledge abundance”. What I have experienced is a thrill at being able to access so much information in such a short time. I do not fear what Nicholson refers to as the “24-hour knowledge cycle”, the ability to access news 24/7. I relish in it.
Nicholson writes about the changing market for knowledge. He states:
“When the effective shelf life of a document (or any information product) shrinks, fewer resources will be invested in its creation. This is because the period during which the product is likely to be read or referred to is too short to repay a large allocation of scarce time and skill in its production. As a result the ‘market’ for depth is narrowing.”
When you look at what is happening in the publishing world you have to agree with the first part of his comment, that because a “news product” has a short life it’s not financially feasible to invest heavily in it. However, I disagree with his conclusion, that the result is that the market for depth is narrowing. Hey, I’m part of the market and I’m not narrowing, nor are my eleven year old students who’s thirst for knowledge is unquenchable. The desire for “depth” is not diminished by the abundance of knowledge. In fact, it is enriched by it.
Filed under: blogging, Gnosticism, Humanity, Philosophy, science, Sociopolitical | Tagged: authorities, blogosphere, crowd wisdom, Exegesis, experts, facts, God, Hermann Hesse, infinity, information, internet, knowledge, media, news, Philip K. Dick, PKD, The Glass Bead Game, truth, twitter, wisdom | Leave a Comment »
(Wikipedia) Michael Massing is a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Michael Massing received his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard and an MS from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He often writes for the New York Review of Books concerning the media and foreign affairs. He has written for The American Prospect, The New York Times, The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. In addition to his magazine contributions, he has written on the War on Drugs in his book, The Fix (2002), and on American journalism, Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq. Massing received the MacArthur Fellowship in 1992.
Well, I wrote a somewhat extensive analysis which was erased when my computer or the internet went fluky. Basically, mainstream journalism is too often sadly pathetic and the blogger journalists are the new muckraker journalists who are forcing mainstream journalists to face their biases and their false objectivity. If democracy is to survive (or made into something more than a pretty ideal), then it will be up to civic journalists to speak truth to power. It takes someone who isn’t comfortable (who isn’t established and fully respectable) to afflict (call a spade a spade) the comfortable (the rich and powerful). Mainstream journalism is only as good as the civic journalism that forces it to be good. Left to its own devices, mainstream journalism (i.e., corporate journalism) would be nothing but propaganda that would destroy democracy at its roots.
Filed under: blogging, Sociopolitical | Tagged: alternative, blogger, journalism, journalists, mainstream, media, muckraker, news, reporters | Leave a Comment »
Access: Public 
Marmalade said
My experiment began just now. I posted a blog about blogging on each site.
Live Journal actually was more confusing than I expected. I posted or thought I did, but couldn’t figure out if it actually posted or not. It showed as posted. Nonetheless, when I looked for it,I couldn’t find itwith my previous posts. Maybe there is a lag for posts to show. I’ll have to check it later.
Word Press was also confusing. Both Live Journal and Word Press were very cluttered. On Word Press, I couldn’t even figure out how to place a title on my post. I spent 10 minutes trying to figure it out, and ended up posting it without a title.
Blogger was easier. The page did freeze up, but that might’ve been connection issues unrelated to the site. I opened a new window and it seemed fine. One significant problem was that I wanted to remove a paragraph, but was unable. The “cut” option seemed to be disabled in my IE7 browser. So, I had to manually delete it using the “backspace” button. I’d hope that a major browser would work with a major site like that. I have some problems with Internet Exploerer here on Gaia, but I have lower expectations for this site.
The last site was My Opera. It was simple and easy. It has many options and yet isn’t cluttered. It felt very intuitive and posted without a single problem.
My Opera wins the first round of the experiment. Its hard to say who came in second, but offhand I’ll give second place to Blogger.
Nicole said
it will be cool to see how the experiment progresses!
starlight said
LOL…you’re a trip Ben…i was wondering what you been up to…joy*
Marmalade said
Nice to see you both. Happy Happy Joy Joy
Because all of the praise I read about it, my guess is that I’ll like Word Press if I ever figure it out. I’m not sure why I couldn’t find the section for the title. I downloaded the new version (2.7 I believe) and maybe I was just experiencing a glitch. I’ll try it again. Someone from work brought up their Word Press page for posting and it looked entirely different. It might also be browser related. I’ll try my other browsers as part of this experiment.
I checked back with Live Journal. I still couldn’t find the entry I tried to post with the other previous entries. I kept the window open, and I was able to go back to the page that showed the posting. It seems to be posted somewhere. Its possible that Live Journal has the capacity for posting on multiple pages and somehow I unintentionally posted it on another page. If so, I need to learn how to control which page it posts to.
Marmalade said
Second Round:
I used Google Chrome this time. I didn’t have any of the problems I had last time. I like Google Chrome. It seems to have less compatability issues with the blogging sites.
Its strange with Word Press. The appearance of it was the same. I put the title where I tried to put it last time, but for unknown reasons it allowed the title to appear this time. I do like the Category option Word Press. The closest thing I had to a problem was that I couldn’t sign into my Word Press blog on the page of my blog. Instead, I had to go to the main page to sign in.
Nobody wins first place this time. This round is a tie, but I’m thinking I’m going to learn to like Word Press more and more.
Marmalade said
There is one thing that this test is making clear. Gaia competesfairly wellwith the otherblogging sites. There aren’t as many choices here in terms of functions, but there is still plenty one can do. Gaia is very simple and intuitive. I’ve never had any major problems in blogging here.
Nicole said
that’s good to know, about Gaia and Google Chrome. I have the latter but haven’t used it much yet, force of habit.
Marmalade said
Yeah, Google Chrome seems decent. I haven’t had any major issues like I had with Internet Exploer 8 which made my virus scan non-functional. It took me a while to realize there was a problem. I hope I didn’t pick up any viruses. IE8=BAD!!!
The problem with Google Chrome is that it has compatability issues with playing videos. Whereas I’ve never had problems with videos with Internet Explorer. You just can’t have everything. I guessI have to choose whether you like blogging or watching videos more.
Annemieke said
“I couldn’t sign into my Word Press blog on the page of my blog. Instead, I had to go to the main page to sign in.”
Yes, very strange indeed. I mostly stay logged in, but when for some reason I have to sign in, I always wonder where I have to do that again.
“Gaia is very simple and intuitive.”
Totally agree with that. No matter how good I find WordPress, intuitive would not be a term to use. Although I am more and more ‘getting it’ lately.
I also like Google Chrome and at the moment I use it together with Internet Explorer. For some reason I like IE still best for bookmarking sites. But I noticed it is good to use other browsers to see how it all looks, because sites can look rather different with other browsers sometimes.
I so like that you share this kind of struggles. I am going through the same processes at times. But I totally love it.
Marmalade said
Its getting close to bedtime for me, but I shall comment first.
Yes, Annemieke, I prefer Internet Exploer overall. Maybe its because I’ve used it the most and I’m familiar with it. I never had major issues with it until I downloaded IE8.
You like that I share this kind of struggle… is that you’re way of saying you don’t want to hear me share my struggles withchanging my cats’ litter box? Sadly, neither Google Chrome nor Internet Exploer is compatible with the litter box. I should get a virtual cat with a virtual litter box. It would immensely simplify my life.
Centria said
I love your analysis here. I was convinced blogger (blogspot? are they the same thing?) was going to be the best option. But within a day of posting there, I switched allegiance to wordpress. Even though some of the layouts are confusing, it seems easier for others to find your work through the categories and tags. No one has even found the blogger posting. But wordpress has proved more visible and likeable. Gaia, though, is simple and intuitive. It’s still preferable in many ways….
Marmalade said
Blogger and blogspot are related but not the same… both relate to blogging with Google. Its technically more appropriate to say blogspot I suppose, but for some reason I was using the Blogger name instead. I was meaning the same thing anyways.
You seem attracted to Word Press for the same reasons as I. The category and tag system will be very helpful as I gather more blogs. I’m glad they also help others to find my blogs. That will be part of my comparison experiment. I’ll see which of my blogs get the most comments and what kinds of commenters they attract.
Marmalade said
Third Round:
This time I used the Opera browser which is related to the Opera blogging site. It was a very easy to use browser except for one factor. When I tried to copy and paste from my Gaia blog, it didn’t carry over the hyperlinks. Both Google Chrome and Internet Explorer carry over hyperlinks.
I ended the third round at that point. So, none of the blogging sites were a winner in this round, but the Opera browser was the loser.
Marmalade said
For the time being, I take my conclusion back for the Third Round. The hyperlink copy/paste problem seems to be failing on all of my browsers. That is very odd because it was just working. Is it something to do with my computer? Or are the various browsers somehow causing problems for eachother? I hope I can figure this out.
Nicole said
oooh, that’s a very annoying problem. really odd!
Marmalade said
I’m bringing my experiment into a less formal mode. I decided to drop LIve Journal from the experiment just because the set up is somewhat confusing and not aesthetically pleasing. I’m going to continue to use the other 3 for a while. At the moment, I can’t say I entirely favorany one of themover the rest.
Nicole said
ok. i see you’re still having that words running into each other trouble!