08 Dec 08 In The Year 2525 If Man Is Still Alive
Blogging has, for the majority of us, moved past the personal diary stage. You don’t really want to know what cereal I had for breakfast, when I showered, or the color of my socks do you? OK, you do – email me afterward then.
So Why blog?
I’ve heard this question many times.
I’ve heard a number of answers too. Some say that services such as Twitter or Friendfeed largely eliminate the need for blogging, as we can all interact in these services without setting up and maintaining a blog.
Now there are only so many minutes in a day (yes I know it’s 1440). I know I’ve been blogging less lately, as I’ve been spending more of my time in Friendfeed. Too much time, sometimes. However, it’s not wasted time, by and large, as there are many good links posted in there, and I learn new things all the time (as we all do).
Whoa! Hang on a minute…..
If there are links posted in there, that means they’re coming from a web site, and some of those links are blogs, right? Yes of course. Many links are to YouTube videos or mp3s at last.fm perhaps, yes, but there are many links I get to news sites, and blogs too.
My take on it is that if you wish to write longer articles, opinions, share news or a hobby, a blog is still the best place to do this. You can write what you want to, about what you like, and then share it on the social media networks with those you think might be interested in reading your diatribe.
Of course, if you’ve nothing to say, then blogging is perhaps not for you, but there’s few people that truly have nothing to comment on at all.
I’m not much of a science fiction fan, but one thing that does fascinate me, and it’s this. If we look back 500 years or so, communication was still basic, and storage of communications even more so. Only the rich could read, and write, afford to buy books, and so much history is based around the elite or ruling classes.
However, if we were in 2525 looking back to now, what a rich library we would already have to look through to see how the common person lived an every day life. How interesting it will be to see what we all got up to, and how we lived back here and now.
On second thoughts then, perhaps I should blog about my breakfast cereal and my socks after all. Even if you’re not interested in the minutiae of my life my great-great-great-great grandchildren might well be.
Tags: audience, blog, blogging, cereal, diatribe, followers, information business, media networks, mixture, mp3, news sites, personal diary, share news, snippets, socks, twitter, Zager And Evans
10 Aug 08 Social Media – Twitter
I guess when you use many online services, and when many people in your online circle do too, you tend to be a little surprised when you find those that have never heard of it.
One example of this is Twitter.
I use Twitter daily, multiple times daily. What do I use it for? I keep in touch with the wide world with world news from the BBC; I get hurricane alert news; Cricket scores, and local weather. I also keep track of some of the local bloggers and them of me, as we tweet snippets during the day.
I also use it to keep in touch with my wife when we in different places, as it’s easy to use via SMS on a cellphone. It’s the brevity that’s good too. Not a huge amount of options – just 140 characters of text (which can be a URL) and away you go.
Perhaps it sounds a pointless little app. What’s wrong with a phone call, or just a text message. Well, nothing perhaps, but that forced brevity is good compared to a phone call that is meant to be short, but goes on for a half hour or more; twittering is easier if you’re at a PC, than finding the cellphone and using the keypad, even if you’ve got a latest generation smartphone.
I would suggest you try it out if you haven’t. You might find it’s more useful than you imagined.
Tags: alert news, bbc, bloggers, brevity, cellphone, cricket scores, different places, half hour, hurricane, local weather, multiple times, phone call, sms, snippets, text message
