More interesting research on blogs, this time showing how often the media talks about blogs, with the frequency of articles on blogging skyrocketing in the spring of 2004 (follow the link and check out the nifty graph).
Category Archives: Technology
A Picture of Blog Readers
71% of blog readers are over 30.
79% of blog readers are men.
21% of blog readers are bloggers themselves.
82% of blog readers say TV is worthless or only somewhat useful as a source of news and opinion (55% say the same about newspapers, 54% about magazines).
50% of blog readers have spent more than $50 on books online in the past six months.
All of this comes from a Blog Ads survey of questionable scientific merit (an online survey advertised through select blogs; even the numbers seem questionable: their site said 61% of blog readers were over the age of 30, but when I added the numbers up they totaled 71%.)
I’m Seven and I Blog
A Brittish school has started an after-school blogging club with children as young as seven. The results are amazing: kids doing unassigned homework and performing as well as 14- or 15-year-olds are expected to when it comes to computer skills.
Say Cheese
The definition of what’s picture-worthy has rapidly changed with the advent of the camera phone, especially in Japan where 90 percent of cell phones sold have cameras. The camera phone is not only replacing the traditional camera that was only hauled out for special events, but it’s allowing people to capture minor moments of every day life, changing the importance and purpose of pictures.
Blogs Fall for Bloomsday Virus Hoax
The Onion-esque spoof site The Watley Review ran a piece earlier this week, “Bloomsday Virus Inflicts James Joyce on Mobile Phone Users”. Literary fans had apparently concocted a virus to strike on June 16, 2004, the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday. Bloomsday comes from Joyce’s densely packed novel Ulysses when the protagonist Leopold Bloom travels across Dublin on June 16, 1904. The virus supposedly replaced the phone’s address book with the convoluted narrative, and then passed it on to other cell phones.
Anti-virus experts expect the worst:
Anti-virus experts are warning that this mobile phone virus is almost surely just the first of many, and that there exists a plethora of densely symbolic literature that could be inflicted on an unwary mobile phone-using public.
“James Joyce is just the first salvo,” warned [Francis] Harrod, [with the anti-virus software developer F-secure]. “Melville, Camus, Dostoevsky, Woolf… It’s only going to get uglier from here on out.”
So the spoof says.
Meet Joe Blog
In what will surely be a much-maligned and often-linked article, Time reports on the blogging craze. The piece gives a good overview and history of blogging, though it does give the impression that amateur blogs are replacing professional news outlets, which is hardly the case. Most blogs have more of a mutualistic, if not parasitic, relationship with pro news outlets, and rarely do blog readers get their news solely from blogs.
The Craigslist Introvert
The man behind the web phenomenon Craigslist is 51-year-old introvert Craig Newmark. His network of local portals offering personal ads, job listings, and other local-interest lists in 45 major cities worldwide is in the top 20 of U.S. portals, putting it with the likes of Yahoo!, MSN and AOL.
The shy celeb can’t write a personal ad (much less navigate that awkward social scene), but still puts a lot of stock in connecting people: “My feeling is that something connecting people to fix the world over time is the deepest spiritual value you can have.”
New Duds
You may notice a new look around the blog. I’m trying something a bit different, hopefully making things fit in a bit more with my main blog.
You’ll also notice that those lovely snapshot images at the top are changing now. My long-term vision has finally been realized, thanks to the techno wiz that is Josh Lewis!. Hopefully I can add some more of those images as the days go on. If you like the images you can either keep hitting reload to see more, or just go look at the fancy new art page.
As a minor consequence to all my fiddling, all my pages are now php files instead of html. To most of you that means nothing, but basically you might experience some funkiness when I link to past entries in this blog. I’ve fixed all the entries in 2004, but stuff farther back isn’t fixed. You should still get to the file, but it won’t have all the new glory of those little black and white snapshots loading at random. And I’ll eventually delete those old html files.
Changing Blogging Habits
I’ve been thinking about changing how I blog. These Thoughts have been a random mess of all sorts of junk, from creative writing exercises to random diatribes to links, quotes, and interesting news tidbits. While that’s been all well and good, it’s certainly gotten away from my original intent. It’s not like that’s a big deal, this is a morphing, changing thing, and I like it that way. I’m just contemplating another morph.
In the last few days I’ve toyed with posting a few different things on my main Monkey Outta Nowhere blog that I normally wouldn’t blog about or would post here. It’s more the links, quotes, news, and kind of throw away, pop culture type stuff. I think it’ll be a nice way to keep my Monkey Outta Nowhere blog updated with stuff that showcases some of my writing. After all, Monkey Outta Nowhere income doesn’t exactly come from my diatribes, creative writing, and other such stuff.
And it’s a shorter url.
So looking back on what I’ve blogged about lately, some stuff would show up on Monkey Outta Nowhere (like this, this, this, and this). Most of the other personal junk would stay here. Which has the potential for making this blog really boring. Then again, maybe that’s what some of you like. Those that do can find that here. Those that like the other stuff can head over to Monkey Outta Nowhere. Update your bookmarks accordingly. I’m feeding each blog to the other in the sidebar, so you can certainly stay up to snuff that way.
It’s all more exciting experiments for my world of blogging. We’ll see how long it lasts. Though I have to say, I love doing stuff like this. I hope to do more of this on the Monkey blog.
Ten Dollar Reagan
Ronald Reagan supporters are pushing to have his likeness on some cash, among other places. Current discussion includes putting Reagan on the $10 or $20 bill, though both proposals would require an act of Congress. Another option is to put Reagan on the dime, or possibly on half the dimes produced (leaving FDR on the other half of all dimes produced), something the Treasury can do without approval from Congress.
All of which causes me further speculation about what made Ronald Reagan so great. Speculation that, by the way, is thoroughly honest, innocent, and not malicious, as some seem to think.
It seems especially ironic to consider putting Reagan on our money considering the divided feelings over Reaganomics. According to that CNN/Money article, the idea behind Reagan’s economic policies were to lower taxes, decrease government regulations, and increase military spending. The result was 20 million jobs, a huge drop in interest rates, and a $3 trillion debt by the end of the decade. The opposite approach seems to be Bill Clinton, who balanced the budget and didn’t cut taxes. I’m no economist and I don’t really know how to compare the two, but I do know that the mid-to-late 1990s had quite an economic boom as well. An NPR commentator pointed out that the economic growth in the 1990s was more evenly spread throughout society.
Interesting points to ponder.
At any rate, I find it especially peculiar that there’s a Ronald Reagan Legacy Project with a goal of “seeing a Reagan commemoration in every American county” (Star Trib). Furthermore, they’d like to add Reagan to Mt. Rushmore (though they might have to settle for the road that leads to Rushmore). Apparently there are only some 54 memorials to Reagan across the country, compared to more than 600 for John F. Kennedy and more than 800 for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Apparently it’s a race.
But seriously, it makes me wonder about who we honor and why we honor them. Why are there 600 memorials for JFK? Was his shortened presidency that great? Was averting a nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis that much of an accomplishment? Or was he just a popular guy and we feel bad he was shot?
I understand that it’s important to remember the past and honor national heroes, but all the rangling over who’s a better hero or a more worthy hero is really odd. And at one point is one hero better than another? When can Reagan, hero of the Cold War, replace Alexander Hamilton, hero of the Revolutionary War? Because there’s only so much space for memorial. I can imagine a park absolutely cluttered with bronze statues to hundreds of years of American presidents. You’d be walking on the George H.W. Bush Memorial Sidewalk reading your Official Gerald Ford Map and sucking away on your large Bill Clinton Sodapop.
All the while no one can remember what any of them did.