Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 - part 2

Time to re-read all of  this opinion, and get my thoughts in order.

"The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths."

This is probably right. But does that matter? It depends on why you are blogging in the first place. its a personal thing...

"It's almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers."

Um, Ok so you are blogging to get noticed. I understand that many artists and authors do what they do because they feel happy, driven, compelled to do so, and many have not the remotest thoughts about nor wish to to noticed. They produce because they can, and want to, irrespective of who might or might not notice. Personally, I might not consider myself to be an artist, but I am happy to write stuff from time to time, ie get thoughts on paper so to speak. So I do. Hecklers; yup, you get them. I problem with the internet, and especially if you produce anything to do with software or internet technology etc, is that you are likely to attract young juvenile nerdy guys who have low social skills and no interest in relating positively to others. So you will get rude, arrogant (often very badly written, and misspelt) responses. My advice about this: accept it, and ignore it.

"And why bother?"

See above.

"The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter."

Twitter is designed for 160 character max thoughts. In this day and age of sound-bytes I can see its appeal for many. I am on Twitter, and see its use. However a blog is a different animal. Its a vehicle for writing anything from an opinion piece to an essay to an opus magnus. You don't usually go hooning round the beach in an offshore yacht, nor do you usually sail a sailboard offshore (well not very far anyway). Its all about horses for courses.

(This is partly an opinion piece, and partly done to test writing a quick post via linking on an email hyperlink/email client (See "How do I post via email?")

Home ‎(David Tangye, Gold Coast, Australia‎)

Home ‎(David Tangye, Gold Coast, Australia‎): "Welcome! to my base website featuring the following areas of expertise and interest ..."

Amazing! Web 2.0 at its best!

This blog shows how utterly cool it is to post articles to the internet, and blog and share them. This post is a great guinea pig. What I have done is:

1. Set up the "Blog This!" link in my browser's links toolbar (see this Blogger help page). Now I can simply select any text on any web page and click that "Blog This!" link to initate a popup whereby I flesh out a quick blog. The popup editor to do this is a little basic but is adequate. For instance I had to switch it to html-mode to add code to make this list. Also I am not sure about how or whether I could add an image in. I think I would need to do that from the main editor at the blogsite. It would not be hard to add one later,eg a snapshot of me creating this now. However the editor has a standard button to add a link, eg to the "BlogThis!" help page, and also handles text Bolding, Italics, color, quoting via buttons. So this will be posted to whichever of my Blogger blogs I select.
   
2. My Blogger blogs appear in my Google Reader, and from there, I normally Share the post, so it also appears in my "Google Shared Stuff"...
3. which itself has a link on my Base Website ...
4. which itself is the subject of this post.