Random Ramblings
Created | Updated Jan 25, 2007
Following last week's editorial, I now set out to write something for The Post. But where to start?
What scope shall this have? Ok, scrolling through the articles of The Post to get an idea. Ongoing story? No, rather not, it's disheartening if you go there for the first time, only to find that it's chapter 35 and you have missed the first 34 chapters. What else? Poems? Hmm, not as easy as they look, maybe another time again. And how long should it be? Nowadays, the attention span of most people is very short. But we're on hootoo - people are used to doing lots of reading and, anyway, why do I bother? It's highly unlikely I'll ever know if and who has read how much.
So, what topic could be of enough interest to be read by somebody?
I think journals and blogging are actually quite an interesting phenomenon. Somebody recently started a thread on
Ask the h2g2 community about Blogs and Bloggers. Now there's something that puzzles me. I mean, why would anybody who has this nice feature of a journal here want to have a blog elsewhere?
The reasons given were quite interesting. Most of the bloggers said they did it because there was no profanity filter and no moderation. Some people said it was to stay in touch with friends and family far away and that they are able to post photos on their blogs. Other reasons were that the potential audience was huge and that you are able to comment in a conversational and interactive way with the other bloggers.
A variety of valid reasons and yet I neither have a blog, nor do I read any; it just doesn't 'float my boat'. Am I just too old for this? A relic from internet-less times, who is incapable of going with the flow? Or is it more a question of being reserved, of not wanting to share my thoughts with everybody and their dog, but merely with my friends, blissfully ignoring the fact that my journals here can just as well be read by everybody else as well as my friends?
And what is it about journals that some are very successful, with lots of people posting to them no matter what is written in the journal as such, and others being ignored by the majority of people, many of whom unsubscribe the moment these journals pop up in their conversation list?
That's another, fascinating phenomenon, one that has baffled me for quite some time now. The reaction of people to those who don't post to their journals is equally interesting. Some just shrug their shoulders and move on, knowing fairly well that it's impossible to follow every single journal, especially if they have a large friendslist, with a few prolific 'journalists' among them. Others have been known to react incredibly offended, removing the friends, who haven't replied to their journals but unsubscribed instead, from their friendslist, even if they themselves take the right to ignore journals from those friends. Oh, and then there is apparently a feature which enables you to unsubscribe from a journal before it is even written. The mysterious ways of hootoo, it seems, and I'm not expecting to find out. C'est la vie!
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