Good luck!

0  0

0  0

Steve

0  0

I agree that anonymousness can be very liberating and also can detract from credibility if the reason for it is not obvious. The motives of the author are like food colour to water.

I think that the success of blogging is and will continue to be due to it’s immense diversity, responsiveness and adherance to the natural laws of selection. Caveat Emptor.

0  0

Well, Will, they haven’t done anything really harmful that I would need to intervene so it hasn’t risen to the level of terrorism.

For example, I have an aunt and uncle who were organizers in the Right To Life movement. They were always marching in anti-abortion parades. Worse yet, they would make their kids march with them. Sometimes they would make them carry little mock coffins. Their kids hated it. I’m not too impressed with parents who dragoon their kids to march along in their protests as if they had an independent mind and had come to the same conclusions as their parents.

My criticism came in the form of silence when they waxed rapturously about their exploits and gentle mockery when they could take it. I might enquire, for example, if the kids needed a new coffin as the old ones were getting dog-eared. When my aunt was arrested for picketing an abortion clinic I was going to ask her how the food was in the slammer but my Mom nipped that line of enquiry in the bud.

However, if they took their cause beyond peaceful protest and civil disobedience, yes, I would be responsible if I did not object. If they were taking photos of women going to abortion clinics and using them for harassment, as some nuts did, I would be responsible if I did not strongly object to them in person. If they caused harm to other people, I would be obliged to report them to the police.

Steve

0  0

I second your opinion about the informed opinion that blogs present.

I took the mainstream media as gospel until I got into the military and could compare media accounts with intelligence accounts. It was pretty obvious that the MSM was partisan and uninformed. After I got my MBA, it was pretty obvious that most business and economic writing in the MSM was economically illiterate. And on some issues, the MSM is invincibly ignorant. I doubt there is one journalist in a hundred who knows what an assault weapon is, yet all of them editorialize on them in crime stories. There is never a story on aircraft accidents that does not contain errors immediately obvious to a competent aviator.

The problem is that almost no journalists have any expertise in anything except journalism. They are subject matter illiterate in most of the stories they write. Very few are interested in becoming experts in a subject and reporting knowledgeably about it. Most go into journalism to change the world, which is a high blown way of saying they want to use journalism to propagate their political agenda. So they use each story as an anecdote to further their agenda, cherry picking the stories to fit the larger political mosaic they are creating.

As bloggers, I think what most of us realize after a while is that everyone of us is knowledgeable, even an expert, on some topic. When we write on that topic, we can beat most journalists on their best days. When a news story flares up, it can draw a hundred knowledgeable bloggers who can outwrite and outthink the typical journalist and very often the very best journalists on that topic. The strength of blogs is assembling those voices quickly.

Steve

0  0

What I find fascinating and vital about blogs is the informed opinion that surfaces – with journalism, an event is reported then may be commented on in a comments column, which invariably has a political angle: a blog which reports the same event is likely to come from an individual standpoint and be coloured by the blogger’s own experiences, and is unlikely to toe any particular line, which gives it a lot more depth.

And blogs are so easy to use!

0  0

0  0

The talk was a mixture of both, and both languages were really interchangeable in an almost subconscious level!

0  0

As soon as Im finished with school, I have sworn to travel the world HARDCODE this time around, and I will HAVE to drop by your corner of the the world and create a ruckus.

Mahmood, was this talk given in Arabic or English?

-Ibn

0  0