Seven Generational Ruminations

The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture author: Andrew Keen asin: 0385520808

Charles Cooper is offering a review and/or perspective on a recent book, The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture. As one of the amateurs he's talking about this makes for some interesting reading. The book in question is by Andrew Keen who Mr. Cooper describes as a "gloomy elitist" and with this book is trying to "rattle the cage" of the "geekerati" of Silicon Valley.

I just listened to an National Public Radio piece that presents one mans concept of utopia. Namely, individuals or small scale organizations working on small scale work projects.

There's this current story about massive snooping into telephone conversations by the NSA. The NSA and CIA and other spy agencies are supposed to turn their efforts on targets outside the U.S. but under Bush Administration edict they've been working inside the U.S., in opposition to U.S. law. Yes, the President has been breaking the law.

The conduct of the U.S. Administration is that this is not a war on Terror, but instead a war on Personal Freedom.

Reporters sans Frontiers has made a call for action/change about Internet companies that do business with repressive countries. Do Internet companies need to be regulated to ensure they respect free expression ? They cite several cases of Internet and Technology companies cooperating with repressive countries, for example Google and Yahoo filter search results based on blacklists provided by the countries in question.

If blogging can be hazardous to your job (as this article says: Blogging may be hazardous to your job By Amy Rosewater, The Baltimore Sun) just how is that so? And, don't we have freedom of speech engraved in the U.S. Constitution?

What the article talks about is bitching about co-workers etc on the blog. That people get fired over that.

Well... okay...

Boy what a mountain formed out of this mole-hill. Jeremy Hermans was on an Alaska Airlines flight that experienced sudden cabin depressurization shortly after takeoff and made an emergency landing safely without anybody being hurt. But what made this emergency different is that Jeremy took a few pictures and wrote about it on his blog. His blog posting is full of emotion we who weren't there can only guess at.

Corporate blogging is on the rise. The big sign given in this article is that some job postings are now asking for an "ability to blog". That's certainly a sign ... Job descriptions add ability to blog, aid PR (Mary Jacobs, Dallas Morning News, Dec. 31, 2005 12:00 AM) The way Mary Jacobs spins this story, bloggers have been beating up on corporations for so long, and now it's time for corporations to bring some of them inside the corporate walls and use their knowledge of blogging practices for corporate benefit.

Here's a useful resource to help understand the scope of blogging by corporations. Corporate blogging is distinct from personal blogging in that the blogger is writing for the benefit of the corporation. Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki This is a list of the Fortune 500 companies who have blogging activities.

Podcasting is an interesting phenomenon that has wideranging potential consequences. Podcasting allows for easy distribution of audio "shows" similar to radio programs. For that matter, many radio programs are currently available as podcast. A podcast is relatively simple application of the RSS feed, the podcaster merely makes an audio file be an attachment to an entry in their RSS feed. Voila, instant podcast.

"Structured Blogging" has been popping up on my web2.0 news feed the last couple days. I don't know how new this idea really is, but it seems like an overly hyped application of ideas that have already been floating around for years.

Let's look at a few articles to explore what these people mean by "structured blogging".