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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 7/7/2005 |
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What’s
a blog, and what does it do ? Before
the internet, there was a huge online community known as information services such
as Compuserve;
pay services that would allow
you to access via your phone
modem everything from online games to chat rooms to special interest
areas. You paid by the minute, so
you wanted to get your money’s worth. There
were hundreds of special interest areas, ranging from a-z. If you
had a particular interest, you could either create or host a special interest
area or group, or SIG as they were known. Sometimes these were useful, sometimes they were a waste of time and only
served as a forum for windbags to express their views. I remember complaining
to compuserve about a couple of their special
interest areas as I felt they were a waste of my online time visiting them
under the pretense that I would get some useful information out of them. These
turned out to be the pre-cursors of what is now known as Blogs,
or Web logs. A blog provides a forum for someone to
express their views on any topic they wish to cover. Virtually anyone can create a blog for free, and thousands of websites let anyone set
up a blog on anything they want to talk about, such
as http://www.blogspot.com which lets
you set up your own blog in 3 easy steps, and voila
– your views are out there in front of the entire internet world. In the
earlier days of the internet, domain name registration was relatively
expensive and maintaining a website was complicated, and so blogging became a way for someone with views and opinions
but no money to put their opinions on the internet. What you
can find today in a blog is anything from very
useful information on gardening or cooking, opinions on books and movies, to
hate filled invective of obviously deranged minds, such as that of the alleged
killer of the Idaho Child and his family, who ran his own blog
at http://www.fifthnail.blogspot.com/
. Here you will find his postings from the past 2 years which provide an
insight into his twisted mind. But you
can easily find websites with as bad or worse information as blogs on the internet. For example http://www.ogrish.com/ seems to specialize in showing online
or downloadable videos of murders, executions, and other gruesome scenes, and
last year posted videos of the beheadings of several of the Iraq hostages. So you
might ask, well where’s the internet police
and why haven’t them shut down all the truly objectional
blogs and websites, and the answer is – there
are no internet police. When you
go to a blog or a website, you need to realize that
they operate under no censorship, no guidelines, and there are no editors associated
with these sites, monitoring the content. What you see is what you get, and
you need to take the information with a grain of salt, and certainly not as
the gospel truth. In the
old cb radio world, which I had a lot of fun with, you would sometimes come upon what was known as a
“motormouth”, someone who talked a lot
about nothing. But you could also
find some excellent information on the cb airways,
such as directions, or where the smokies were, or
where the good restaurant was in the town coming up next on your jighway. So, some blogs are good, and some are bad, but they’re open
to anyone, and if you’re interested, just pick a topic and start blogging. Breaker
1-9, I think we got us a CONVOY !!! For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2005 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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