I have been thinking about Twitter, Plurk, email, and blogs lately. I have been using Twitter and Plurk a lot lately. I know that they are mostly chatter, but it is easy to fit chatter in with everything else I have to do.
I remember use to love e-mail. Back in 1996 I used to get up first thing in the morning and read my e-mails. If felt exciting, like waiting for letters in the mail. I was sharing e-mail with people all over the world, at least the English speaking world. When I logged onto my computer I could not wait to see what was there for me. It was new and exciting.
Now a days I mostly ignore my personal e-mail. I check it all the time to see is anything good is there, but I rarely write anyone. I rarely get any good e-mail from anyone. If I get an email the correspondence will go on for two or three days before it dies off. There is a lot of reasons this is true. I do not have the attention span for e-mail anymore. It might be because I am so attached to e-mail every day at work I do not want to be attached to it at home.
Twitter and Plurk are interesting because of the short aspects of both these services. Twitter is amazing at how much can be shared in just 140 characters. It has the ability to make me feel very close to some people because it is so casual. Plurk is amazing because at how quick the communication it. It is really communication in the now.
I know that I need to be willing to put times into communication. I would love to e-mail my friends again, but it is more effort than I have to give right now. I hate to think that these forms of communication are making me lazy.
I have been trying to label all my blog posts. With over 2800 blog posts it has been taking me over a year to do this. I am not really sure how many more I have to do before I am finished. Doing this I have found a lot of broken links. Lots of the stories that I posted blog entries about are no longer on the web.
This has effected my writing some. I am not trying to write entries that stand up even if the person does not follow the link. I need to be able to write entries that always make sense even if the links go away.
If the link does go away I might clean up the broken link, but I am not going to find the story someplace else. It is not worth my time.
I was looking in the referral logs of my blog. Most of my search referrals are currently image searches. I used to get all kinds of crazy searches that would find Sad Salvation because of written content. Now random people find me because of images. I am not sure why that is. Have Google text searches got better? Are people searching for fewer crazy things? Are images really what my blog is about?
I am not sure if this is good for my blog or not. I am not sure how to attract people who have never read it before. I am not sure that people that do not know me would even like reading it. I would love to be a big time blogger, but I am not sure this blog is going that direction.
Blogger is finally adding a feature that I have been wanting for year now. I now can schedule future posts. This means I can write a post on Sunday to have it appear on Monday. This feature makes me so happy. Why would I want this feature. Right now I am working on a daily series about flickr views. Before I had to go back every day and post if I get the post done early. Now I can set it and forget it. I am very happy with this.
Note: This was my test post to make sure it works correctly.
Gapingvoid did a webcomic about why he deleted his twitter account. This is interesting to me. Lately I have been less active on my blog. I know this has to do with being engaged. I spend a lot of time with Kate. Even when I am sitting at my computer, I cannot just whip up a good blog entry. It takes time and a lot of effort. What I want to say is just not on the top of my head. It takes a little drilling for me to get to.
I have a twitter account. It is an interesting communication tool and it is worth using for me. It just not the same as a blog. I spend much of my time just deleting messages. Most of the time I am using it on my phone. While it is entertaining, it really makes the rest of text messaging less useful to me.
Twitter at its best feels like a really good short blog, cutting through all the crap. The problem is that is rarely feels that way. Most of the time it is just people talking too much. It seems like less worth my time than reading blogs.
I am not sure if I stopped twittering I would write or read more blogs. Twitter is like a lot of web 2.0 things, I like it, but I will it was more useful.
I was looking at an old blog entry from back in 2002. Back then someone had the idea of doing a peer blog review. At that point the idea seemed fresh and new. Now I am not sure this idea would mean anything at all.
I will admit that when I started my blog and when blogs started to get well know, they seemed like something really important. Blogs seemed like a way to get the internet that seemed to go away as part of the Dot.Com boom. There seemed to be something special about the information you could get from blogs.
I am not sure why I keep this blog going. I like to write and it is good to have one place where I can collect my thoughts. Sad Salvation is a good place for me to collect those thoughts and share them with other people. I am no longer trying to drive traffic to my blog. If people find it okay, if they do not I am not going to worry. They can do what they want to read me, more power to them.
I am not sure what kind of response you would get to a Blog Peer Review project right now. Would you want MySpace blogs included? Would you want to include blogs where all people do are cut and paste memes? Would you exclude personal blogs? Would you only include blogs that have big reader bases? I am not sure how I would answer these questions.
Back in 1996 I remember a watching TV and seeing an "expert" talking about the future of the internet. The news reporter asked him about the future of web surfing. He said that he was not sure web surfing had a future. He said that the web was still new and we could not be sure what would happen. He was not sure that people would still be staying up all night surfing the web, going wherever links take up. It look he was right.
I am not trying to say that blogs are going away, but they are not as powerful as they were a few years ago. They seem to be left in the past some. I am not sure what I will think about blogs in the future, but they are not as important to me as they were in the past.
I would like to list this photo under deserves more views. I know the truth is that I should file it under: not as good at it could be.
I am thinking about starting a Photo Blog up. I am not sure if it is worth my time or not. I already have a flickr account. What would it mean to also have a photo blog? I am not sure it would be worth the time.
I am trying to figure out what realistic blogging goals for 2008 would be. I know that I will not be able to find the time to blog everyday. Between work and relationships, it is just not a good goal to set. I would fall behind and just about give up. That is not really what I want to do.
Should my goal to be to make three posts a week? Should I be looking for posts that will really be worth my time. I should be making posts that say something I want to say.
I will have to figure this one out. I would like to make a goal and meet it for at least 40 weeks next year.
I made a hand full of resolutions in 2007. I have been successful for most of them. One I just finished was blogging 150 photos. I think that blogging photos makes my blog more interesting and it makes me think about photography. Both of those things are good things.
If you want to see all the photos I have blogged this year they are in one place, you can look at my set on Flickr. They are in roughly the order I blogged them. I think it is cool to just look at that set.
Some days I feel this blog is nothing more than me looking at the back of my hand. I must admit that is what Twitter feels to me. Most of the Twitter messages I get are people saying, "Look How Cool I Am." I like some of them, but if you are twittering more than once hour every day you might want to rethink your twitter policy.
My blog has been feeling lonely lately. It is upset with me for treating it so poorly. It wants me to keep it up to date. It wants me to visit every day. It wants me to think about what I am posting. It wants more from me. The problem is that everything wants more of me. I only have so many hours in the day. I can only blog so much. I have to work, and live. Blogging seems far down the scale of things to do.
I am wondering if I should start over. Should I get rid of San Salvation and start a new blog. Maybe it is time to start something fresh. There are lots of things that have change about my life in the second half of 2007. Maybe a new blog should be one of them.
If you have been playing attention to my blog, you will notice I have been backdating for a while now. You will notice that most of my post are photo posts with very little content. I will admit to this. I have been backdating. I see nothing wrong with backdating. This is my place and I get to make up the rules. I know some people see this as dishonest, but I do not really care. I am only a K-list blogger and this is all about me.
To be honest, I have been very wrapped up in living my life. Finding things to actually write about would be very hard. I just do not have that much to say right now. Everything is about my job or my relationship. I really do not want to blog either of those things here.
For right now I will be backdating. The pain here is that my archive system is broken. Things do not show up there correctly. This change happened when Blogger added labels. I could ask Jeremy to try to fix it, but something tells me my $60 did not cover this.
Yes, I am back dating again. I know that some people do not like the idea of back dating in blogs. Why do I need to go into the past and back date entries. For some reason I really like to. That is why all these old entries are popping up.
I am not sure what backdating really means to me. I am really thinking about flickr and photos right now. It seems like the right way to get across what I am thinking about.
The other day I did a search for how many dead blogs are there? I am interested in this because I have been looking at old Sad Salvation entries. There are lots of blog entries I point to blogs that are no longer there. That made me think about dead blogs and extinct blogs. The difference between the two are is that dead blogs are still sitting there in cyberspace not being updated, extinct blogs are missing from cyberspace. I know I am making up these terms. I feel that dead blogs and extinct blogs are different from each other and should be seen that way. If you have better terms for these things let me know.
I found an blog post about dead blogs that points to an article about dead blogs. I think that both of these things are pretty interesting. There is no shame that the rate of growth of blogs has slowed. I think we have not entered the second phase for blogging yet. I think the story of blogs and the impact on society is far from over. I think that is the important thing. Even if there are a lot of dead blogs out there, what matters is that readers still find blogs to read.
Everything on the web should be permanent, but it is not. There are hosting fees and URL registration fees. If you do not keep those things up your blog will go away even after it is dead. The information can be lost. Now my blog points to sites that are no longer there.
Now, everything comes with a blog. Almost Every social network site has a blogging feature that goes along with it. Sites from MySpace, Last FM, to OK Cupid have blogs. I cannot create enough content for the blogs I already have. There is no way to create a new blog for every site I sign up for. As web 2.0 kicks in, a new phase of blogging is going to start. I think that this blogs are going to different than the last generation off blogs. I think the users will be less invested in them and they will go dead at a much faster rate. I also think there will be a lot more private friends only blogs with social network sites.
I think we will see more changes if micro blogging like Twitter catches on. I think we will see a different level of blogging. I think we do not know what changes that will bring.
Even if there are a lot of dead blogs, blogs are not going away. Even if the rate of growth of blogs have slowed, it does not mean the change created by blogs is going away. The promise of blogs is that anyone can get their message out there. If you are good enough people will read you. I think the Huffington Post is a great example of how blogs have changed the world. Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer did not have to create a magazine or get a show on a cable network to get their message out there. I think this revolution will not end even if the trend of everyone having a blog ends.
On the Sunday edition of the Mercury News there is a tease banner of 'Who Is Reading Your Blog?' The story is in the Perspective section. The column is about how people are obsessed with who is reading their blog, looking at their photos, watching their video, and visiting there myspace page. Views are one of the main currencies of the web. The numbers of views you get is the amount of attention we are getting.
I do not worry too much about who is reading Sad Salvation. I figured out a long time ago that I am a not going to be an A, B, or C-List blogger. I have always seen myself as a K-List blogger. My technorati rank is around 400,000 and I do not see it going up anytime soon. For whatever reason, I do not appeal to a mass audience. I know that people are reading it because I am getting comments from time to time.
I am obsessed about views when it comes to Flickr. Views are my main driver. I care that my median view does not drop. It has been slowly climbing this year. It seems to be stuck between 40 to 38. I have a group for photos that I think should have 100 views. For some reason I get the most reward out of people looking at my photos.
There is one quote in the story which I found interesting.
One concern, however, looms on the horizon for all those creators: In a world where everyone is busy churning out videos, blog entries, and podcasts (and counting the number of people who tune in), do we run the risk of having no one left to watch?
Yes, I spend much more time working on Sad Salvation than I do reading blogs. I spend much more time working on my photos than I send on looking at other people's photos. I am more focused on me than I am on other people. I guess that is part of why I like being a blogger.
Blogs are just like the rest of the world. In the same way they give us the chance to communicate with the rest of the world, they also give people the power to be jerks.
Outsiders often make the mistake of viewing blogs as the online equivalent of newspapers or magazines with newsrooms of reporters and managing editors reviewing copy, said Jeff Jarvis, a blogger and associate professor at the City University of New York's graduate school of journalism. They are not. "No one edits the Internet," Jarvis said. Traditional "media are things you sanitize, control and put a bow on." The Web is not.
The internet is like a huge cocktail party. Every once is communicating, telling stories, having fun. Of course there are loud jerks that want to shout everyone else down. If those jerks are not careful, other people will leave and they will just be communicating with each other. That is what bloggers have to be careful about.
I think it is time for me to turn my RSS feed back on. I turned it off because of a problem I was having with old entries. I am adding tags (Blogger calls them labels) to old entries and those old entries are showing up a new in my RSS feed. I turned off my RSS feed thinking I could pound out the old entries in a few weeks. With over 2400 entries, it was a larger job than I thought. I have not idea how many entries I have tagged, but it is less than half. The people who use my RSS feed will just have to put up with the Greatest Hits aspect of my blog for now. I will never everyone know when it is over, but it will be a while.
I have been looking the Sad Salvation referral logs. When I first started to blog I looked at them all the time. I even did posts about crazy ways people found my blog. There used to be a lot of crazy searches that pulled up Sad Salvation.
Now looking at my referral logs, 80% of the searches that find my blog are Image searches. Most of the images they find are old images, before I used flickr for my blog. It seems that some images are more popular than others. That is why I picked the flower tattoo for this post.
I know that many people do not link to my blog. Many of my readers have gone away since I turned off my RSS feed. It just wonder what it means that images are the most found thing about my blog. I have the feeling this is saying something about how people use the web is changing.
Today in the New York Times I see an article that asks, Is it too late to bring civility to the Web? All I can say is that some people need to get over themselves. It is sad that this question even needs to be asked. I would hope there is not a need for a code of conduct. I would hope that bloggers can conduct themselves, but if they cannot we might just need a code of conduct.
I want to say that if you comment on a blog, the person who owns that blog has the right to delete your comment, no matter what. The owner of the blog can delete your comment if they do not like the comment, think you use too many comma, or just don't like your last name. The blog owner is not stepping on your right to free speech. Your right to free speech is your right to link to that entry and make your blog post. that is where your right to free speech is.
I use a system where the comments only last three months anyway. I have always thought that comments are extra. They are an add on to the blog. If a comment is really good I will add it to my blog. I know that lots of people disagree with me.
On a friend's flickr post I saw a link to San Francisco Zine Fest. I have been thinking about zines for a while now. I wonder if zines still matter. Part of me think that zines are nostalgia or an anachronism for the most part. I get the feeling that the time for zines are past.
I am not usually someone who thinks that the internet has killed print media. I think that that it has changed the place in the world for some print media. Newspapers seem to be the most displaced. I think it has to do with the timeliness of the information. Newspapers seem old by the end of the day.
I feel that zines have been displaced by Blogs and Websites. When I was reading and writing zines (yes it was much more reading than writing) back in the early 1990's it felt like zines were the only way to get these messages out. There was no other way for people making zines to be published to the world.
Zines were a whole world of people expressing themselves that you have to look for. People had to put effort into finding zines they liked. It was not something like TV which is there no matter what you do. Zines seemed to be about finding voices like your own is a world that was filled with people who are not like you.
With blogs I guess I am not sure why people still make zines. I think it is much easier to connect with people who are not right around you. With the effort and money it takes to make a zine, is it really worth it. Are the people who wrote the good zines writing good blogs now?
When I went to the Seattle Central Library they had zines in the Teen area. Seeing these zines made me think about doing a zine. The problem is I am not sure how a zine would be different that just a mash-up of my blog and my flickr account. Could I make a zine that is worth reading? I am not sure what I would make a zine about.
I am turning off my RSS feed for a little while. I want to use the blogger label function to add tags to a lot of my old entries. The only way I can think to do this is to turn off my RSS feed. You will have visit Sad Salvation to get all of my blog goodness.
I have been reading all the archive post from Dial B for Blog. Dial B for Blog is no longer active, but it has a big archive. The writer has taken the character Robby Reed from the Dial H for Hero comic as his pen name. The blog mostly looks at old comics. At the start he did a lot of funny comparisons of different comics, but as it goes on the blog becomes more sincere.
I have been thinking about comics lately and the internet has just been making it worst. Wikipedia has a lot of good comics information. I have been able to find just about everything that I have been looking for there. There is a lot of good writing about comics on the internet. Most of the stuff that interests me right now is looking at stories about old comics.
Looking at Dial B for Blog made me look for the list of Public Domain Comic Book characters. There is part of me that would love to write a story with an old public domain comic book character. I would love to mine those old storied to make new stories. I think that is one of the powers of comics. I would love to write a story like that.
The story of the Egyptian Blogger getting jail time is very disturbing to me. Freedom of speech and freedom of press is the most important freedom to me. I understand that laws are different in different places. I understand not every culture is like my culture. I can see why people want their rules to fit where they live in the world.
My problem is I think speech is the most important thing in the world. Speech is the basis of thought. What is free will without free speech? It is meaningless without free speech. There is no other way I can put it. It is more important than I can even say.
I am not sure what I can do to change what happened in Egypt. I need to do something. It does not look like this situation is about to change right now. I am not even sure what our government could do to help him out. It is important to try.
I did not make any resolutions for 2006. It seems like I take some years off. I am not sure these are really resolutions. They are goals. I know that these are not that challenging. It still stuff I want to try to do this year.
Take a photography everyday Post at least 200 pre-2005 to Flickr Use my text messaging more. Use up all 500 of my monthly text messages at least once Blog at least 150 photos. Be open to the changes that come
I see things happen in the news and it takes me a few days to write about it. I wonder if the moment is already past by the time I get around to writing about it. It is really hard to know. I know that blogs are at the type of instant communication, but it takes me a while to come up with ideas. If I was not working full time I might be able to sit around and blog all the time.
I think there can be too much instant opinion in this day and age. I need a day or two to think about my arguments. I need time to write those arguments out. I need to time to think about events and what those events mean.
The problem is that the writing can stretch out why past the point where the event I am writing about is in the news. I find myself writing about things after everyone else has moved on. I wonder if anyone cares by the time I get to write about things.
I should not be too worried. I am not sure anyone cares about what I write about anyway. I should just try to say focused and write whenever I can.
I know that I should be putting more effort into my blog right now. I am getting a lot of extra readers from National Blog Posting Month. A lot of them are getting to by blog from the NaBloPoMo Randomizer. If my blog is not interesting the people finding my blog will not come back again in the future. I am just not sure I have anything interesting to say right now.
I just have no idea what to write. Since I do not know what to say, I will ask you to read my archives. I swear back there I have something worth reading back there. I am just not sure what you will find worth reading. Just give it a try. I have to go back to working on my novel.
Oh Crap I only have 25 minutes left to post a blog entry. I do not want to run out of time. I know that NaBloPoMo is getting me a lot of attention. I should be doing better posts. The problem is my novel is using all of my mental real estate right now.
As of today I have been writing and publishing Sad Salvation for five years. I am not sure if publishing is the right word for it, but I do not have a better word for it. It is hard for me to get my mind around the idea that I have been doing this for five years. It has become such a big part of my life while I have lived in San Jose. It is hard to remember living in San Jose and not writing Sad Salvation.
The funny thing is that much of my social scene is connected to Sad Salvation in one way or another. I have a whole collection of friends I have meet because of blogs and the internet. I think that is why Sad Salvation has lasted this long. I keep on doing it because it is easy for me to see the rewards.
A few things you may or may not know connected to Sad Salvation
- Invisible City had the first blog I ever read. - Sad Salvation started as a result of the 9/11 attacks - The End Of Summer Party was a blog my friends started to keep in touch with each other. It is long past gone. - The Zines I helped publish were, Senseless Banter, Read Our Minds, and Baggage. I was also published in a few other zines. - Super Karate Monkey Fist, Is my backup blog that I keep doing different things with. - Jeremy designed my current Sad Salvation look. - Vox, and LiveJournal are my other blog
If you want to know what is different now than five years ago you can read the archive. I know it has changed over that time. I should go back and read those entries to see who I have been over the last five years. It is not always easy to keep track of while you are living your life.
Here is a reprint of my first Sad Salvation entry. I hope you enjoy it.
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Welcome to Sad Salvation
I looked at my life a few years ago and thought about something. I was sitting at a coffee house thinking about starting a new zine. I was trying to rack my brain trying to figure out what I could personally publish that would be interesting for people to read. I was thinking of the zines that I had read recently. There was nothing that I was reading at the time that really excited me. Most of it was pretty meaning less.
I had read a decent number of zines. I have even published about a half dozen issues. I looked at what other people were writing. I found something incredibly personal in zines. They were a place where people could try to construct some kind of story about their lives. The zines I was reading at the time where unlike any of the other stories I was finding in the rest of the world.
Being 23 years old there was something really empowering about zines. I was right out of college and I seemed to be going nowhere in the world. All of my friends were facing the same situations. We were working at bookstores and restaurants. We were clerks and temps. We spent our time watching clocks and find ways to slack off. Zines seemed to be the best way to work out our artistic frustrations. Using the office copy machine to cut the cost of a zine was a natural thing to do.
I was sitting at this coffee shop and I was not 23 years any more. I was 27 years old and my friends were starting to find their way into careers. They were becoming teachers, designers, and engineers. It was my day off from a dot.com start up. The way my life was happening was slowly sinking in for me.
For most of my life, my friends have been the artist type. Growing up we would tell stories, dream up comic books, and talk about the kinds of movies we wanted to make. We were all writers at heart. As I went through my life, these were always the kinds of people that I became friends with. We were people who dreamt about making our impression on the world. We thought about big ideas and big ways to express them. The problem was that we were becoming regular people.
There is a whole generation of people that are just like me. People that in their heart see themselves as writers and artists, but their job does not reflect that. We are sitting around playing in bands for recreation. We write zines and web sites as an artist outlet. We keep on thinking that someday we will be able to break out and become a true artist.
In this light, writing a zine is Sad Salvation. It is not only our artistic salvation, but it is also salvation because it is what we value most in this world. I am not speaking about everyone. I am just talking about a type of person I seem to be close with. We are not starting families, we are not growing roots in a community, we are not working toward building specific lives for ourselves. I wonder if we will ever find that Salvation we are looking for.
It appears that that my photo, Somewhere around Thunderdome ended up on the Flickrotica blog. I find this to be funny. I am not sure if I could have got a photo on this blog if I tried. By not trying it was very easy to accomplish. I am not sure if I should hold this as a badge of honor or not.
I went to the San Jose Weblogger Meetup on Thursday. There were not that many people there, but we had a good time.
The writer of épanouie was there, but I cannot remember her name. I do remember that she has only been blogging for a week and she is an Astros fan. I am not sure how long the average blog lasts, but I hope she keeps it up.
Stephanie was talking about all the attenion she got about her entry How to explain RSS the Oprah way. I think this is more of a sign if you use Oprah's name to something it explodes. I am wondering if people my age are naming there daughers Oprah.
At the meeting that asked for people to think about topics that would get more people to show up. Here we go with a few things
Conversation Topics: How do LJ, MySpace, and Vox fit into the blogging world Guest topic: Demographics of Blogging -Who is writing and reading blogs Blogging Tool: Technorati What has worked well for me: Guest Bloggers and Sweeps Week
I read some blogs and blog columnist say they were disappointed at Apple that iTunes 7 does not have HD support. They want shows and movies in at least 1080i resolution. Whenever asked about download bandwidth and time constraints, they say that Apple should use BitTorrent or a system like it. I hear people all the time talk about BitTorrent like it is free bandwidth.
Could a commercial service like Apple's iTunes Music Story use a shared distribution system successfully? I am not sure what the technical barriers to this would be. My guess is that it would not be as easy as it seems. Even if it was really easy, I am not sure what kind of customer experence it would be. I am not sure a technology like BitTorrent would support the kind of business Apple or Amazon wants to build.
I am not sure if anyone cares or not, but I have started a mostly music blog over at Vox. I can upload MP3s and they stream from the Vox site. I like being able to share music with other people. I was telling my sister Kathy that the internet has made me more interested in Music. I like it not because I can read things like Pitchfork media. I like it because I can read what people like me think about music.
I am so blogging this. I always love this shirt. It is like telling people that the security camera is recording their every move. Yet I did not read one thing on Daemonlip blog from this meeting.
My vacation has been over since Wednesday. I have still been recovering with all that time. I think after this weekend I will be back to my normal self. I still have some Comic Con photos to sort through and post. I am really behind when it comes to posting photos to Flickr. I have a lot of non-Comic Con Vacation photos to sort through. For right now you can check out my Comic Con 2006, Women in Costume, and Summer Vacation 06 Sets.
I still have a lot to write about from vacation. I will apologize now to the people who expect my life to be up to date in my blog. I am going to write a lot of entries about what has been happening over the last couple of weeks. I know that my writing will not totally be in order. That is just one of the things you will have to put up with.
I think I am going to blog as many photos as I have good stories for. I took over 1000 photos at Comic Con and over 1000 photos on the rest of my vacation. I think I need to put some of those photos to a little more use than just posting them to flickr.
I am really falling behind with blogging about my vacation. I will catch up later. In the mean time you can see some of my moblogging at vox and my photos at Flickr. I will catch up later.
I just signed up for a Vox account. I am not sure what I am going to do with it. I already have a blog, a backup blog, LiveJournal, myspace, and Yahoo 360 account. You would think I already have enough places to blog. I guess I feel like I always need more. I know it is because I want to be there before it becomes big. If it turns out to be the next big thing, I want to be there before it is over. I had a Flickr account for almost a year before I started using it.
Vox has a lot of cool features. I can hook it right into my flickr account to make uploading photos easy. It also makes it easy for me to blog about music. I could make this my blog about music. That would be pretty cool.
I am not sure where all of these blogging services are going. I am not sure if I should cross post things or use every post for a different reason. I just wish I had enough time to keep all these blogs up to date.
I have an invite to share if anyone wants to try Vox. Just let me know.
As anyone looking at my flickr account can see, I have been thinking a blog about photography lately. The newness of my new camera has not worn off. At this rate the newness may not go away for months. It is so cool and I love the kind of pictures I can take with it.
Having this camera makes me want to take lots of photos. I have been averaging 50 photos a day since I got it. That is a lot of photos. Some of them are good, some are no better than my old camera, and some of them just stink. I am taking a lot of photos so I can learn how to use this camera.
I also take a lot of photos because I am looking around more. I spent some money on this camera (and camera accessories) and I want to get the most out of it. It is also very enjoyable to use the camera. In cases where I used to take just one or two photos, I am now taking ten photos.
Now that I am taking so many more photos, I am not sure what I should do on flickr. Up to this point I have seen myself as a journaling photographer. I was just taking pictures of my day to day life to share with everyone. I was not worried about the limits of my camera or my skills. I was just working with what I could.
With my new camera I can take some better photos. One out of every 50 or so look really good. I have noticed that most of my flickr friends who are really good post very few photos. To make those photos stand out you limit how many you post. Maybe you post everyday but you only post one photo.
But there are thousands of really good photographers on flickr right now. There is only one person living my life. If I quite posting the photos of my everyday life, I might lose what makes me special on Flickr.
I guess I need to figure out what I want out of flickr. Do I want it to be about my life or do I want it to be about my photography. I can keep on posting the good pictures, but they will be lost amount the flood of all the other photos I am posting.
I know that my good photos are not what get the most views. Views are about lots of funny things. All of the sudden all of my photos of laptops have over 1000 views.
I have no idea how to messure what people like about my flickr photos.
For Blog Sweeps Week I would like to have some guest bloggers on Sad Salvation. It would be cool if other people would write some entries for me. If anyone out there is interested please let me know. I have a couple of people lined up, but I need some more.
A friend of mine suggested that I kick off Blog Sweeps Week with a redesign of Sad Salvation. That is a good idea. The problem is that I really do not know enough about HTML or graphic design to do a good job. I got this design by paying a friend a few years ago. I do not have the cash to do that now. At that time I was lucking because I was on vacation when I paid him and I just took the money out of my vacation budget.
I do not have the skills or the money to get Sad Salvation redesigned. That means that I would have to depend on the kindness of others to get my web site redesigned. I really do not seeing this happening in the next couple of weeks. I guess I will have to just keep the design that I have right now.
Smile Originally uploaded by earthdog. We had our first South Bay/Silicon Valley Blogger meetup of the year on Tuesday. What sticks out in my mind the most is that Elke announced that she turned off her RSS feed. I admire her for that. Some people gave her a hard time because they only read the blogs that show up in their RSS Reader. She wants people to come to her website. If the medium is the message, the message changes when it goes thought an RSS reader.
I was at the San Jose blogger meetup and Antwon had the bet line I heard in a long time. "That is why I have two boxes next to my bed. One for condoms and one for affidavits. I wonder what we were talking about.
My archive is currently broken. I do not recall making any changes that would brake it. I do not remember any changes at all. This pisses me off, but I am not sure how to fix it. Anyone have any ideas?
I was switched over to the updated blogger interface a few days ago. I have been trying it out with all supported Mac browsers, IE, Safari, and Mozilla. I have to say that Mozilla is my favorite. I did not have that much of an issue with the old interface. The Mozilla interface keeps much of what I liked. This most likely will make Mozilla my default browser for most things now.
I do not concede myself a journalist. I do not think that there is a bloggers code of ethics that people try to stick to. I know that I try to not state anything as fact unless it can be backed up. I am happy that I do not have to offer Right to Reply on my web site. I do have comment boxes, but I do not think that is enough. I think that I agree with Declan McCullagh on this issue.
Quick! Before you get a chance to think about it. Why do you keep a weblog? Give me the off the top or your head answer.
Now take a moment and think. Think about what you keep on logging on everyday. Think about why you keep on updating things. Think about why you even have a web page to begin with.
I was reading a web article that made me think about all these things. My off the top of my head answer is because I have to write something. I might as well put it on the web. If I do not write things I start to feel hollow inside. I would like someone to read it.
After I think about it, I have a weblog because there has to be something good one the web. I do not want the web to be just a mall I can shop from at work. I do not want every web page to be owned by a company. I think it is important that people are out there. Right now the most interesting thing I can do is weblog. I think that is true for most people.
I am looking back at the picture I posted an hour ago. I wonder if I am abusing this woman's image. There are two arguments. The first is that she posted her picture on the internet. She should know that when you post something like this you are releasing it to the whole world. The second is that she put her picture up for a specific purpose. I had to dig pretty deep to find it. I am out of bounds to use it for my weblog.
I want to know what other people think. How would you feel if you found a picture of yourself on someone else's weblog? Someone you do not know?
It is 2:20 AM. I have been sitting at my computer for about two hours not writing. I am not even starting to get tired yet. I feel that I have at least another hour or two in the tank. I have ideas to write about and focus. I have a sense of the world, that is something that I have been missing a lot lately.
The problem is that it is 2:20 AM. I need to be in work in 7 hours. I need to get some sleep tonight. If I go much longer, I will not be able to get up tomorrow morning. It is sad that I need to choose work over writing. It is sad that I do not have this kind of focus earlier in the day. I will have to work on improving my focus. It is the biggest thing missing from my writing currently.
It is 2:30 right now and I think I will be going to bed.
I love clicking on the 'The 10 most recently published blogs' on the Blogger home page. Some of them have just great titles. One of the recent ones I saw was He Said, She Said. Nothing has really been published on this blog yet. I see new blogs from time to time and I wonder if they are ever going to turn into anything. I want to keep my eye on this one. I want to see if they do anything with it.
I really like the idea of doing a blog with a small number of people and discussing subjects. Does anyone out there like this idea. Do you think you could write something at least three times a week that we could kick around. Tell me if you think we could start one.
I am finally out of backdate hell. I have caught up to real time. I no longer have to worry about getting entries from the past in before going forward. We will see if I can pull that out. In the last two days I have caught up from June 7 to today. You will have to hit a couple of archive pages to not miss anything.
I want to try to write an entry everyday in July without backdating any of them.
Blogger has improved its archiving system. I am no longer limited by the week I used blogger. It will not publish archives going as far back as I want. I am importing all of my old Blog 5.0 entries to Blogger now. All of Sad Salvation can be in one place. If you give me a while everything will be in one place. I can work to shut down my old web site. It is nice to have everything in the same place. I wonder if I should put any of my pre-blog journal on-line.
I have decided to get rid of my the Travel-Blogue. I needed to clip a little disk space and I have not been using it. It seemed like it was just going to waste. All of the entries have been folded back into Sad Salvation. I would think about doing it again if I was planing on traveling with another person. Are of my travels in the near future will be solo. It was a good idea, I just was not keeping it up.
