Amatomu's slogan used to be "The South African blogosphere, sorted."
Well, now it has become unsorted, because Amatomu no longer seems to work. To "unravel" means to pull a knitted garment apart so that all you have is separate strands of wool, and you can no longer see the pattern or shape of the garment, or even the garment itself. It has gone.
And one by one the tools that I used to use to find interesting blogs have gone, or become unusable.
The first to go was Technorati. It's still there, I think, but it's no longer useful. It used to have tags that found blog posts with particular topic tags, but that no longer works. It's become a thinly disguised advertising gimmick.
The next to go was Blog Catalog. That's still there, but some whiz kid who had never heard of the old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" decided to "improve" it. Now it no longer works.
Then it was the turn of MyBlogLog. Yahoo! bought it as a successful running concern from the original developers, and then pulled the plug on it. Yahoo! does that a lot. They did it with Geocities, they did it with Webrings, and they did it with MyBlogLog.
MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog were social blogrolling sites. They allowed each person to sort the blogosphere according to their own preference, but in such a way that others could see them and join in, the theory being that if you liked someone's blog, you might like the blogs they liked, and the people who liked their blog might like yours. Since those two disappeared from the scene, I've lost contact with a whole bunch of blogs that I used to read, and I missed them. I found some again and put them in my blogroll, but that doesn't tell me how often the writers of those blogs visit my blog, as MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog used to do.
But there was still Amatomu for South African blogs. You could see who had posted what recently, and which recent articles were most popular and so on. But now even that's gone.
There's still Afrigator, but I've never understood its user inferface, and no matter how much time I spend on it I never seem to find anything I'm looking for.
Occasionally someone comments on my blog, and I think, hey, I used to read your blog, but I haven't seen it for a long time, and now I no longer know how to find it.
It's all rather sad.
And when I say it's sad people say, you must move on... move on to Facebook and imbibe popular culture and immerse yourself in banal and trivial stuff like "What my friends think I do, what my mom thinks I do, what my boss thinks I do" and so on.
Blogging's better, but it's getting harder to find the good blogs.
Showing posts with label social blogrolling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social blogrolling. Show all posts
18 February 2012
03 September 2011
End of blogrolling, end of blogging?
This morning I got a message about a new comment on my blog, so I went to have a look at it, and my blog vanished. There was just a message saying that the page could not be displayed and I must contact the administrator.
The comment I tried to look at was from "Anonymous", so, thinking it might contain some malicious redirecting code, I deleted it.
But still the blog would not display. I went to the Blogger forums and found that others had had similar problems, which appeared to be caused by blogrolling widgets. They either had bugs, or were being hacked, it seemed.
So I deleted all the blogtolling widgets.
But now my blog is isolated.
It was bad enough when MyBlogLog disappeared, and BlogCatalog was "improved" so that it became almost useless. But I still had blogrolls of blogs I liked to read, and I could see when they were updated, and so could read new posts on them.
But now I've had to remove them too.
Someone really does seem to be out to kill blogs and blogging.
I liked to read "The poor mouth", but can't remember the URL, and the same with lots of other blogs.
The comment I tried to look at was from "Anonymous", so, thinking it might contain some malicious redirecting code, I deleted it.
But still the blog would not display. I went to the Blogger forums and found that others had had similar problems, which appeared to be caused by blogrolling widgets. They either had bugs, or were being hacked, it seemed.
So I deleted all the blogtolling widgets.
But now my blog is isolated.
It was bad enough when MyBlogLog disappeared, and BlogCatalog was "improved" so that it became almost useless. But I still had blogrolls of blogs I liked to read, and I could see when they were updated, and so could read new posts on them.
But now I've had to remove them too.
Someone really does seem to be out to kill blogs and blogging.
I liked to read "The poor mouth", but can't remember the URL, and the same with lots of other blogs.
25 April 2011
Farewell to MyBlogLog friends
I suppose it's time to say goodbye to my MyBlogLog friends.
MyBlogLog provided the little widget that showed who had visited my blog, and, if they were themselves bloggers, provided a link back to their blogs. I've spent many hours surfing blogs that way -- following someone who visited my blog, and then someone who had visited their blog and so on. If one wanted to visit a blog again, one could join that blog's "community" and have a list of them, so it was a form of social blogrolling. You could have your own blogroll, but also see other people's blogrolls on MyBlogLog, and I've found many interesting blogs in that way.
But that's all ending on 21 May, since MyBlogLog was taken over by Yahoo, and Yahoo have announced that they are killing it on that date. So on the right is the "in memoriam" of what the MyBlogLog widget used to look like, frozen in time, something to remember it by, a preserved piece of blogging history.
Tomorrow we'll be going away on holiday, and by the time we get back, MyBlogLog will be gone, so the time to say goodbye is now. I may add some of the blogs I used to visit on MyBlogLog to my regular blogroll, but I'll probably forget some of them, and so will tend to lose touch. While we are on holiday I may ocassionally manage to post something at a wireless hotspot, but the places where one accesses those are not usually conducive to blog surfing.
There is also BlogCatalog, which was similar to MyBlogLog, but it was revamped about six months ago, to make it more difficult to navigate and use, and most of its functionality has gone. I'll leave the widget up while it still works, but I won't click through to the BlogCatalog site much, because even though some of the stuff is still there, it's very difficult, if not impossible to find any more.
Perhaps some of my MyBlogLog contacts will still visit my blogs, but I'll never know if they have done so unless they leave comments. So farewell, Adios, Hamba kahle -- maybe we'll see each other again, maybe not.
MyBlogLog provided the little widget that showed who had visited my blog, and, if they were themselves bloggers, provided a link back to their blogs. I've spent many hours surfing blogs that way -- following someone who visited my blog, and then someone who had visited their blog and so on. If one wanted to visit a blog again, one could join that blog's "community" and have a list of them, so it was a form of social blogrolling. You could have your own blogroll, but also see other people's blogrolls on MyBlogLog, and I've found many interesting blogs in that way.
But that's all ending on 21 May, since MyBlogLog was taken over by Yahoo, and Yahoo have announced that they are killing it on that date. So on the right is the "in memoriam" of what the MyBlogLog widget used to look like, frozen in time, something to remember it by, a preserved piece of blogging history.Tomorrow we'll be going away on holiday, and by the time we get back, MyBlogLog will be gone, so the time to say goodbye is now. I may add some of the blogs I used to visit on MyBlogLog to my regular blogroll, but I'll probably forget some of them, and so will tend to lose touch. While we are on holiday I may ocassionally manage to post something at a wireless hotspot, but the places where one accesses those are not usually conducive to blog surfing.
There is also BlogCatalog, which was similar to MyBlogLog, but it was revamped about six months ago, to make it more difficult to navigate and use, and most of its functionality has gone. I'll leave the widget up while it still works, but I won't click through to the BlogCatalog site much, because even though some of the stuff is still there, it's very difficult, if not impossible to find any more.
Perhaps some of my MyBlogLog contacts will still visit my blogs, but I'll never know if they have done so unless they leave comments. So farewell, Adios, Hamba kahle -- maybe we'll see each other again, maybe not.
25 February 2011
Dead: social blogrolling
Yet another Yahoo! service bites the dust.
I received the following e-mail from Yahoo!
The other social blogrolling service, BlogCatalog, became quite unusable about 5-6 months ago, so that's the end of that. I wonder if it's a sign that blogging itself is in decline?
Yahoo! has a long history of taking over useful online services and then abandoning them. First it was Webring, then Geocities, and now MyBlogLog. That means that the last useful service they maintain is their listserver, Yahoogroups. It's also something they took over from someone else, an outfit called e-Groups. If they abandon that, there'll be nothing left that will make it worth remaining a member of Yahoo!
I received the following e-mail from Yahoo!
We will officially discontinue Yahoo! MyBlogLog effective May 24, 2011. Your agreement with Yahoo!, to the extent that it applies to the Yahoo! MyBlogLog, will terminate on May 24, 2011.
The other social blogrolling service, BlogCatalog, became quite unusable about 5-6 months ago, so that's the end of that. I wonder if it's a sign that blogging itself is in decline?
Yahoo! has a long history of taking over useful online services and then abandoning them. First it was Webring, then Geocities, and now MyBlogLog. That means that the last useful service they maintain is their listserver, Yahoogroups. It's also something they took over from someone else, an outfit called e-Groups. If they abandon that, there'll be nothing left that will make it worth remaining a member of Yahoo!
21 November 2010
Entropy in the blogosphere: the disintegration of social networking
One of the good things I have found about blogging is that one can find people interested in similar things and exchange ideas with them. There are various tools, like blogrolls, for finding bloggers who say interesting things.
In the past I've found social blogrolling tools, like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, useful for this. But both have recently become considerably less useful, though for quite different reasons. BlogCatalog, as I noted in a recent post, recently decided to change the way it looks and works, and shot itself in the foot. With its reduced functionality it is almost useless.
MyBlogLog continues to function, and it is the behaviour of users that is the problem.
Both of them had little widgets (or "gadgets" as Blogger calls them) that you can put in the sidebar to show who visited your blog. And that is a reminder to me to visit their blogs. OK, some people don't show up there because they read blogs through RSS feeds. But others don't show up there because they have taken themselves out of MyBlogLog entirely, though their blogs remain there like orphaned children.
Here are some of the abandoned ones:
Bishop Alan's blog
The Stroppy Rabbit
Calum Carr's take on... whatever
Some are still there, but have removed the widget from their own blogs:
Skewed view
Conjectural navel gazing: Jesus in lint form
The poor mouth
While others never bothered to put the widget on in the first place.
The trouble with that is that it makes it more difficult to surf from blog to blog -- I visit the blog of someone who has recently visited me, move on to someone who has recently visited them, and so on. But with the widget gone, there's nowhere to go but back. So I'm beginning to feel constricted, as if the number of options is shrinking. It's all rather sad.
On my family history blog I discovered that most of those who visited (as shown on MyBlogLog) were not interested in family history or genealogy, and some were just spammers. But in that field someone revived an old device -- the web-ring. Web-rings let you surf from site to site following a similar theme. The problem with static web pages was that once you had seen them all, you had seen them all. Great for new visitors, but not for people who had seen all the sites. With dynamic web sites, like blogs, however, it is ideal. Each time you visit there is likely to be new content. So perhaps things are not so bad after all. I just have to find a web-ring for this blog, which is such a mixture of stuff it is difficult to fit into any category at all. So, goodbye BlogCatalog, hello blogrings.
In the past I've found social blogrolling tools, like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, useful for this. But both have recently become considerably less useful, though for quite different reasons. BlogCatalog, as I noted in a recent post, recently decided to change the way it looks and works, and shot itself in the foot. With its reduced functionality it is almost useless.
MyBlogLog continues to function, and it is the behaviour of users that is the problem.
Both of them had little widgets (or "gadgets" as Blogger calls them) that you can put in the sidebar to show who visited your blog. And that is a reminder to me to visit their blogs. OK, some people don't show up there because they read blogs through RSS feeds. But others don't show up there because they have taken themselves out of MyBlogLog entirely, though their blogs remain there like orphaned children.
Here are some of the abandoned ones:
Bishop Alan's blog
The Stroppy Rabbit
Calum Carr's take on... whatever
Some are still there, but have removed the widget from their own blogs:
Skewed view
Conjectural navel gazing: Jesus in lint form
The poor mouth
While others never bothered to put the widget on in the first place.
The trouble with that is that it makes it more difficult to surf from blog to blog -- I visit the blog of someone who has recently visited me, move on to someone who has recently visited them, and so on. But with the widget gone, there's nowhere to go but back. So I'm beginning to feel constricted, as if the number of options is shrinking. It's all rather sad.
On my family history blog I discovered that most of those who visited (as shown on MyBlogLog) were not interested in family history or genealogy, and some were just spammers. But in that field someone revived an old device -- the web-ring. Web-rings let you surf from site to site following a similar theme. The problem with static web pages was that once you had seen them all, you had seen them all. Great for new visitors, but not for people who had seen all the sites. With dynamic web sites, like blogs, however, it is ideal. Each time you visit there is likely to be new content. So perhaps things are not so bad after all. I just have to find a web-ring for this blog, which is such a mixture of stuff it is difficult to fit into any category at all. So, goodbye BlogCatalog, hello blogrings.
06 November 2010
BlogCatalog loses functionality
BlogCatalog used to be a halfway decent social blogrolling tool until a couple of months ago.
Then someone who had never heard the old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" decided to fiddle with it, and as a result it's lost a lot of its functionality. Instead of doing what it used to do quite well, it's now trying to do what Twitter does, and does it very badly indeed.
We've already got Twitter. We don't need a third-rate imitation.
And now we no longer have BlogCatalog. Or at least we have it in a very truncated and crippled form.
The part that still works is the widget that shows who's visited this blog.
Oh, and the messages from people who don't visit my blog, but still tell me they want to be my "friend". That I could do without.
What's missing is all the features that made it useful for finding interesting blogs to read.
What used to happen was that I would click on one of the people who visited my blog, and get to see their blog, if they have one, and then some blogs that were similar to theirs, chosen by some mysterious algorithm that seemed to work, more often than not, to show some interesting blog. But that's gone now.
There was also a facility for creating groups or communities of bloggers with a common interest, so that you could see a group of blogs that deal with a topic you were interested in. No longer.
You can't find blogs that you are interested in. You can only find blogs that the people at Blog Catalog want to show you because the blog owners have paid them to do so. In other words, it's become a vast junkmail advertising site. Instead of opening your horizons to the wider blogging world, it now tries to rub your nose in stuff you aren't remotely interested in.
I really don't mind if sites like BlogCatalog have banner ads, or better still, discreetly-placed ads. I know someone has to pay for the service they provide. But when they stop providing the service, I think fewer and fewer people will be using it. I'm certainly spending a lot more time in it than I used to. There's nothing to see there any more.
They should go back to doing what they did well, instead of trying to do what Twitter does, and doing it badly.
Then someone who had never heard the old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" decided to fiddle with it, and as a result it's lost a lot of its functionality. Instead of doing what it used to do quite well, it's now trying to do what Twitter does, and does it very badly indeed.
We've already got Twitter. We don't need a third-rate imitation.
And now we no longer have BlogCatalog. Or at least we have it in a very truncated and crippled form.
The part that still works is the widget that shows who's visited this blog.
Oh, and the messages from people who don't visit my blog, but still tell me they want to be my "friend". That I could do without.
What's missing is all the features that made it useful for finding interesting blogs to read.
What used to happen was that I would click on one of the people who visited my blog, and get to see their blog, if they have one, and then some blogs that were similar to theirs, chosen by some mysterious algorithm that seemed to work, more often than not, to show some interesting blog. But that's gone now.
There was also a facility for creating groups or communities of bloggers with a common interest, so that you could see a group of blogs that deal with a topic you were interested in. No longer.
You can't find blogs that you are interested in. You can only find blogs that the people at Blog Catalog want to show you because the blog owners have paid them to do so. In other words, it's become a vast junkmail advertising site. Instead of opening your horizons to the wider blogging world, it now tries to rub your nose in stuff you aren't remotely interested in.
I really don't mind if sites like BlogCatalog have banner ads, or better still, discreetly-placed ads. I know someone has to pay for the service they provide. But when they stop providing the service, I think fewer and fewer people will be using it. I'm certainly spending a lot more time in it than I used to. There's nothing to see there any more.
They should go back to doing what they did well, instead of trying to do what Twitter does, and doing it badly.
05 June 2009
Who is Raymond A. Foss?
Who is Raymond A. Foss -- or, What is "community"?
Whenever I look at the social blogrolling site MyBlogLog, I see the footprint of Raymond A. Foss, who seems to be a member of the "community" of every single Christian blog registered with MyBlogLog.
If you look at his profile page you can see that he is in fact a member of 2487 "communities" on MyBlogLog, and that he has 5629 family, friends and contacts.
But when I visit the blogs whose "communities" I am a member of, I hardly ever see Raymond A. Foss among the "Recent Visitors" to those blogs.
A few months ago my wife was watching a TV programme, I think on the BBC, called The human footprint, which was about the effect that the average human being has on their environment over their lifetime, and one of the things they noted was that the average inhabitant of the British Isles knew about 1750 people in the course of their life.
I decided to try to make a list of all the people I've known -- family, friends, colleagues at work, casual acquaintances. I include people I've met and that I remember having had conversations with, even if I've only met them once or twice. I've got nearly 700 listed for far. I don't do this all the time, just in odd moments while waiting the kettle to boil for coffee and times like that.
The idea of someone having 5269 friends and contacts just boggles the mind. And especially since Ramond A. Foss never seems to interact most of the people that he has listed in this way, or with the blog "communities" he has joined.
Raymond A. Foss is not the only one, however.
Another one who joined a lot of Christian blog communities and then rarely or never visited them is Called2Bless.
I mention these two because I keep seeing their pictures (avatars) every day, in the "communities" they have joined, but rarely if ever interact with.
And things like this make me wonder what is community, and what do people think it means?
It's not confined to MyBlogLog, but can be found on every social networking site. Several times a week I get e-mails from people who claim to have seen my profile, and say that they want to be my friend, and ask me to send a photo. I usually just delete them unread. If they really wanted to be my friend, they would read my blogs, and write intelligent comments on some of the articles, and it would become clear that we have at least some common interests, something to talk about.
Over the last 20 years I have had several "friends" I have made through electronic networking, through BBSs, and later Usenet and the Internet. Some of them I have never met in the flesh, but have kept in touch with them for 10, 15 or 20 years. In some cases I have met them, and we've continued our electronic conversations face to face. In that way there is a community, a network of friends and relationships, because there is interaction between people. And its those kinds of relationships that social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are designed to foster and facilitate. But some people seem to want to call "friends" people they have never met and show no desire to communicate with.
Another example of this false "community" and false "friendship", where people claim friendship with not communication or interaction comes from another social blogrolling site, BlogCatalog.
BlogCatalog has an equivalent of MyBlogLog's "communities", which it calls "favorites" (and used to call "neighbourhoods"). These are blogs that you want to mark for return visits.
But it also has "groups", for people who share common interests.
I recently started a group there for Orthodox Christian bloggers, because I looked for such a group and didn't find one, and thought it might make it easier to maintain contact with people who share a common interest. Soon after it started shamirdevnath joined. Shamir Devnath does not appear to be an Orthodox Christian, and his blog did not appear to have any recent posts on Orthodox Christianity, so I rejected his membership. Three days later he joined again, so I banned him. Shamir Devnath belongs to 1217 groups on BlogCatalog. I've no idea what the average size of a group on BlogCatalog is, but the Orthodox Christian bloggers group has 10 members so far, though it is fairly new, so more may join. But if all those 1217 groups had an average of 10 people, that's 12170 people. How can someone like Shamirdevnath relate to so many people? As far as I can see, it's impossible. So why is he (and again, there are many others like him) so keen to join groups in which he clearly has no interest, and has no desire to interact with?
Also on BlogCatalog I get e-mails several times a week telling me that so-and-so has added me as their friend. Half of them are people I have never heard of, never interacted with. According to the BlogCatalog widget, they've never even looked at any of my blogs, much less commented on the posts. Why on earth do they want to add me as their "friend", when I don't know them, and they don't know me, and apparently don't even want to know me. If they wanted to know me, at least they could read my blog.
Back to MyBlogLog: soon after I joined, they introduced a new feature -- that members could send a message to all the members of the community of their blog.
There was an outcry from some people, who complained that they would be inundated by "spam". The loudest squeals came from someone who had joined over 9000 "communities", but if they didn't want communication from them, why did they join them in the first place?
Don't get me wrong -- I like social blogrolling sites like BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. I wish all the blogs I am interested in would join them, because it would make it easier to keep track of ones that deal with topics I am interested in. But when people join communities they have no interest in, it dilutes the usefulness. If everyone joins everything, there is no point in anyone joining anything.
What kind of world do we live in, where people want to join groups that they have no interest in, where they want to call people their "friends", but have no communication with them?
The kinds of things I have mentioned above indicate to me that we live in a seriously dysfunctional society, and this dysfuction is not confined to one country or one group of countries, or one culture, but seems spread throughout the world.
Nearly twenty years ago someone wrote "The Rushdie affair showed how dangerous is the present stage of global development - a stage of communication without community" (Anderson, Walter Truett. 1990. Reality isn't what it used to be. San Francisco: Harper. p. 241).
That was a book about postmodernity.
But now we seem to have reached post-postmodernity, where we have reached an even more dangerous stage -- a stage of community without communication.
Whenever I look at the social blogrolling site MyBlogLog, I see the footprint of Raymond A. Foss, who seems to be a member of the "community" of every single Christian blog registered with MyBlogLog.
If you look at his profile page you can see that he is in fact a member of 2487 "communities" on MyBlogLog, and that he has 5629 family, friends and contacts.
But when I visit the blogs whose "communities" I am a member of, I hardly ever see Raymond A. Foss among the "Recent Visitors" to those blogs.
A few months ago my wife was watching a TV programme, I think on the BBC, called The human footprint, which was about the effect that the average human being has on their environment over their lifetime, and one of the things they noted was that the average inhabitant of the British Isles knew about 1750 people in the course of their life.
I decided to try to make a list of all the people I've known -- family, friends, colleagues at work, casual acquaintances. I include people I've met and that I remember having had conversations with, even if I've only met them once or twice. I've got nearly 700 listed for far. I don't do this all the time, just in odd moments while waiting the kettle to boil for coffee and times like that.
The idea of someone having 5269 friends and contacts just boggles the mind. And especially since Ramond A. Foss never seems to interact most of the people that he has listed in this way, or with the blog "communities" he has joined.
Raymond A. Foss is not the only one, however.
Another one who joined a lot of Christian blog communities and then rarely or never visited them is Called2Bless.
I mention these two because I keep seeing their pictures (avatars) every day, in the "communities" they have joined, but rarely if ever interact with.
And things like this make me wonder what is community, and what do people think it means?
It's not confined to MyBlogLog, but can be found on every social networking site. Several times a week I get e-mails from people who claim to have seen my profile, and say that they want to be my friend, and ask me to send a photo. I usually just delete them unread. If they really wanted to be my friend, they would read my blogs, and write intelligent comments on some of the articles, and it would become clear that we have at least some common interests, something to talk about.
Over the last 20 years I have had several "friends" I have made through electronic networking, through BBSs, and later Usenet and the Internet. Some of them I have never met in the flesh, but have kept in touch with them for 10, 15 or 20 years. In some cases I have met them, and we've continued our electronic conversations face to face. In that way there is a community, a network of friends and relationships, because there is interaction between people. And its those kinds of relationships that social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are designed to foster and facilitate. But some people seem to want to call "friends" people they have never met and show no desire to communicate with.
Another example of this false "community" and false "friendship", where people claim friendship with not communication or interaction comes from another social blogrolling site, BlogCatalog.
BlogCatalog has an equivalent of MyBlogLog's "communities", which it calls "favorites" (and used to call "neighbourhoods"). These are blogs that you want to mark for return visits.
But it also has "groups", for people who share common interests.
I recently started a group there for Orthodox Christian bloggers, because I looked for such a group and didn't find one, and thought it might make it easier to maintain contact with people who share a common interest. Soon after it started shamirdevnath joined. Shamir Devnath does not appear to be an Orthodox Christian, and his blog did not appear to have any recent posts on Orthodox Christianity, so I rejected his membership. Three days later he joined again, so I banned him. Shamir Devnath belongs to 1217 groups on BlogCatalog. I've no idea what the average size of a group on BlogCatalog is, but the Orthodox Christian bloggers group has 10 members so far, though it is fairly new, so more may join. But if all those 1217 groups had an average of 10 people, that's 12170 people. How can someone like Shamirdevnath relate to so many people? As far as I can see, it's impossible. So why is he (and again, there are many others like him) so keen to join groups in which he clearly has no interest, and has no desire to interact with?
Also on BlogCatalog I get e-mails several times a week telling me that so-and-so has added me as their friend. Half of them are people I have never heard of, never interacted with. According to the BlogCatalog widget, they've never even looked at any of my blogs, much less commented on the posts. Why on earth do they want to add me as their "friend", when I don't know them, and they don't know me, and apparently don't even want to know me. If they wanted to know me, at least they could read my blog.
Back to MyBlogLog: soon after I joined, they introduced a new feature -- that members could send a message to all the members of the community of their blog.
There was an outcry from some people, who complained that they would be inundated by "spam". The loudest squeals came from someone who had joined over 9000 "communities", but if they didn't want communication from them, why did they join them in the first place?
Don't get me wrong -- I like social blogrolling sites like BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. I wish all the blogs I am interested in would join them, because it would make it easier to keep track of ones that deal with topics I am interested in. But when people join communities they have no interest in, it dilutes the usefulness. If everyone joins everything, there is no point in anyone joining anything.
What kind of world do we live in, where people want to join groups that they have no interest in, where they want to call people their "friends", but have no communication with them?
The kinds of things I have mentioned above indicate to me that we live in a seriously dysfunctional society, and this dysfuction is not confined to one country or one group of countries, or one culture, but seems spread throughout the world.
Nearly twenty years ago someone wrote "The Rushdie affair showed how dangerous is the present stage of global development - a stage of communication without community" (Anderson, Walter Truett. 1990. Reality isn't what it used to be. San Francisco: Harper. p. 241).
That was a book about postmodernity.
But now we seem to have reached post-postmodernity, where we have reached an even more dangerous stage -- a stage of community without communication.
28 April 2009
For everything there is a season
For everything there is a season, a time to blog and a time to tweet, a time to vote and a time to count votes. A season to visit friends and a season to delete friends.
Holy Week is over, Bright Week is over, the elections are over, and Summer is over.
We're well into autumn, when things are usually harvested or something. Well the leaves from the mulberry tree need raking, at any rate. We did'nt get a single mulberry from it. The dogs and the birds got most of them, and the rest were trampled underfoot.
Then there are blogs, and blogging friends, and blogging non-friends, and blogging wannabe friends and blogging don't-wanna-be friends. The tall, the hamfisted, the pompous and the good-looking.
There are the people who are following me on MyBlogLog, and have made me their friend on Blog Catalog, but who have never visited any of my blogs. They don't seem to be interested in any of the things I'm interested in, but still want to be my "friends".
But there are also the real friends, though sometimes the links are tenuous or broken.
There are the ones like Cobus and Reggie who are now invisible, and whose blogs are inaccessible from MyBlogLog. Please log in and link your blogs, and don't play hard-to-find!The ones like Miss Eagle and Stephen who have new blogs, but haven't linked them, and whose old blogs are not to be found. And those like DaveMac, whose blogs have never linked.
There is Spookyrach, whose Friday cemetery blogging provides the humorous and the macabre, though not necessarily in that order. One of my great blogging ambitions is to have spookyrach visit and leave a comment one one of my blogs.
And there are those whose blogs are linked, but whose log-ins have expired, so they don't show up in the MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog widgets, so I never know if they've visited my blogs, or if they just find them too boring or too disgusting to visit. Like Tauratinzwe for example. Perhaps Oxonian, Roger and Arthur also fall into that category -- their blogs are still there and are linked, but they don't have the widgets on their blogs, and they don't show up as having visited mine.
And there are the ones who have visited fairly regularly, and have sometimes left comments. I'd like to thank them for that. I can't remember them all so apologies if I've left anyone else, but there is Dion, and Jenny, and Bruce (all Methodists), and PriestlyGoth and Crushed by Ingsoc and James and Jams and Matt.
Twittering is OK, but it's not the same as blogging.
And real friends are those one meets on more interactive forums, like those for discussing missiology, or religion, or the books of the Inklings (C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and friends) or just anything under the sun.
Holy Week is over, Bright Week is over, the elections are over, and Summer is over.
We're well into autumn, when things are usually harvested or something. Well the leaves from the mulberry tree need raking, at any rate. We did'nt get a single mulberry from it. The dogs and the birds got most of them, and the rest were trampled underfoot.
Then there are blogs, and blogging friends, and blogging non-friends, and blogging wannabe friends and blogging don't-wanna-be friends. The tall, the hamfisted, the pompous and the good-looking.
There are the people who are following me on MyBlogLog, and have made me their friend on Blog Catalog, but who have never visited any of my blogs. They don't seem to be interested in any of the things I'm interested in, but still want to be my "friends".
But there are also the real friends, though sometimes the links are tenuous or broken.
There are the ones like Cobus and Reggie who are now invisible, and whose blogs are inaccessible from MyBlogLog. Please log in and link your blogs, and don't play hard-to-find!The ones like Miss Eagle and Stephen who have new blogs, but haven't linked them, and whose old blogs are not to be found. And those like DaveMac, whose blogs have never linked.
There is Spookyrach, whose Friday cemetery blogging provides the humorous and the macabre, though not necessarily in that order. One of my great blogging ambitions is to have spookyrach visit and leave a comment one one of my blogs.
And there are those whose blogs are linked, but whose log-ins have expired, so they don't show up in the MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog widgets, so I never know if they've visited my blogs, or if they just find them too boring or too disgusting to visit. Like Tauratinzwe for example. Perhaps Oxonian, Roger and Arthur also fall into that category -- their blogs are still there and are linked, but they don't have the widgets on their blogs, and they don't show up as having visited mine.
And there are the ones who have visited fairly regularly, and have sometimes left comments. I'd like to thank them for that. I can't remember them all so apologies if I've left anyone else, but there is Dion, and Jenny, and Bruce (all Methodists), and PriestlyGoth and Crushed by Ingsoc and James and Jams and Matt.
Twittering is OK, but it's not the same as blogging.
And real friends are those one meets on more interactive forums, like those for discussing missiology, or religion, or the books of the Inklings (C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and friends) or just anything under the sun.
30 September 2008
Atheist irrationality and social blogrolling
Look Who's Irrational Now - WSJ.com:
Hat-tip to Stephen Murray.
I wouldn't really have paid much attention to this, were it not for the high proportion of militant atheists on Scoutle, a relatively new social blogrolling site that I've been trying out. As a result of that, I've seen an unusual number of atheists posts trumpeting about how rational they are, and how irrational everyone else is. An agnostic friend had a run-in with some of them about a year ago, and told me how irrational he found them, so there's not much new there. It's just interesting to see a bit of research backing up the anecdotal evidence.
As for Scoutle, well, it's an interesting blogging tool, and perhaps will improve once more people are using it and it has a bigger variety of members. The idea is that instead of going looking for interesting blogs on Google or Technorati or Amatomu and such sites, you send a "scout" out on Scoutle to go and do the looking for you. Your scout then presents you with a list of possibly interesting blogs, which you can then confirm or reject. I'm assuming that it learns from these confirmations and rejections and learns to revise its choices -- a bit like Stumble-Upon, only for blogs instead of ordinary web pages.
Though it has some quirks (like showing lots of militant atheist sites to a Christian blogger like me), I'm willing to give it a go because some of the other sites that are supposed to do something similar seem to have been misbehaving recently. Technorati, for example, has been quite slow. If you want to find out what they are saying in the blogosphere about Thabo Mbeki's ousting as president, you want to read it today, and not wait until Technorati gets round to pinging the blogs in two weeks time.
Another one that is disappointing recently is BlogExplosion. It is really a sort of manual version of Scoutle. You select a category of blogs you want to see, and a category of blogs you don't want to see, and it shows you the former and not the latter, and a few others thrown in for variety. In my case, I want to see blogs on books and literature, and don't want to see ones on business. But the last few times I've used it, it's shown me blogs on anything but books and literature, and very often repeats the same ones I saw last time, and worst of all, some of them haven't been updated since the last time I saw them. While you are looking at blogs on BlogExplosion, it shows your blog(s) to other people, so when I do that I try to do it just after I've posted new things on my blogs, so that the people who read them won't see the same old posts umpteen times. At least it gives you the option to say "don't show me this again".
As I said, Scoutle does much the same thing, but the process is automated. You don't have to go through five dull blogs to find one interesting one. Scoutle is supposed to find them for you. So if you've got an interesting blog, please join Scoutle now!
The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith -- it's what the empirical data tell us.
'What Americans Really Believe,' a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.
Hat-tip to Stephen Murray.
I wouldn't really have paid much attention to this, were it not for the high proportion of militant atheists on Scoutle, a relatively new social blogrolling site that I've been trying out. As a result of that, I've seen an unusual number of atheists posts trumpeting about how rational they are, and how irrational everyone else is. An agnostic friend had a run-in with some of them about a year ago, and told me how irrational he found them, so there's not much new there. It's just interesting to see a bit of research backing up the anecdotal evidence.
As for Scoutle, well, it's an interesting blogging tool, and perhaps will improve once more people are using it and it has a bigger variety of members. The idea is that instead of going looking for interesting blogs on Google or Technorati or Amatomu and such sites, you send a "scout" out on Scoutle to go and do the looking for you. Your scout then presents you with a list of possibly interesting blogs, which you can then confirm or reject. I'm assuming that it learns from these confirmations and rejections and learns to revise its choices -- a bit like Stumble-Upon, only for blogs instead of ordinary web pages.
Though it has some quirks (like showing lots of militant atheist sites to a Christian blogger like me), I'm willing to give it a go because some of the other sites that are supposed to do something similar seem to have been misbehaving recently. Technorati, for example, has been quite slow. If you want to find out what they are saying in the blogosphere about Thabo Mbeki's ousting as president, you want to read it today, and not wait until Technorati gets round to pinging the blogs in two weeks time.
Another one that is disappointing recently is BlogExplosion. It is really a sort of manual version of Scoutle. You select a category of blogs you want to see, and a category of blogs you don't want to see, and it shows you the former and not the latter, and a few others thrown in for variety. In my case, I want to see blogs on books and literature, and don't want to see ones on business. But the last few times I've used it, it's shown me blogs on anything but books and literature, and very often repeats the same ones I saw last time, and worst of all, some of them haven't been updated since the last time I saw them. While you are looking at blogs on BlogExplosion, it shows your blog(s) to other people, so when I do that I try to do it just after I've posted new things on my blogs, so that the people who read them won't see the same old posts umpteen times. At least it gives you the option to say "don't show me this again".
As I said, Scoutle does much the same thing, but the process is automated. You don't have to go through five dull blogs to find one interesting one. Scoutle is supposed to find them for you. So if you've got an interesting blog, please join Scoutle now!
15 September 2008
What a friend we have in Whatsisname
In the last two days I have been informed by BlogCatalog that four people have listed me as their "friend". I don't actually know any of them, and as far as I can tell (and Blog Catalog is supposed to tell you these things) not one of them has actually visited any of my blogs.
On BlogCatalog I am told I am a friend of 30 people, and probably about 20 of them I don't know at all, and they have never visited any of my blogs. By contrast, I have three people listed as my friends. Two of them I have met in the flesh, and the third, whom I haven't actually met, I have been communicating with on line for nearly 20 years.
BlogCatalog is a social blogrolling site; it is primarily a way of seeing who has visited your blog recently, and keeping track of the blogs of people you know. In that, it performs a useful function, but it gets a bit counterproductive when people add as "friends" people they don't know and who don't know them, and in whom they have no interest and with whom they have no desire to communicate.
Another similar social blogrolling site is MyBlogLog. Instead of "friends", they have "contacts", but the principle is the same, and so is the abuse. MyBlogLog allows you to categorise contancts into "Family", "Friends" and just "Contacts", but again, it really makes little sense to list as contacts people with whom you have no contact, and no desire to be in contact.
I list as "contacts" or "friends" only people I actually communicate with. At a minimum, I would say that they should have left at least three comments on my blog, and I should have left at least three comments on theirs. But preferably they should also be people I communicate with outside the blogosphere, either by e-mail or face to face.
Much the same sort of thing can be said of Twitter, where I am sometimes informed that someone new is "following" me, and when I have a look, I discover that that person is "following" (seems more like "stalking" to me) several thousand other people. Twitter isn't even a social blogrolling thing. It's where I let my wife know that I have or haven't bought black plastic rubbish bags at the supermarket so that she can know whether she does or doesn't need to get some on her way home from work. Actually, I have great difficulty in getting my wife or other members of my close family to read Twitter, so it seems that there isn't much point in it, and the only people reading it are people on the other side of the world whom I've never met, and am never likely to.
And to such people I would say, don't follow me on Twitter -- read my blog(s), and comment on them, then at least we'll be communicating. If you don't want to read my blogs, if you find them boring, or irrelevant to your interests, then there is no conceivable reason why you would want me as a friend or a contact.
My wife watched a TV programme a few months ago that mentioned that the average person knows about 1750 people in their life time. Out of curiosity I've tried to list all the people I've known to see if I can reach 1750. I've almost reached 500. It boggles the mind when people are apparently "following" over 8000 people on Twitter, or list over 8000 "contacts" or "friends" on social blogtolling sites.
One social commentator remarked that " The Rushdie affair showed how dangerous is the present stage of global development - a stage of communication without community". [1] But I think Anderson underestimated it. It certainly isn't community, and there doesn't seem to be much communication either. It seems that the more tools we have to communicate, the less communication actually takes place.
I've ranted about this before, so perhaps some people are finding it boring (another reason why you don't want me as your friend). So perhaps I should end this rant with something positive, some hints on how to get the best out of social blogrolling sites like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog:
On BlogCatalog I am told I am a friend of 30 people, and probably about 20 of them I don't know at all, and they have never visited any of my blogs. By contrast, I have three people listed as my friends. Two of them I have met in the flesh, and the third, whom I haven't actually met, I have been communicating with on line for nearly 20 years.
BlogCatalog is a social blogrolling site; it is primarily a way of seeing who has visited your blog recently, and keeping track of the blogs of people you know. In that, it performs a useful function, but it gets a bit counterproductive when people add as "friends" people they don't know and who don't know them, and in whom they have no interest and with whom they have no desire to communicate.
Another similar social blogrolling site is MyBlogLog. Instead of "friends", they have "contacts", but the principle is the same, and so is the abuse. MyBlogLog allows you to categorise contancts into "Family", "Friends" and just "Contacts", but again, it really makes little sense to list as contacts people with whom you have no contact, and no desire to be in contact.
I list as "contacts" or "friends" only people I actually communicate with. At a minimum, I would say that they should have left at least three comments on my blog, and I should have left at least three comments on theirs. But preferably they should also be people I communicate with outside the blogosphere, either by e-mail or face to face.
Much the same sort of thing can be said of Twitter, where I am sometimes informed that someone new is "following" me, and when I have a look, I discover that that person is "following" (seems more like "stalking" to me) several thousand other people. Twitter isn't even a social blogrolling thing. It's where I let my wife know that I have or haven't bought black plastic rubbish bags at the supermarket so that she can know whether she does or doesn't need to get some on her way home from work. Actually, I have great difficulty in getting my wife or other members of my close family to read Twitter, so it seems that there isn't much point in it, and the only people reading it are people on the other side of the world whom I've never met, and am never likely to.
And to such people I would say, don't follow me on Twitter -- read my blog(s), and comment on them, then at least we'll be communicating. If you don't want to read my blogs, if you find them boring, or irrelevant to your interests, then there is no conceivable reason why you would want me as a friend or a contact.
My wife watched a TV programme a few months ago that mentioned that the average person knows about 1750 people in their life time. Out of curiosity I've tried to list all the people I've known to see if I can reach 1750. I've almost reached 500. It boggles the mind when people are apparently "following" over 8000 people on Twitter, or list over 8000 "contacts" or "friends" on social blogtolling sites.
One social commentator remarked that " The Rushdie affair showed how dangerous is the present stage of global development - a stage of communication without community". [1] But I think Anderson underestimated it. It certainly isn't community, and there doesn't seem to be much communication either. It seems that the more tools we have to communicate, the less communication actually takes place.
I've ranted about this before, so perhaps some people are finding it boring (another reason why you don't want me as your friend). So perhaps I should end this rant with something positive, some hints on how to get the best out of social blogrolling sites like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog:
- Log in to social blogrolling sites you belong to, and don't log out. If you are logged out you won't show up on the widget on other people's blogs, so they won't know if you've visited and so are less likely to pay your blog a return visit.
- Put the "Recent visitors" widget somewhere on your blog. Visitors can then find other blogs that they might find interesting, since if they are interested in your blog they will probably find the blogs of frequent visitors to your blog interesting as well.
- List your interests ("tags" in MyBlogLog) so that others can find your blog more easily.
- Don't list people as "friends" or "contacts" unless you actually know them and want to communicate with them. And above all don't list anyone as a friend if you haven't read their blog.
References
[1] Anderson, Walter Truett. 1990. Reality isn't what it used to be. San Francisco: Harper. Dewey: 909.82. Page 241.12 June 2008
Social blogrolling -- what is a "friend"
There are three main social blogrolling sites that I know of: MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog and BumpZee. They are useful in that they not only let you compile a list of blogs you want to read again, but (if set up properly) let you see who has visited your blog, and you can then pay a return visit.
I joined MyBlogLog a little over a year ago, and found it useful for finding interesting blogs and keeping a list of ones I wanted to revisit.
I joined BumpZee, but found it clunky, slow, and less than useful. It doesn't show blog visitors unless the person is actually logged in to BumpZee, and they have to log in every time they open their browser otherwise they don't show up.
I joined Blog Catalog more recently, when we had a synchroblog on human rights, and found that they were also promoting blogging on human rights on 15 May.
To add blogs to your blogroll, in MyBlogLog you join a "community" related to that blog, and in Blog Catalog you join a neighbourhood. You can also have a list of "contacts" or "friends", which is similar to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace etc.
And this is where things start getting strange. I keep getting messages that people have added me as "friends" or "contacts" when it is evident that they have never even visited my blogs, much less commented on them. I don't know them, I've never corresponded with them, and don't see how they could be regarded as "friends".
I only list as "friends" or "contacts" people I have actually met, or whom I have corresponded with, or who have regularly commented on my blog, and I have regularly commented on theirs. In other words, people I have had some interaction with over some time. Adding people as "friends" or "contacts" when you don't know them and they don't know you seems counterproductive, and to destroy the usefulness of social blogrolling sites, and social networking sites generally.
I suppose Technorati could also be regarded as a form of social blogrolling, in that you can list blogs you like as favourites, but it doesn't show who has visited your blog, and recently its navigation seems to have become much more difficult.
Like many web services, they start by doing one thing well, and then try to do more and more things, and end up not doing any of them well. That's what happened to Google. They started by having a very good search engine, and then they tried to do just about everything, and now they don't even do their search engine well. They too have a social networking site like Facebook and MySpace, called Orkut, very popular in India, not so much in South Africa. But their search engine simply hasn't kept up with the competition.
I joined MyBlogLog a little over a year ago, and found it useful for finding interesting blogs and keeping a list of ones I wanted to revisit.
I joined BumpZee, but found it clunky, slow, and less than useful. It doesn't show blog visitors unless the person is actually logged in to BumpZee, and they have to log in every time they open their browser otherwise they don't show up.
I joined Blog Catalog more recently, when we had a synchroblog on human rights, and found that they were also promoting blogging on human rights on 15 May.
To add blogs to your blogroll, in MyBlogLog you join a "community" related to that blog, and in Blog Catalog you join a neighbourhood. You can also have a list of "contacts" or "friends", which is similar to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace etc.
And this is where things start getting strange. I keep getting messages that people have added me as "friends" or "contacts" when it is evident that they have never even visited my blogs, much less commented on them. I don't know them, I've never corresponded with them, and don't see how they could be regarded as "friends".
Annoying things about social blogrolling sites
- People who add you as a friend when you don't know them
- People who add you as a friend when they've never visited your blog
- People who have blogs, but don't have the widget on their blogs
I only list as "friends" or "contacts" people I have actually met, or whom I have corresponded with, or who have regularly commented on my blog, and I have regularly commented on theirs. In other words, people I have had some interaction with over some time. Adding people as "friends" or "contacts" when you don't know them and they don't know you seems counterproductive, and to destroy the usefulness of social blogrolling sites, and social networking sites generally.
I suppose Technorati could also be regarded as a form of social blogrolling, in that you can list blogs you like as favourites, but it doesn't show who has visited your blog, and recently its navigation seems to have become much more difficult.
Like many web services, they start by doing one thing well, and then try to do more and more things, and end up not doing any of them well. That's what happened to Google. They started by having a very good search engine, and then they tried to do just about everything, and now they don't even do their search engine well. They too have a social networking site like Facebook and MySpace, called Orkut, very popular in India, not so much in South Africa. But their search engine simply hasn't kept up with the competition.
17 February 2008
Time to trim the blogroll again
It's time to trim the blogroll again -- the list of blogs that I like to visit.
Some of them are no more, while others have been restricted to invited readers only (and I wasn't invited). Some haven't been updated for a long time.
The Blogrolling web site does make it quite easy to maintain a blogroll, though.
Some of them are no more, while others have been restricted to invited readers only (and I wasn't invited). Some haven't been updated for a long time.
The Blogrolling web site does make it quite easy to maintain a blogroll, though.
07 February 2008
Now that Muti has been hijacked by the illiterati...
Now that Muti has been hijacked by the illiterati, is there any hope for SA blogging?
This is what I saw in the Muti widget in the sidebar of my blog this morning
What is that idiot ranting about?
Not sure, because there is no link, no URL. Muti has been hijacked by people like that who appear to be using it as a corporate Twitter. Oh well, bye bye Muti, it was nice while it lasted.
It is clearly not an auspicious time for Dave Duarte to ask if it's time for South African bloggers to be paid.
It's time for South African bloggers to grow up, and stop posting such a high proportion of illiterate, racist and childish rubbish.
Get paid? By whom and for what?
I've read a few blogs of people who blog for money.
They are boring. There was one who wrote about the beauties of Bulgaria. But don't bother to comment, because the person who wrote that has never been to Bulgaria and knows nothing about it. They were being paid by some travel agency.
The surest way to kill the blogosphere is to fill it up with junk mail and leaflets like the snail mail box. And soon it will not be worth reading new blogs to find fresh opinions because there won't be any -- there will just be press releases, most of them written by people who would never, ever be hired to write a paper press release.
Looks like Muti's gone. What's next?
This is what I saw in the Muti widget in the sidebar of my blog this morning
Has anyone else just HAD ENOUGH of all this self-promoting, brown-nosing, arrogant and misleading HOGWASH? It's like an ego war on Muti these days, about which so-called 'social media expert' can write a bigger/better/fancier blog than the next. ENOUGH. G
What is that idiot ranting about?
Not sure, because there is no link, no URL. Muti has been hijacked by people like that who appear to be using it as a corporate Twitter. Oh well, bye bye Muti, it was nice while it lasted.
It is clearly not an auspicious time for Dave Duarte to ask if it's time for South African bloggers to be paid.
It's time for South African bloggers to grow up, and stop posting such a high proportion of illiterate, racist and childish rubbish.
Get paid? By whom and for what?
I've read a few blogs of people who blog for money.
They are boring. There was one who wrote about the beauties of Bulgaria. But don't bother to comment, because the person who wrote that has never been to Bulgaria and knows nothing about it. They were being paid by some travel agency.
The surest way to kill the blogosphere is to fill it up with junk mail and leaflets like the snail mail box. And soon it will not be worth reading new blogs to find fresh opinions because there won't be any -- there will just be press releases, most of them written by people who would never, ever be hired to write a paper press release.
Looks like Muti's gone. What's next?
24 July 2007
BUMPzee social blogrolling
A few weeks ago I read a review of some social blogrolling sites -- MyBlogLog, BUMPzee and Blog Catalog. All three have a widget that displays recent readers on your blog, so you can see who has been reading your blog and pay them a return visit.
But apart from that, they work slightly differently. MyBlogLog is a true social blogroll site, where each blog has a "community" that regular readers can join, and if you want to pay a return visit to a blog without the hassle of adding it to your regular blogroll, you can join its community so you can find it again quite easily.
BUMPzee also has communities, but instead of being linked to particular blogs, they are linked to particular interests. This is a bit more focused. I joined and created a Missiology community, since there wasn't one. But as other blogs with missiological interests join, it should become a useful blogroll of missiology-related blogs, and aggregates their posts.
Now you might blog about lots of things, and not every post will be about missiology, so when you add your blog to the community, you can specify keywords, so that only, for example, posts tagged "missiology" or "missional" will be shown in the aggregator.
That seems to have the potential of being a very useful feature.
BUMPzee started as a site for affiliate marketing, and so at present most of the communities are on related topics, but it is now open to everyone (rather as Facebook started as a "students only" social networking site). So don't be put off by the fact that the top communities listed deal with affiliate marketing. Communities can now be on any subject you like, and I think I'll be creating a few more.
Apart from the missiology one, I've started one for the Inklings -- C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams & Co. I know there are several other blogs that have posts on those authors and related topics, such as theology and literature, and it will be useful to be able to look for updates in one place (if they join, and put the widget on their blogs, of course).
But apart from that, they work slightly differently. MyBlogLog is a true social blogroll site, where each blog has a "community" that regular readers can join, and if you want to pay a return visit to a blog without the hassle of adding it to your regular blogroll, you can join its community so you can find it again quite easily.
BUMPzee also has communities, but instead of being linked to particular blogs, they are linked to particular interests. This is a bit more focused. I joined and created a Missiology community, since there wasn't one. But as other blogs with missiological interests join, it should become a useful blogroll of missiology-related blogs, and aggregates their posts.
Now you might blog about lots of things, and not every post will be about missiology, so when you add your blog to the community, you can specify keywords, so that only, for example, posts tagged "missiology" or "missional" will be shown in the aggregator.
That seems to have the potential of being a very useful feature.
BUMPzee started as a site for affiliate marketing, and so at present most of the communities are on related topics, but it is now open to everyone (rather as Facebook started as a "students only" social networking site). So don't be put off by the fact that the top communities listed deal with affiliate marketing. Communities can now be on any subject you like, and I think I'll be creating a few more.
Apart from the missiology one, I've started one for the Inklings -- C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams & Co. I know there are several other blogs that have posts on those authors and related topics, such as theology and literature, and it will be useful to be able to look for updates in one place (if they join, and put the widget on their blogs, of course).
02 July 2007
Social blogrolling - controversy on MyBlogLog
There's been a bit of a tempest in a tea cup over a new feature of MyBlogLog -- the ability to send messages to all one's community members.
Some, like Meg in Australia, have complained that it is spam, but it seems that those who are complaining have joined hundreds of communities that they have no real interest in.
And I disagree. I think being able to send a message to all one's community members (provided it is not overdone) is a good thing. Perhaps some will abuse the facility by sending spam, but then the answer is simple -- leave their community. But a message once a quarter or even once a month should not be a problem.
I think "community" means that one desires to interact with others in the community. If people join communities on MyBlogLog and similar social networking sites, they ought to be interested in the topics of the community and in interaction with the members. If they do not want to communicate, they should not have joined the community in the first place.
In my blogs I have tried to make it clear what I am interested in and what I blog about, and I do that in MyBlogLog too. I hope that people who are interested in similar things will read my blogs and comment, and join my communities in MyBlogLog so we can keep in touch, and so I will be reminded to look at their blogs occasionally.
But some people seem to join communities just to see how many they can collect. I have difficulty in understanding the motivation for joining a community where one has no interest in anything the community is about. If you join a football club, and have no interest in football, why did you join? If you then object to receiving the club newsletter, don't complain to the post office about the club sending you the newsletter, just resign from the club.
I have the same problem with people on social networking sites like MySpace, whom I've never heard of, saying "I want to be your friend". If they've read and commented on my blog, or we've discussed things in a newsgroup, or exchanged e-mail or snail mail, or communicated in some other way, fine. But just to be a "friend" with no discernable common interest with me makes no sense.
One of the problems of electronic networking is that it can lead to communication without community. But the sudden demand from people on MyBlogLog for community without communication is far more difficult to understand.
Some, like Meg in Australia, have complained that it is spam, but it seems that those who are complaining have joined hundreds of communities that they have no real interest in.
And I disagree. I think being able to send a message to all one's community members (provided it is not overdone) is a good thing. Perhaps some will abuse the facility by sending spam, but then the answer is simple -- leave their community. But a message once a quarter or even once a month should not be a problem.
I think "community" means that one desires to interact with others in the community. If people join communities on MyBlogLog and similar social networking sites, they ought to be interested in the topics of the community and in interaction with the members. If they do not want to communicate, they should not have joined the community in the first place.
In my blogs I have tried to make it clear what I am interested in and what I blog about, and I do that in MyBlogLog too. I hope that people who are interested in similar things will read my blogs and comment, and join my communities in MyBlogLog so we can keep in touch, and so I will be reminded to look at their blogs occasionally.
But some people seem to join communities just to see how many they can collect. I have difficulty in understanding the motivation for joining a community where one has no interest in anything the community is about. If you join a football club, and have no interest in football, why did you join? If you then object to receiving the club newsletter, don't complain to the post office about the club sending you the newsletter, just resign from the club.
I have the same problem with people on social networking sites like MySpace, whom I've never heard of, saying "I want to be your friend". If they've read and commented on my blog, or we've discussed things in a newsgroup, or exchanged e-mail or snail mail, or communicated in some other way, fine. But just to be a "friend" with no discernable common interest with me makes no sense.
One of the problems of electronic networking is that it can lead to communication without community. But the sudden demand from people on MyBlogLog for community without communication is far more difficult to understand.
13 June 2007
Social blogrolling
Many blogs have blogrolls - lists of blogs that the author of the blog likes to read. But I'd like to invite bloggers who read this blog to go a step further and have a pictorial blogroll, which you can get by going to MyBlogLog.
How does this differ from an ordinary blogroll? Well, you can go to the page for this blog, and see the blogroll in reverse -- not just the blogs that I like to read, but the people who've bookmarked this blog because they like to read it. And you can click on their icons to see a list of their blogs.
Also, each blog and blog author has tags. Once upon a time Blogger (the software that runs this blog) allowed you to go to the blog author's profile and see a list of their interests. Then you could click on one of the interests that is your interest too, and find other bloggers with that interest.
Unfortunately it doesn't work any more (like many other featured of the "fully-featured" new Blogger).
But never mind - MyBlogLog has a workaround. Click on the tags, and you will see other bloggers who are interested in that topic, and blogs that deal with that topic. Things like Facebook and MySpace give you social networking, but MyBlogLog gives you social blogrolling.
One of my main interests is missiology, and at the moment there are very few blogs on MyBlogLog with that tag. Yet there were quite a lot of bloggers with that listed as an interest in their Blogger profiles. Unfortunately one can no longer find them that way, but if they listed it in MyBlogLog, the problem would be solved. And it would be nice if some of my fellow Orthodox Christian bloggers did the same thing, and then put a widget like the one below on their blog. Try it and see.
How does this differ from an ordinary blogroll? Well, you can go to the page for this blog, and see the blogroll in reverse -- not just the blogs that I like to read, but the people who've bookmarked this blog because they like to read it. And you can click on their icons to see a list of their blogs.
Also, each blog and blog author has tags. Once upon a time Blogger (the software that runs this blog) allowed you to go to the blog author's profile and see a list of their interests. Then you could click on one of the interests that is your interest too, and find other bloggers with that interest.
Unfortunately it doesn't work any more (like many other featured of the "fully-featured" new Blogger).
But never mind - MyBlogLog has a workaround. Click on the tags, and you will see other bloggers who are interested in that topic, and blogs that deal with that topic. Things like Facebook and MySpace give you social networking, but MyBlogLog gives you social blogrolling.
One of my main interests is missiology, and at the moment there are very few blogs on MyBlogLog with that tag. Yet there were quite a lot of bloggers with that listed as an interest in their Blogger profiles. Unfortunately one can no longer find them that way, but if they listed it in MyBlogLog, the problem would be solved. And it would be nice if some of my fellow Orthodox Christian bloggers did the same thing, and then put a widget like the one below on their blog. Try it and see.
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