More than a third of UK blogs contain derogaory information about the bloggers’ companies
Foolish bloggers! Don’t you know you must never ever slag off your company in your blog? Obviously, I would never risk getting the sack like that (so I left the company).
I’m surprised so many people use their blogs to vent about work. I guess those statistics refer to people slagging off their companies in their personal blogs, rather than dedicating a whole blog to talking about how bad their companies are.
Blogging code of conduct (now with cool badges!)
Lameness knows no limits. The “blogging code of conduct” saga continues… Thank god it’s unenforcable, but at least we all get funky badges to stick on our websites to warn people they may get offended. I wonder who decides what’s offensive? I know the US is full of Christians now and many Christians find homosexuality offensive. Should Gay guys writing about their homosexual lifestyles brand themselves as potentially offensive now to protect people who don’t like the thought of men sleeping with men? Why not? It’s offensive if it offends me, right? Where do you draw the line?
I love the way everyone always has to conform to sensibilities of the most humourless, oversensitive, overly PC individuals. Why don’t these people just learn to just deal with it. Get net nanny or something or just chill.
With this in mind, I’ve made my own badges. As an individual with a brain and a healthy appreciation of free speech, it offends me when I come across blogs written by people who want to “enforce” their idea of “civility” on others. It would really help if there was a nifty little badge displayed somewhere prominent, that warned me about the situation before I started reading and got annoyed. I’m not a great designer by no means, but here are a few suggestions:
The Internet is full (of crap). Go home.
My growing boredom and the fact that I have decided to do some shameless self-promotion online has made me spend far too much time reading blogs as of late. I’ve only ever bothered reading a few blogs, generally of people I know (or have at least met) and rate as either authorities in their field, or friends I care about. Apparently, I’ve been leading a very sheltered life.
Since I’ve started expanding my reading circle, I’ve realised how much crap is out there. There is really rather a lot of crap out there, isn’t there? I know I should have really remembered this from my long-lost (thank god!) moderating days, but I’d blissfully forgotten, until now. So any blogs, so little original content. One person says something, then another one blogs about the first person saying something (often without adding a single original thought) then this gets picked up by someone else and before you know it there’s a whole daisy chain based around a single thought, which often isn’t even original in itself. Since I’ve started blogging myself, I’ve suddenly realised what a huge commitment it is to consistently deliver good content, but I don’t think everyone out there struggles with the same issues and self-doubts. The desire to keep adding content to the site usually gets the better of people and you end up with lots of stuff that is no better than white noise.
It’s sort of depressing, but it’s also encouraging, because at least I know that when I put my mind to it, I can actually write, so all of a sudden I have an edge. In my ultimate sadness, I’ve basically decided to spend most of next month building up my blogs and do that as a full time job, which hopefully means I’ll have the time to do some serious writing for a change, rather than be a human news-aggregator.
Watch this space.
Blogging, death threats and victim mentality
Before I go any further, I’d like to make it clear that up until today, I had no idea who Kathy Sierra was. I only found out she existed because a piece about her blog death threat thing made the Digg front page. The title made me think that she must have written some really provocative controversial stuff that pissed a lot of people off and made them want to kill her so I thought “hey, good on her”, but then I actually went and read the article and had a look at her blog and hey, I couldn’t see any controversial stuff at all. I also gather it wasn’t anything she’d written in particular that had made people pick on her. So to recap the story as I see it:
Woman has blog. Woman gets some offensive comments on blog from what seem to be a bunch of pimply 15 year olds trying to be “street” and “el33t”. Woman totally freaks out and in a fit of drama queen hysterics cancels public appearances and “suspends her blog in protest”. Other sad bloggers follow and one of them (who I’ve never heard of either, but then again, I only read very specific blogs and don’t really care about the “blogosphere” as a whole) has this to say about the matter (as quoted on the BBC website):
Robert Scoble, author of popular technology blog Scobleizer, condemned the campaign against her.
“It’s this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop. I really don’t care if you attack me. I take those attacks in my stride. But, whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn’t happen if the interviewee were a man,” he said