Death of the blog?

Over at Urban Vancouver, Ray points to an interesting post by Nicholas Carr on Rough Type. The discussion is about the death of the blog, now that many blogs had morphed into media sites with multiple authors, targeted ads, various gadgets and multiple posts a day.

I’ve been thinking about this myself lately. I’ve come to the conclusion that I prefer blogs with a single author and those that provide full text feeds. I’d made the decision about full text RSS a while ago, and I’ve already pruned my feeds on that count. Now I find I’m spending less and less time reading blogs with multiple authors.

As Nicholas says:

“As blogs have become mainstream, they’ve lost much of their original personality.”

I don’t mind an occasional guest post on a blog, but I’m really there to learn what the individual blogger has to offer. It may be the personality of his/her writing, the knowledge they choose to share, or something about the interests they have. I find it much like getting to know someone and enjoying their company.

If they want me to meet their friends, they can link to those friend’s blogs, and if they sound interesting to me, I’ll visit. I may even add them to my list of feeds.

Sure, I still visit blogs like Lifehacker and pop in on Gizmodo once in a while, but that’s usually when I want a quick fix of a specific type of news. I may also jump over to CBC or other websites depending on the kind of news I’m after.

But for the most part, I stick with personal blogs. I get enough ‘media’ every day already. To me, a more personal blog is what blogging reading is all about.

And next the flood

This was the view on the way to Guildford this morning. We probably got 5-10 cm as predicted.

Now they're telling us we're going to get some rain. Lots of it. Sigh, first we're buried and then we drown.

Sure been a weird winter here on the wet coast. Only a few years like this on record, and I think I've seen at least 3 of them.

Out for a walk in the park

What a beautiful day for a walk.

I trundled off  after lunch to Bear Creek Park, near King George Hwy and 88th Ave in Surrey. The sun was out and it was fairly warm.  A nice change from the last week or so with the snow, ice, rain and cloudy skies.

While the main paths had been cleared at sometime over the last couple of weeks, most of the trails were still just paths cleared by stalwart, walking visitors. One path I followed had been cut by a skier and someone else walking the tracks.

I  took a few pictures and surprisingly, met a few people. It’s amazing how some things just seem to attract a conversation with strangers. A dog, a baby, or a honkin’ big camera all seem to do the trick. Ok, I can’t vouch for the baby, but from what I’ve seen…

I stopped to look for a picture at the station for the park’s miniature railway. A gentleman and his partner approached and said, “You’ve got a camera.”

Smiling, I said yes, and while he started reaching for something, he asked if I’d take his picture.

I thought he was going for a business card, so I could email the picture to him. Nope. He pulled out his Canon point and shoot and set it up for me to use.

There was no viewfinder on his Canon and I only had one hand free, so while holding the little LCD screen out in front of me, I took the picture. Didn’t tell him I’d been drinking coffee all day and that it was probably going to have a characteristic caffeine blur. . Sigh, there goes my cred as a photographer ;-(

They seemed happy though, and we talked photography for a while. He drives trucks and takes his little camera everywhere. She loves his pictures.

Later as I was leaving, I ran into another family. The gentleman saw my camera and he had to tell me that he had seen some owls hunkered down on the tracks under the miniature train. Then he pointed to some birds flitting around the bushes beside us and insisted I take a picture. Too bad the little birds were too far away, too small, in the shadows, etc. But I took a picture anyway. He seemed happy, even though he didn’t see the picture 😉

It was a beautiful day for a walk. I met a few people, and I learned a few things about shooting in the snow. What’s better than that!

They say the hardest part of doing something is getting started.

Well, I’m back. Not sure where this is going, but here’s the first post of the new year. Life does take a few curves, but we’ll see if we can do better than we have the last couple of years, shall we? Heh.

Having a full time job really sucks up the time. That said, I’ve picked up some new skills and gotten back into photography.

Back in another life, I assisted at a studio, while collecting a wage subsidized by our federal (un)employment program. Learned a lot, and that helped me grow and develop some modest skill with a Pentax Spotmatic camera. Loved it.

The Spotmatic ended up in a lake (thanks to my ex ;-), so I moved ahead with a Konica and then an Olympus. They had some electronic bells and whistles, but I never really liked them. For one thing, I could not keep the Olympus running. It ate batteries faster than I could supply them. 

I later found out that the circuit board on the camera was cracked from the start, and that’s what was draining the batteries. But by that time, I’d found other things to occupy my time and the warranty was *very* expired.

Two years ago, I started taking some event pictures at work with an old Fuji S2. What a wave of nostalgia. But the quality of pictures soon wore thin as I watched my colleague shoot with an S3. Jealous me jumped in and bought a Nikon D80.

Things have blossomed since then. More lenses. A D300. More lenses. A D700, and still more lenses and gear. Yikes it’s scary. But it’s also exciting. Some of my skills are coming back and I’m loving it.

So what you’ll get here will probably be a scattering of photo talk, along with some other stuff I find interesting (for some reason). Let’s see where it goes, shall we?

If you want to follow along, I have a Flickr photostream here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/donsca/

It’s a work in progress. Like this blog, heh.

Scribefire not as unruly as it looked

I tried Scribefire with my last post. It seemed to have some difficulty with quoting parts of pages. I guess I need to head back to the manual for that. Still, on seeing the post on my blog, it doesn’t look all that bad.

Anyway, I’ve heard a lot about Livewriter lately, so I thought I’d try posting with it. This is the first attempt.

I’ve used Qumana for a while, and I really like(d) it. Things have been pretty quiet there for some time, so I’m not sure where it’s headed. Better to have an alternative on the back burner, I guess.

Ok, first post with Livewriter…here goes.

Can heros be contagious?

While there are lots of great things going on in the
world, most of the news is about stuff that sucks: murders, accidents,
bombings. Tragedy. The old maxim, ‘if it bleeds it leads’, seems to be the
state of the art with news.

What would happen if we changed that. What if we talked about all the great and
interesting things going on in the world: selfless heroes that take on a search
and rescue role, charities that help make the world a better place, businesses
that have interesting ideas they are willing to share and explore.

What if we talked about what drives the people behind great ideas. Could
something like that be contagious?

Seth Godin makes the point. "Celebrate the heroes." I like that.

Seth’s

Blog: Contagious

"The most important thing you can do is choose who you’re
hanging out with. The second high-leverage thing is to put dynamics in place
that reinforce the ideas you’d like to see spread. Celebrate the heroes. Make
it easy for those ideas to spread…"

They say
that you become what you think about. Perhaps we should change our
thoughts to something contagious, but wonderful, instead of focusing on all the
threats in the world.

What do you think?

 

It’s never easy

Starting with a new program always means adapting to its foibles. It seems Contribute is no different.

The first few posts to Typepad and Blogger went off without a hitch . The first time was a snap, but now I’m back after Xmas, things are not quite as rosy.

A Blogger blog I have doesn’t seem to work now. All I get is a message saying there is an error, or I’m not logged in. Perhaps the upgrade to the new Blogger format there has something to do with it. I saw something in the help section that there are 3rd-party programs using an older api. Patience, I guess.

Typepad still seems to work.  Well, we’ll see at the end of this post, won’t we. There is one other private blog that won’t let me in, so I guess I’ll have to see about getting them to fix that.

All said and done though, so far Qumana has been foolproof. I’ve managed to post on all the blogs I’ve tried so far. Might have to stick to that, rather than Contribute for blogs. We’ll see. That might go against the grain at work. 

Starting a WordPress blog

Ya gotta love it.

I’m working with some associates on a dark blog right now. It’s in development and based on WordPress. That means learning how to use that software and so far it’s been a great experience.

Even better, tonight I tried using Qumana to post on the blog’s test server. What do you know. It worked on the first try. I should have expected that though. The Qumana folks seem pretty sharp.

We’ve just got the first few post up on the blog as a test, but we still have to work through who’s going to do what in the future. Once we have a few of the technical details worked out, I hope we can go public.

Now, back to learning. If anyone has a link to the Coles Notes version of how best to use WordPress, please pass it along in the comments.

Powered by Qumana

China anyone?

Well it’s been pretty dark in here for a couple of months. Apologies. I’ve started a full time job with the Surrey Board of Trade and it’s taken a while to get use to the 9 to 5 cycle. More on that later, but let’s just state the obvious for now – it’s very different from being self-employed. Interesting work, great collegues, but the regular hours take some getting use to. It’s coming, but it’s taking some time.

With that short introduction to let you know where this post is coming from, I wanted to publicize something the SBoT is offering through Dec 22. No, I won’t get a kickback on this, but I am trying to help my employer.

They have a great deal right now that they’re offering with Citislinc International. A tour package to China: 4 Cities, 8 days and 7 nights, all inclusive, for a non-member price of $1,849. Members save $50. The price includes round trip airfare, hotels, airport taxes, 3 meals a day, English speaking tour guides, and admission to a number of events. I’m no expert, but given that the cost of air alone runs close to a grand in Canadian bucks http://www.flychina.com/LFW/LowFare.aspx , this sounds like a pretty good deal.

If you’re thinking of doing business in China sometime, the organizers can set up some meetings with people in your industry. If you just want to tour around, that’s fine too.

There’s an information session about the trip on December 12 at the Sheraton Vancouver Guildford Hotel between 7 and 9 pm. Final deadline for a $125 deposit is December 22. Give them a call at 604.581.7130.

Now (hopefully) back to regular programming.