This might make a nice e-card for Christmas...
By Ray on December 20, 2007 - 6:24pm
If I hadn't already sent out my e-card for this Christmas,
this might have made a good one.
It's just too bad that you can't enjoy it in its full size
of 1440 by 1024. And that makes me wonder why the thumbs on
this site don't pop up to full size pictures like those on
"Blogger" sites, for example. I know, Richard - it takes too
much bandwidth to do that. And you guys aren't as rich as the
guys at Google yet. (Who is?) But it would be really nice, if
wishes came true. Meanwhile, enjoy your Christmas!
We've both mentioned blogs on "Blogger" recently, and I'd like to say a few words about all that, if I may. I've had a blog on "Blogger" two or three times, mostly to find out how that worked, and see if I'd get any responses. I tried creating a blog on there two or three times, because each time, I got disillusioned rather quickly, and then I would terminate it.
The last time, just lately, I had a little gadget on there from Sitemeter, which you can find on their homepage and it keeps track of all the visits or "hits" your blog receives, and gives you a regular report. By checking that meter reading, and its separate report, I learned that I was the only one who ever saw that blog. So I was happily working away, completely wasting my time. Makes a guy feel sort of stupid when he learns that. And for those of you who know about such things, yes, I was sending out pings to the major tracking services which track blogs, so that wasn't the problem. The problem is, there's just too damned many blogs out there. Everybody wants to try writing one, but almost none of us bothers to read anyone else's. And please don't take my word for it. Read this Chicago Tribune story about it in which a reporter questions the VP of Technorati on the 109.2-million blogs that Technorati tracks. As the man says at the end, over 99% of those don't get any hits in a year, and are done in total obscurity. Only their creators ever see them.
The one possible exception to all this is the community or group blog, such as this on Urban Vancouver, and similar ones. These seem to work better, and do get more hits, because there's more of an interplay among the writers/users/readers of them. So we aren't slaving away in total obscurity, like we might be on "Blogger". That's why I don't want to see a nice site like this one taken over by pieces that are mainly here to advertise someone's business or publicize their corporate or business website. And we've seen too many examples of that recently. I don't think we're here to be just a captive audience for salesmen. We came to exchange views and ideas with one another and that isn't happening if we're just getting a sales pitch. That turns us right off, and gets us looking elsewhere for whatever we really expected to find here. And in the end, nobody benefits from that.