...and does it really matter?

And what about Twitter? You thought blogs were easy... I'm posting more but in 140 characters on Twitter, so I wonder the effects of that on blogging?

Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest looks at the state of blogs as the half-finished novel in your closet or furniture in your garage that needs to be sanded and repainted. From the article:

"Like Mrs. Nichols, many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?"

If you look at blogs as an enterprise it looks horrible, but if you compare it to other creative outlets, not so bad. I mean not every person taking cooking classes wants to open a restaurant, so just want to entertain.

via Resource Shelf

Labels: blogs

I use a lot of creative commons photos in my presentations for class. just from the creative commons search on the advanced search on Flickr I've been able to find professional photos to illustrate most of my topics. So I put most of my photos on Flickr under the same license. I follow the pay it forward with copyright credo. Well I just found out that schmap.com asked to use one of my photos for their Boston Harbor Cruises. Of course I said yes. At least it's being used. My creative commons photo is there under Boston Harbor Cruises. So there you go.

(And no, I'm not planning on changing Clare's pictures to creative commons. I thought about it, but until I can get Clare to sign a model's release, I don't think I'll be able to have her pictures out there for general use. For now you can just check out the FebruBEARy set.)

Finally catching up on the podcasts from December this week.

I caught episode 120 of This Week in Media to find that their first story was about a New York Times article on the Amazon Kindle from December 23rd by Brad Stone and Mitoko Rich. The most interesting part of the discussion is the personal opinions these early adopter/ media savvy people have about the device and how their comments are in line with a lot of what I hear from people who use the library's device. I'm beginning to think that Amazon really created a great reader to get my parents comfortable with digital books.

The discussion is only about 10 minutes long at the most. After that the show goes back to focusing on the media they usually talk about- TV, film, online video, etc.

Here's the direct link to the show- TWIM 120

Labels: kindle