Saturday, February 11, 2012

Lost in a News/Blogging Haze

Ok so I'm doing these posts a little out of order but with all the effort I've put into this post today I feel that its a fair trade ;) so this haze that I'm referring to started this morning when I started looking at the NyTimes and got trapped by my habit of opening a link in a new tab. Before I knew it I had like 20 tabs...then I started reading the tabs...and then just got lost in this spiral of news articles until NYTimes.com "saved" me and told me I had reached my limit of free news article. That is a problem I will have to address at some later date (most likely with a depletion to my bank account) because I don't think deleting my history works anymore...(dang). For the moment though it has saved me from myself. 

Unfortunately Technorati does not have the same stringent limit that says "hey you! yea you, the one whose been sitting in front of the computer for the past hour (or two)...get off the internet and do something with your life!" No Technorati left me to fend for myself against the armies of information it hosts. See, we had to pick a blog to follow and I, being the picky person I am, was not going to follow just any blog. No, it had to be interesting and fun. So, to pick a blog, I looked at Technorati's (that's a really annoying word to type btw...from now on it shall be TR for short) list of top 100 Blogs (that is a LOT of blogs) so I would pick one blog...look at it's site and the articles it listed just skimming through the headlines to see if it would be interesting. Unfortunately for my day (which has been sufficiently wasted on Blog research) some of the articles were interesting, so I had this annoying habit of clicking on them...and reading them. Some of them had links to other things like videos or photos of the Best and Worst Grammy Dresses of All Time or the like loitering nearby. So then I'd get lost again. Then I'd eventually decide that this particular blog wasn't good enough and find my way back to TR to find another blog to get lost on. I repeated this process until I finally got bored (and hungry...I hope you know this little exercise has made me miss my lunch...I hope you're happy...totally just kidding) and decided to follow the Huffington Post because it offers the greatest variety of things to look into and read. I will most likely stay in the Tech section of the Huffington Post but will occasionally wander to other parts of the site as well. 

The problem with tech blogs is they tend to have a lot about new gadgets and things being put out...which is all good and interesting but I tend to like articles about Anonymous hacking the CIA or Cybercrimes or the Facebooker's IT-guy dad shooting his daughter's laptop after something she posted. (don't bother watching the video he posted...except for the last 20 seconds its pretty boring, and even then not worth the wait for it to download). So I guess I like articles about the politics of tech rather than the tech itself. 

Anyway what have I noticed since Ive spent a great deal of time reading both the blogs and the newspaper? 

The good bloggers read the news. 

This seems obvious but it is kind of a revelation to me. I had kind of imagined that blogs and the Internet in general was sort of a revolutionary uprising against traditional media. That "hardcore" bloggers and Internet advocates were all for the Internet completely replacing traditional media. Alas, 'tis not the case.  Blogs are just another bubble in Jeff Jarvis's flow chart of the "Me-Sphere". Some of the articles I looked at in the Huffington Post linked directly to an article in the New York Times (One I had already read earlier today...it made me laugh to see it again...Here's a link to it if you'd like to see it). Its like the Circle of Life but not. Now if you will excuse me, I'm going a little stir-crazy. I think I need to go run around outside or something....

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