Tag Archives: news

To blog or not to blog?

Posted on by
1

Creative writing brings me joy. I love to have pen in hand, a blank page, and to freewheel across the page. Later I transfer this into digital format.

I’ve been blogging since 2008 and journalling since about 1996 when I applied myself to writing Morning Pages as prescribed by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. I ditch most of the journals because they are full of whingey personal crap where I sort out the problems of my mind.

But when I look back over the blog archive, I think it is a personal account rich in images, metaphor, questions, ideas, and experiences.

But the online landscape has changed and over these recent years it has been overrun with scammers, hackers, criminals, loud opinionators, and stupid promotions and ads for companies and organisations. No, I don’t want to buy your idiotic product or join your ”woke” cause!

Fortunately, there are still some authentic, peaceful souls brave enough to continue to post beautiful pieces: Rich Roll, Isabel Paige, Valerie Lin, Rip Esselstyn, and others.

Lately I’ve been considering closing down this blog. I want to minimize the risk imposed by hackers and scammers. I loathe the barrage of fake emails, clickbait articles, catastrophized news, and petty advertising. I don’t want to feed the hungry phantom of the negative online world, or AI for that matter.

So maybe this is it? What do you think? See you on the outside?

Where do I go for news now?

Posted on by
Reply

Twitter was once an excellent social media platform until it was transformed into X by you-know-who. You could really tailor it to your own areas of interest, as well as learn about what was going on in the world very quickly. It was relevant. With regret I got off that platform once it went over to the dark side.

FaceBook is awful and has been for a long time now. Once it was a useful way to keep in touch with family and friends. Now it just pushes irrelevant detritus your way: ads, groups, and causes.

Instragram is still okay, but the Meta folk are intent on filling it with ads and awful influencers. I like it for the beautiful images, not for someone bleating at my face about who-knows-what.

After Twitter died, I regretfully returned to mainstream news such as the ABCTV. But it seems they don’t teach proper journalism and reporting anymore. Or at least these people aren’t chosen as news presenters. I’m not interested in your random opinion, or worse still, woke government sanctioned opinion. I just want the news of the world. Especially not horoscopes and animal stories, or idiot dances on TikTok, and more than just localised events. What is actually going on in South America, or Africa, or France? The world is bigger than just China and the USA. Our national ABC Morning News in Australia is an embarrassment of trivial giggling trash. I find that SBS News is a much more interesting and professional media service, and it does include news from all over the world.

I tried Threads by Meta and liked it. It seemed to be kind and positive. Lots of booklovers are on there. But with Meta swamping out the ads again I hopped off as quickly as I hopped on. I realise the necessity for sponsorship, but they go overboard making it difficult to sort through the feed to find the things you really want to see and read about.

I heard about Bluesky and I am currently on there to see what it’s like. It seems very USA-centric at the moment. I wonder if that will change as more people become aware of it.

Maybe I need to stream a news service via YouTube. Where do you think is the best place for daily factual unbiased world news? Suggestions needed.

Alexa, Jelly, and Web 3.8

Posted on by
Reply

Forget Web 2.0! That is so 2005! Now we have Web 3.8. Wow!

What is that? Remember ‘six degrees of separation’? Well, according to Biz Stone, the guys who came up with that theory have done more research and found that in this digitally connected era, the degrees of separation have reduced to just 3.8.

Rich Roll interviews Biz Stone in an intriguing interview where Biz explains his newest website and system – askjelly. Biz Stone is one of the guys who co-founded Twitter. Oh – that Biz Stone!

fullsizerender

Askjelly is a systemised knowledgebase that uses people for answers instead of text-based information on the Internet. As Rich and Biz spoke I realised that Librarians might finally be out of a job. The famous quote by Neil Gaiman: ‘Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.’, might finally be defunct. Biz has found a way to crowd-source the subjective questions.

So I put askjelly to the test and posed the question: “What will happen to Librarians in the age of knowledge-bases, ‘jelly’ and AI?”

And shortly thereafter I received two thoughtful replies:

From CallKathy:

screen-shot-2016-11-09-at-6-25-27-pm

And from Chris:

screen-shot-2016-11-09-at-6-24-00-pm

Biz’s theory is that there are not really unique questions, and that someone on this planet will have the answer for you.

He then went on to show how this technology works with Amazon’s Echo and Alexa and it evoked similarities to the AI robot in the movie Her.

Rich Roll has kindly listed a lot of the relevant articles and links in the show notes of his podcast information and it’s well worth a look.

As for the success of #askjelly and the future of Librarianship – only time will tell.

 

EOM

Posted on by
Reply

Don’t you love acronyms? They are useful if you know what they mean and if you are communicating with others who know the same ones. They exist across the range of human subjects and are specific to their own topics. If you don’t know what an acronym stands for then they are as useful as if someone spoke to you in a foreign language.

EOM is commonly used in emails in the local government organisation where I worked for the last four years. And in that time I never knew what it meant. It’s significance seemed unimportant, so I was never prompted to ask.

End Of Message! Superfluous perhaps. It was commonly used in the subject line of an email when there is no content in the body of the email. For example, “Email subject: Leftover sandwiches in staff room. EOM”

On my last day I received a phone call from a local newspaper reporter asking me questions about why I was leaving. I told him that it was because I was going to care for my father who is failing quickly with Mesothelioma. I reminded him that he needed to go through the usual Council communication channels. Prompted by his enquiry I wrote a media release and sent it through to the Council media person. It had not occurred to me that this would be of any interest to the local community. It was published in the newspaper under the cute heading “Portland Library Manager turns the page“.

EOM

20131130-095255.jpg