Thoughts on blogging

As I mentioned in the earlier post, I don't want to blog in the "traditional" way, meaning observing my surroundings, or websites, or news world, and comment on things that have happened lately. It doesn't mean I don't enjoy reading those blogs, in fact I have few of their RSS feeds bookmarked, especially few interesting global warming ones.

It was quite obvious last December how powerful and fast media blogs are. It took only few hours after tsunami had hit various places in Asia that European blogs started collecting the newest news and reporting whatever they had found online or heard from news. Blogs were the fastest way to read a summary of things happening, but also with the cost of not being the most reliable source. Traditional press needs time to check the facts, do serious source seeking and getting indepth with their news when blogs are way more flexible in that way. One of course should keep that in mind.. but then again, it's not that hard to forget that you're reading a blog instead of a real news agency material.

I've been paying attention to New Zealander, or Kiwi in other words, blogs lately. We're planning to move there in some years, and I'm looking for interesting contacts there. They had their government elections two days ago, so all the Kiwi blogs are filled with politics and aftermath of the vote results. Funny to notice that almost all of the bloggers were voting for Greens, it seems to be the young, educated people's party, and these bloggers fit into that category well. Green party had been using blogging as a political promotion, all the big name candidates have an audioblog at Green party's Frogblog, and they also made a multimedia-DVD as the first party in NZ ever to use these communication tools. It's interesting to see how NZ is a bit behind us in new media, and I will definitely get back into that subject sooner or later here.

These new trends of blogging (audio, videoblogs) are still fairly uninteresting to me. The problem of blogs is that they are from people I usually don't have a connection with, and I don't get any amazing experiences from their products. Blogging is mostly, after all, one way communication. What I miss instead of all these fancy technologies is a whole experience, something for everybody, an artistic, a cathartic, a stunning moment where I'd experience something new, something that would touch me. When blogging becomes an all around feeling, then I'll get interested.

In the mean time I would be happy to receive links to really interesting blogs that are just more than commenting on websites! Sure Slashdot is cool and nerdy, but I don't find it interesting enough to read it everyday. Also big blogs like that create trends that is definitely one of the ways to handle power and promotion. If you get your new product mentioned in cool way at Slashdot, it's sure that it will be a hit among computer people. I also earlier mentioned that I prefer community based "blogging" than private persons. Slashdot is somewhere there in between, but it's already too big to be a working community. I don't know.. maybe the new thing, business blogging, is something that will make it more interesting for bigger publics as well and make it easier for consumers to feel connected to companies.

But what I want to see in the future of blogging... News agencies and TV stations blogging their news on their websites using video and sound, continuous feed from their sources and seeing that also normal people can send their own news as almost as important as any other news are.

Blogging

I'm starting to like this future based thinking. I have an idea for this blog as well - I'd like to share my ideas and thoughts and plans, and get get criticism/feedback and better ideas in return. Of course this would also require audience, so I guess I need to start promoting this one at some point...

My contact to blogs so far has been reading people's online diaries, or following Finnish "newspaper" Lehti, or reading bands' studio blogs. When it comes to talking about what happens online or about news, I seem to prefer more interaction and community feeling than blog based conversation. That's why I don't want to make this blog into a link summary of my surfing today, but more like a brainstorm with me, my old thoughts and commenters. It should be fairly interesting to read what I planned few weeks ago. From now on I'm going to keep a pen and piece of paper with me all the time, and all the ideas written down on paper will be processes to this blog.

Today's idea is to start another blog, that I will keep on the updates of my online portfolio. I noticed I haven't really paid attention to my portfolio lately, I've done loads of new work that should be showcased a bit. So, I'll act on this idea and start a new blog that only updates at my site.

-another idea just came to me. My site is getting quite a lot of traffic because of photos and stuff that I host, so I might as well put a big link to this blog from there so I can get some of that traffic directed to me. Great!

Future sound of this blog

Well this is it. A new blog. I shall keep on going with the livejournal as well, as it is more of a personal diary concentrating on past happenings, but this blog, this will be something different.

The keyword is future.

It could be that I'm inspired by Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time that I'm reading every evening and in the bus/train during weekends. Next chapter is the time travelling... so there you go. Another thing to inspire me to write about future is the life situation right now. Everything is dealing with future now - where to do the work practise, skills I need in future, final thesis, New Zealand... I'm looking forward to all that and this will be the blog where the future happens. Hawking talks about humans not being able to remember future because of the arrow of time doesn't allow it. Well, in this blog that arrow points only forward.