There seems to be this debate going on whether “bloggers” are “journalists” or not.

From Dictionary.com, journalist:

jour·nal·ist

1. One whose occupation is journalism.
2. One who keeps a journal.

Ok, so anyone who “keeps a journal” is a journalist, and if we assume a “weblog” or “blog” is a journal, then we are all journalists.

Some people might be referring to that first bit, “One whose occupation is journalism” though, and that’s fine. Don’t think of yourself as a journalist, think of yourself as a reporter.

Hold on, let’s check on reporter:

re·port·er

1. A writer, investigator, or presenter of news stories.
2. A person who is authorized to write and issue official accounts of judicial or legislative proceedings.

Ok, I think we can cover that first one. Plenty of bloggers have presented news stories, that seems undeniable.

I remember years ago, when I knew somebody who screamed for a band saying they weren’t really a singer, and I told them that was ok, because while they may not have been a “singer” they were definitely a “vocalist” - yeah, I know, if you look those two words up they sort of point to each other in a circular motion, but the point is, if the word in use doesn’t match up to the expectations of the word in people’s eyes, find another word.

In other words, confuse people, and viplos bimcus!

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Panic: dynamic SQL (? placeholders) are not supported by the server you are connecting to (Damn you Microsoft!)

The above bit is the message I got when using Perl’s DBD::Sybase module to talk to Microsoft SQL using FreeTDS, whch technically, is a feat all in itself, but anyway, I’m all for database abstraction in applications and code. Jeremy thinks abstraction layers must die, and if I was someone who was an expert in one database, and got to choose to always use that one database, I might agree. Actually he goes on to say:

The author uses an argument I hear all the time: If you use a good abstraction layer, it’ll be easy to move from $this_database to $other_database down the road.

That’s bullshit. It’s never easy.

In any non-trivial database backed application, nobody thinks of switching databases as an easy matter. Thinking that “the conversion will be painless” is a fantasy.

Ok, the use of “non-trivial” makes this true depending on your definition of trivial, but some things might be considered trivial, and still be quite useful. Some systems can easily swap which database they use very easily. I’ve managed to switch things between MySQL, SQLite, and Microsoft SQL with ease. Now granted, none of these things were enterprise-level, make-or-break application (I’m not at Yahoo!) but they’re important to me and the people who own the data.

Database portability doesn’t have to be a myth. It’s all data, right? Moving it from one system to another should not be a nightmare.

See Also: Database Abstraction Considered Harmful

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