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Does Get It

Perhaps Mr. Catalano does get it. I ended up having an brief email discussion with him and I came away with the belief he understands weblogs. His main point was that if someone thinks they will start a weblog and instantly become popular and read by millions, they are mistaken.

I can see that point of view, but mine is this: What makes weblogs so damn amazing is the potential for someone to start a weblog and be read by millions. This is something that the average citizen has not had access to before. The old saying goes something like “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one” and more and more we all own the press known as the Internet…

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NeoOffice/J

I just recently heard about NeoOffice/J, and I finally got around to installing it this week. Wow! I’ve been using OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X via X11, and while it more or less works, the experience of using NeoOffice/J has been much nicer. It looks more like a Windows app than the nice Aquafied OS X apps you might be used to, but it managed to open Microsoft Word and Excel files with ease. One less reason to use Windows…

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The Myths of Open Source

CIO Magazine: The Myths of Open Source looks at, and attempts to dispell the myths of open source in large organizations.

What are those myths?

  1. The attraction is the price tag
  2. The savings aren’t real
  3. There’s no support
  4. It’s a legal minefield
  5. Open source isn’t for mission-critical applications
  6. Open source isn’t ready for the desktop
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The New New Lockergnome

Chris Pirillo sent me a link to the new new Lockergnome design, which happens to be valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, not that nasty mess of invalid non-semantic table gunk they spit out recently that we all complained about…

Thanks, Chris, you done good…

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Doesn’t Get it

Someone else just doesn’t get it

Let me let you in on two dirty little secrets of blogging. First, for every blogger, there is probably a handful of readers.

Sure, blogging is a new publishing mechanism (sort of). But it has more in common with wanna-bes who self-publish deathless prose through vanity presses, or pre-teens who pour their hearts out into diaries with flimsy locks, or little old ladies who write poetry with quill pens to read to their cats and store in the sock drawer, than with actual, grab-your-audience-by-the-hair (or other body parts) and get ’em to think writing.

Yawn…

It’s like that phone thing. It tends to be used by teenagers planning what to do on the weekend, it couldn’t possibly be a serious business tool! Or those PC’s. I mean, I love playing games too, but how could we utilize them for professional journalism? Which we need a lot more of!

Still, I no longer have the time to keep updating a personal observation blog. And lack of time is the primary reason I’m abandoning Byte Me’s companion Random Bytes personal blog and will shortly take down its archives.

Ok, so besides the fact that this guy obviously made no useful connections through his weblog, as illustrated by his whining and then saying he’ll shut it down, he adds that he’ll remove all archives, as if in shame of his failed experiment. Well, the Google cache will hold it for a while, and then if we’re lucky it’ll go into the Wayback Machine.

Try talking to people who are using weblogs for everyday tasks directly related to business, or people who use them to solve real problems, or track issues, or do research… or… Many weblogs are authored by professionals who just happen to be experts in their domain. It’s not all angst-filled teens with the weight of the world on them. And honestly, that’s as valid a use of weblogging technology as anything else, isn’t it?