2 posts tagged “photo”
CNET reported this week tht the the US Justice department wants to keep track of who creates and uploads both video and photo content to the web. And I quote, "The Bush administration has accelerated its Internet surveillance push by proposing that Web sites must keep records of who uploads photographs or videos in case police determine the content is illegal and choose to investigate."
Am I the only one outraged here? This wouldn't be the slow ebbing away of our freedom of speech, but a full frontal assault. The chilling effect on the new voices that are emerging on the net would be tragic . I can't believe they are serious. OK, I can believe they are serious, but I have to hope enough voices will be raised in opposition.
What is a blog? Really, who cares? While I can understand from an academic standpoint the need to quantify particular genres for accurate apples-to-apples comparisons, really, what is a blog? Part of what I love about the internet is the cornucopia of crap called a blog. Blogging has become a catchall for the personal flotsam of our lives. But I think there is a difference between how we use the web as content providers and content consumers.
From the beginning of my experience as a content provider on the web I have journaled predominantly using photos. From my initial crude homepage, to my various current personas on the web, photo sharing has been an integral part of the dialogue. Perhaps because of ease, perhaps because of the way I see the world, writing about the nuts and bolts of the day is less compelling for me than capturing the moment with a camera. And while I have used this presentational format for sharing my point of view with a personal webpage, I also enjoy sharing with a community at large with a site like Flickr. But the tone of the community dialogue is important to me. When sharing media on a site like Youtube I am put off by the clutter and chaos of the community. I have become a recent convert to Vimeo and I find that the supportive nature of members is not only inclusive, but is an interesting environment for developing thoughtful discourse on personal media. This is knowledge I can then fold back here, in my more traditional blog space. The lines are blurring, and with the ability to marry my written, photographic and video efforts into one central site, I am finding that my need for a personal media portal is fading away. Blogs have become the tool I was trying to create on my own for the past 10 years.
Personal blogging always strikes me as a record of the exceptional rather than the mundane. For a large percentage of authors creating personal blogs, you write because of an exceptional event or feeling, and once it is past your posting frequency diminishes. How does this skew the content of a blog, and is that part of the reason so much of the content is ignored? Are we oversaturated with the angst and disappointment of everyday life?
As a content consumer I read the news… blogs are a part of that flow. I use links to news stories from sources I admire and respect. I love it when someone “pre-surfs” the web and directs me to a discovery on the web. I certainly maintained my own personal “hot links” page in the mid 90s, long since abandoned before the change of millennium. Having constant RSS feeds push content to me is invaluable, and really these authors become my “friends”, even though we have never met.
To quote Clay Shirky, blogging removes all barriers to publishing, so “you have high quality competition that costs nothing.” Then there is this blog. Low quality competition that costs minutes out of your life. Minutes that you will never recover. You do the math. I can’t believe this blog will ever be considered the farm team of any publisher. Shirky’s main point is on target, this is for my circle of friends, my virtual cocktail party. And it is for me. I can’t imagine who else would care.
