I found, or I should say re-found, that del.icio.us has a feature to automatically post any new links added to your delicious account as a post titled “links for year-month-day”. This is either going to be something I like, or get sick of, so we’ll have to see. Until then, enjoy seeing anything I’ve decided is worth keeping track of.
Over at the Action Blog, they’ve set October 15 as a day to post about the environment, and I figured I would participate by commenting on my attempt at greener living over the last year or so. This will be my first post regarding this, and I’ll try and do one a day until the 15th. It hasn’t been the easiest thing to do, nor am I really done with attempting to live a greener life, but I’m trying my hardest. One thing I’ve become aware of is the difficulty of being green in today’s world. One item that immediately comes to mind is transportation.
Last year I purchased a bicycle (not shown at the right) with the intent of biking into work more often to save on gas as well as get back into shape, if only a little. While I rode it into work a couple times, I really didn’t use it as much as I expected to before it got too cold to continue. This past spring I pulled it out of storage, had it tuned up, and did my best to make a conscious effort to ride it more often. Eventually I did, mainly at the end of the summer and beginning of this fall semester. I’ve realized I need to get some gloves if I’m going to continue biking into work, but I’m going to do my best to continue to bike when I can. One of the best realizations was when I noticed, in one of the few times I did take my car to work, that the gas tank was just getting down to a quarter of a tank, and that it had been about 3 weeks since I last filled the tank up; I went about a month on one tank of gas.
Meghan of course does her own eco-friendly thing in order to get to school and work: she walks. I’m debating it, but I’m thinking that once it does start to get too cold or treacherous to bike, I am going to try to walk to work. If I can do that, both of our cars will be regulated to trips that the car is actually needed for, such as groceries and trips out of Bowling Green, but not to take us a mile (or so) to where I work on campus. Aside from campus being close, we’re lucky enough to also have plenty of eating options in walking distance to our apartment. Then again, much of Bowling Green is considered walking distance.
I was doing my typical blog/site hopping, moving from one story or article to another, when I came across Publishing 2.0. The first post I read over was Bloggers Are So Wrong About Media. As you might be able to tell from the title, it’s his opinion about how bloggers are convinced that blogging will bring down the current media giants. I agree with him that it may not be done the way some think.
He mentions in this post as well in one this past Tuesday that bloggers oftentimes do not do a good job explaining the blogging technology. When the majority of the population enjoy holding a daily newspaper or any other type of publication in their hands instead of reading the same articles on a screen, how are you going to get them to use a feed aggregator? Most people wouldn’t know what you meant, and so “bloggers explaining blogging technology” is only part of the issue.
When I was in college, I took a class titled Technology Systems in Socities. One of the instructors (there were two; they alternated every 4 weeks) commented that the purpose of the class was to educate us so that we could go out into the world as technologists; so that we would have an understanding of how technology and systems interacted with human cultures. Everyone who uses Internet and web technology should take the time to explain it to others, especially those who you want to use the technology; you are using the technology, thus you are a technologist… do something with your knowledge.
I guess I got a little off topic there, but it’s still relevant. As much as I like Firefox and Thunderbird, I’m not going to get people to switch to it just by talking about it; I need to show it to them and explain it. I put Firefox on Danielle and John’s laptop and showed him why I used it and certain extensions. I showed my mother it as well, and tried my best to explain its usage. I formatted my brother’s computer, and he wanted Firefox and GAIM on it. Chances are, had I not shown them the programs in the first place, they wouldn’t have used them.
As for blogging, I sort of knew about various things dealing with blogging, such as trackbacks and the like, but I had to dig my way through it to figure out what it all meant and how to work with it. Yes, I choose to host it on my own site instead of going with a specific host like Blogger or Xanga or LiveJournal, but I wanted to be able to easily backup my data and change things around if I wanted. Eventually I found drupal and have been using it for a month or so, and the modules available made blogging easier, but I had to research stuff and try them on my own.
All in all, I can see why he made the post he did, as well as the update to it. I personally don’t think that Web 2.0 will bring about a sort of communism, as he mentions. In a conversation with my father around Christmas, I said that, but then changed it to socialism, which I would now say would be more a derivation of socialism, such as democratic socialism perhaps.
I think Publishing 2.0 is worth reading. I know it’s now been added to my delicious “blogs” tags. This overall post may seem disjointed, but I spent about 5 hours on it, going back and forth between reading, writing, and working.