The Furture of On-line Journals

Never has on-line journals or blogging been so popular. Nor is there a time it has been more in jeopardy.

The obvious villain is Homeland Security which denies monitoring all the on-line activities of the citizens of the United States unless they are in communication internationally. And what blogger isn't. My friends list on Y!360 includes other bloggers from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and even Egypt.

Hope the staff of Homeland Security enjoys the recipes I frequently post on that blog. The poetry probably occupies their time even more. Having to decide if somewhere in there is a hidden code about a future terrorist attack staged to divert attention from George W's latest falling poll numbers. But all of that is expected. Regardless of the subject of my blog for months I avoided the Bush name in tags to stay under the radar.

No the greatest threat for blogging is the corporate sponsorship. Be it Google, Yahoo, or Fox they all want to find a way to make money with advertising or fees. And quite unfortunately the most avid bloggers are those most likely to be irritated by advertising and less likely to afford a monthly charge for use of the platform.

I frankly would not mind a use fee if it incorporated all that I wish to use on the Internet: website, e-mail accounts, news, blog platform, calendar, and social networking. But it would have to be entirely without annoying advertisements like the current roll-over and down Sprint ads. They have only confirmed my opinion to never use them.

Course there are other ways to gleam a profit out of bloggers. They are great padders of the search criteria. Provided they use tags and want to be found. And a lot of marketing information can be filtered from their pages. What for instance interests people capable of putting three sentences together in a cohesive whole with or without staying on subject.

The recently announced changes in Yahoo!360 has sent a lot of the "Sky is Falling" types running to Multiply or Blogger or MySpace or FaceBook. What they fail to realize is whatever has motivated Yahoo! to take a long and hard look at its total package of services is just around the corner for any other blogger platform. Like drug dealers they have all provided these services for free to get us addicted and now they are ready to start raising the price.

The whole panic in 360 land has made me realize that I am not that crazy about the social networking aspect. I started there to blog. I have started my blog here to also blog. I particularly like the ability to e-mail this to people I know that are non-bloggers and that it is open to allow me to refer them to this site with my URL address. The first I can do by journaling on my hard-drive.

All of which brought me back to the photo above: Hand Bound Journals. I found these at a website. I like hand bound journals. I still use them as sketchbooks and for my poetry and lists of creative ideas. I would not mind going back.