Mother always said I was stubborn

If I were a four legged, finned or feathered beast of some sort it would not be any one of the numerous ones that herd, school or flock. Mother always said I was too stubborn to go along with the crowd. I always thought I wanted to make absolutely sure they were not heading over a cliff before I joined in.

A college room mate maintained that if someone rushed into our room to say Russian missiles were heading our direction I would want to consider the advisability of surviving in the bomb shelter under the dorm. (It was the cold war era and my father the pilot argued that you did not want to live through a nuclear attack even if it were possible.)

On Y!360 there is another wave of collective thinking taking place. Those that have sat it out waiting to see what Yahoo!'s new blog platform will be like are now thinking maybe those that left for Multiply months ago might just be the right thinkers in this mix. And nobody gets that. . . "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." I would not go to Multiply again if they paid me to go. It is frankly not my cup of tea.

Blog platforms seem to run the full range from mindless personality contests like FaceBook to more logical and reasoned places like Blogger. Y!360 seems to be about in the middle, Multiply a bit over the edge toward social network. After the first panic I looked into several alternatives. I found I liked Blogger (which I found before the panic) because it was a great place to blog and an impressive place to send non-bloggers to introduce myself. It has a very professional air that I am not ashamed to be associated with. I had decided to place most of my poetry and serious blogs here.

But Y!360 remains a great place to play. I am sincerely hoping that what Yahoo transition it into in the next couple of months maintains the same flavor. If not than I will continue to search for some place to play. But I am not a herd animal. Nor a Starling. Or a Tuna. I don't mind mixing with others but I am not following them blindly into the bomb shelter even if it means I may be nuked.

In my opinion Multiply is a poor place to just survive. It has mega privacy issues which I confronted when I was there before. I choose to not do it again. Besides I have Blogger from which to watch the suicides of the masses. It is quiet here and conducive to weighty thinking. Like being a Zen Lama on a mountain top.

My Special Place

Whether you Multiply, BlogSpot, 360 or Xanga you understand what it means to have a safe space to unburden yourself, express yourself, vent, whine, crow, or just post silly stuff.

We are all very different people and we are not likely to find everything we want at the same spot in Blog land. Yes we all met on Y!360. Some just stumbled into there, some deliberately came, some got forced there by family and friends. We have all been more or less happy, sought our own comfort level. And now change is being forced upon us or at least it seems as if it has been forced upon us.

I wrote the following poem before all this hubbub. I wrote it after I opened my Blogger site. I wrote it after I realized that Mash was about as far from what I wanted as FaceBook.

Blogging in view of others is a bit foreign for me even after a year.I used to fill hand bound journals year after year. I have boxes of them. Want to know what my thoughts were in 1965. Give me a moment and I can find that for you.

My Special Place

A new blog
Spot
Built on lessons
Learned
From before

And yet
Strange
Seemingly empty
Like the pages
Of a journal
But somehow
Welcoming

After working
So hard
To fill friends
List
Find
Blogs to visit

Then knowing
It wasn't
My aim
I wanted
This emptiness

Weeks
Of blogs
Without comment
Knowing
It is for me
I blog

This
Special
Empty place
A depository
For my
Thoughts

September 2007

And on a lighter note this little poem written from my cubicle at the fair.

The Borg

Don't look now
The Borg have arrived
People everywhere
With Bionic
Ear implants

Battery chargers
On their waists
BlackBerry command center
Permanently attached
To their hands
Borgs
Coming and Going
Communicating to
The hive
Tuned out
Dialed in
Not here

Outer space
Ether nerds
Who wants to be
So connected
To the mother ship
Beam me up

October 2007

Hope you are all where you want to be. And remember to always give yourself permission to change your mind. But don't let anyone change it for you. I just bought the most beautiful, totally empty journal to write poetry in.

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.