A quick review of recent news

I have a headline mind. I first noticed this in college when I would sneak off from the dorm with faked parental permission and then imagine disaster: College Coed found in Juarez Jail: Mother said she thought daughter was safe at college.

There does not seem much in my life that I can not reduce to a banner headline with caption.  And it appears that our busy lives means that even the news media is following my example.

• Dems start countdown toward health care vote
• Stevens considers retiring from Supreme Court
• Sandbags delivered ahead of expected Fargo flood
• Woman, son missing after van found on Wash. beach
• 2 wolves blamed in Alaska teacher's death killed
• Army drops bayonets, busts abs in training revamp
• Toyota dismisses Calif. man's runaway Prius report

I really have only a few questions I would like answered on these headlines: Is ex-governor, Sarah Palin, the one that shot the two wolves? And can spring be far behind if Fargo is already ordering sandbags? I already know that John Paul Stevens is the associate justice of the Supremes believed to be the leader of the liberal wing of the court. So retiring with a liberal president in office is a good move. And of course health care will be a fight to the wire because all people voting yea or nay have it already.

I am not interested enough in the missing woman and son on the Washington beach to follow the story further. They probably did something incredibly stupid. If further abandoned vans on beaches prove a serial killer in the area I may backtrack to this on Google. And of course, Toyota dismisses the California man's runaway Prius report. They are into denial, denial, denial. One of the amazing things about the disaster in Kansas City in the early 1980's when the Hyatt walkways fell and killed and maimed hundreds is that Hallmark, owner of the hotel, admitted guilt immediately. I guess those days are over. On to the Exxon Valdiz manner of handling things: Oil, what oil.

And the days of bayonets are gone too with the cavalry sword and horse. I suppose the Kevlar vest made them rather inefficient. And they don't mount well on the standard issue AK47's these days. Still a sad moment. But what is this about bust abs? Poorly written headline in my opinion. Probably just trying to lure in the entertainment news crowd with thoughts of Madonna.

 And that my friends is an in depth look at the news of the day. Go back to Facebook and enjoy yourself with who just planted potatoes in Farmtown.

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.

It is suppose to be all about me

I just posted blog 250 on my Yahoo!360 blog. It seemed like a good time to go back and begin to copy and save my blogs to my hard drive. And a funny thing happened as I worked my way through my beginning blogs. I noticed there were no comments. For almost all of the first fifty blogs I was writing in a vacuum. I was writing for just me. It was what a blog is suppose to be -- an on-line journal that is read in reverse order.

There is a lot of panic currently about all the hard work going down the drain if Yahoo!360 is abandoned (maybe by the bloggers first) or self-destructs because of some inherent flaw in the programming. But as I was setting up word files and saving some of my early entries it occurred to me just how far I had come as a blogger. I got the spacing right finally (most of the time). I learned to add photos and use FlickR, I learned my way around research sites on the net, and began posting my own art and my own poetry. Learned how to use spell check without losing my blog.

And I began getting comments on my blogs. First just one or two per blog, sometimes none. I imagine I was adding friends too though in the beginning I was really afraid of friends.

So now I have 72 friends which were once a real joy. (Opps 71 - the blog today upset one). Now I am not so sure. They seem to be raising my anxiety level by threatening to abandon 360 before it abandons them. I think that was a game I used to run a lot of my life when younger. I eventually abandoned it as not productive. One it required a lot of moving, packing, unpacking, making new friends, etc. Anyway now I get to face all my abandonment issues.

But this is about blog 250. And what that Yahoo blog platform has given me in the way of growth and knowledge and experience. And if it were to crash this very minute before I had copied all my blogs to word files on my hard drive could I say all my hard work was wasted? No. Because I learned and grew. I met people and made friends finally. Several of those are now connected with me through IM's or e-mail. And as I discovered as a military brat moving from base to base, if you are going to stay friends that will happen regardless of where you are transferred, and if you aren't, living next door won't help. I don't always deal well with the drama queens. Blogging in a vacuum has its pluses.

Ergo this site with no friendship issues. I do know that I am not going to MASH except to keep in contact with some of the friends I made here. I am letting my FaceBook account die (there seems to be no way to unsubscribe). I have set up this blog on BlogSpot to do what I originally wanted to do - just keep an online journal and express my views right or wrong. For the moment I am staying on 360 because I like it. When it is no longer fun I am gone.

Woke up this morning in a serious sort of mood

For a year now I have had a blog on Yahoo 360. The rumor in that blogland is they want us all to go to Mash, their new social network. Hey, I think they have copied FaceBook with one serious flaw in my opinion; they allow your friends to edit your page. Excuse me, but isn't that like walking into your neighbor's house and rearranging the furniture?

Mother always said to never put all your eggs into one basket. Rumor seems to be shaking the Yahoo 360 basket. Tried FaceBook and don't like it so I started looking for a more serious blog platform. Some platform to swim to should the ship of Yahoo 360 indeed sink. Blogger was recommended and so here I am back on a new learning curve.

Whether Yahoo 360 survives or not is suddenly not the issue. My intention is to make this my serious blog platform. I have found in the year of blogging on 360 that I have far more to say than I thought I might. A lot about the social conditions, politics, education, global economics, dissolving the United States into a loose federation of five nation states, death of democracy, the list continues. Travels with Charley may just be a bumpy ride.