In its simplest form a blog is a personal diary that you make available to others. This could be as exciting as a day-to-day description of a climb up the north face of Everest all the way down to what Mary Beth had for breakfast somewhere in the southern parts of the US. If you want to rush right in at this point, or if you had something really interesting for breakfast, jump over to the Home Builder article (page D7) that describes how to get started in the blogging world.
Blogging or making comments on web sites and bulletin boards goes back to the Neolithic age of computers. I remember commenting on the local bulletin boards (they were from way back in computing terms), and posting comments on a board.
In contrast the blog is a personal item but it can still attract comments from readers, some who will not be so polite. If you do decide to start your blog expect that at least one person will not like what you are doing. There is no way around this.
There are people will disagree with just about anything no matter how tame you think your writing is. Just like some people in bars prefer to listen to a tone deaf singer over the trained version, there are people out there who will not share you love of fluffy animals whose picture you want to share with the world.
A video blog is the same as a standard blog in all ways except that it comes in the form of a series of video clips. This is still an interactive online diary, just one that moves. Some of these are edited and produced, others are just raw footage taken with a mobile camera or web cam and dumped into the blog.
Vlogging started about two years back and at the end of 2004 the online directory Mefeedia listed less than a hundred of them. You can visit this site and after a quick, free sign-up search through over 310,000 vlogs. If you want to learn how to vlog for free then visit freevlog.org for information on how to do it and some of the tools you can use.
The biggest difference between a blog and a vlog is the amount of work you may have to put into it. Posting an edited video versus a raw capture requires software tools and possibly some additional hardware. To do it well is an artform and not something everyone can do.
There is even a conference on the subject, Vloggercon. The better-known video site You Tube also has vlogs from such names as peanut, samui, plissken and koh.
Hard core Vloggers believe that vlogging will one day replace TV since they can get unedited footage rather than the standard talking head slant on every story.
One popular blogger, Seth Godin, recently announced that he doesn't like comments in blogs, particularly his . This has created a flood of responses from people that feel they have the right to comment on anything they like.
The reasoning is simple: too much time spent clarifying based on comments or, worse, writing based on the anticipation of comments. Another reason is that most comments tend to be insults or rants. These do not encourage any real interactivity and you are usually in a losing battle with some kind of logic-deprived fundamentalist. For the most part the old gentlemanly art of conversation gets lost in the electronic world.
One potential problem with blogs of all kinds is one of bandwidth. If the blog is pushed out or pulled in as part of an RSS feed, the volume of bits will add to the already overloaded communications architecture of the globe. Locally people are complaining that they are getting very slow responses, both here and from external networks.
Blogs do provide some anonymity, particularly if you use a service like blogger.com, so your blogs can be on things that you may not be able to share from, say, the work blog or even your home country blog. You cannot, for example, criticise the Chinese government on any local local blogging host but you could from an offshore version.
Industry news
Local foreigners have been complaining about the lack of access to any English versions of the World Cup broadcasts and I know more than one person who has signed up for the Malaysian satellite feed. Sadly the Internet feeds have either been poor or blocked from many of the English speaking countries such as the UK and Australia. This leaves Thailand as one of the few countries in the region that do not provide an English commentary feed for the tournament. Not a very positive indicator for Thailand, again.
It will not be surprising to readers that Microsoft is developing its own music and video gadget that it will use to compete with the Apple iPod. If you remember I already told you that the software giant is putting together its own iTunes equivalent service.
With its own hardware Microsoft can also control who gets to listen to what using its own built-in security. Despite its own proprietary music format, I will hazard a guess that you will be able to convert to MP3 thanks to some clever program from a 14-year-old, before the MS hardware hits the streets.
The unit is already in a demo form and being shown around to RIAA members as you read this. It is interesting that the Microsoft-branded music service appears to be in competition to other services that it has provided the software for, such as the Viacom MTV Networks service that was launched a few months ago. The technology also provides a protection base for other music subscription services, all over the planet.
Unlike some other service, Microsoft's will be primarily based around the pay per download model, with some type of subscription service also available - details are sketchy at the time of writing. Some of the early feedback appears to indicate that the new Microsoft service is better than iTunes in the sense that Microsoft is building a community-based system instead of a basic shopping store like iTunes.
It will be interesting to see how well Microsoft does in this venture, with giants like Amazon also moving into the field. Final delivery dates are unknown and I suspect somewhat flexible.
In other news, Microsoft lost the appeal on a legal case involving Office. It means that Office versions will be changing the way they communicate with Access and this will have the expected effect on existing programs and macros in products like Excel.
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