thecomptersociety.org blog

Our web log (blog) is hosted at blogger.com Which is a free service and easy enough to use, if you wish to publish your own personal blog there.

the address for our blog is...

http://thecomputersociety.blogspot.com/

The blogger.com main page is..get your own blog here.

http://www.blogger.com

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Live Bookmark in Firefox Browser for Our Blog or any..

If you have the Firefox web browser you can add our blog to your live bookmarks by simply right clicking the orange icon in the bottom right hand corner.

Then follow the directions for where to place the live bookmark

for a discussion of what live bookmarks are go to...

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/live-bookmarks.html

The information there is important.We urge anyone interested in the Internet at all to find out more about live bookmarks and rss syndication.

Firefox is available for free download at...

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

The new Internet Explorer browser is currently being worked on to add this important new feature of rss book marking to the Microsoft product.

What is this Blog Stuff

A number of our members have said what is a blog? Why the mania about blogging on TV news and in articles. This is my (Tom Joseph) try at an explanation.

Blog is short for web-log (Captains log star date 6.03 2023), a form of public diary. Blogs can be personal ranting. Blogs can be about cooking or politics or travel or any crazy or serious thing.

They have caught on because they do not require permission of editors or committee censorship or the structure of a magazine or newspaper or TV network. Blogs are about communicating publicly ones thoughts, tidbits and scraps nothing more.

Who cares? There are as many nasty stupid blogs, with all sorts of insane points of view, as there are people with these views. There are also entertaining and informative blogs with balance and taste.

In the old days people might gather in a town square for an event such as a visit from President Roosevelt or Eisenhower. At such an event people would judge for themselves what was worth paying attention to, the President speaking, the crowd mood, the funny whispered comments of their immediate neighbor, perhaps watching the people drifting off and walking away. A person in that crowd could turn their head any which way they chose.

Today the media, primarily TV, acts as our eyes and ears at political events and selects the gossip and trivia and entertainment of our community.

Unfortunately our professional media does not seem to take their new job very seriously. They are not contracted to really be fair or inclusive or entertaining. Making money is their job.

So the Internet and blogging has returned a little of what was normal and human to us in the past 3.75 million years, which is our right to pick and choose what we want to hear and see and to comment on these things for ourselves.

Often times the TV camera is fixed like a paralysed person, on the staged events of politics and entertainment in a way that serves paid agents and professional campaigns and not the public. The paid-for cult of celebrity has us focused on what celebrities eat and who they date and what they wear. The press creates new celebrities out of idiots and criminals, freaks and performers with little or no talent (fill in the names... for yourself).

The press allows paid private campaigns to make leaders out of people with no real accomplishments. It is not their job (the press) to be judge and jury, none the less they are judge and jury. It is why the Right and the Left complain about press bias at the same time and are correct from each perspective.

The people who really have a gripe are the majority, who are not that partisan to the Right or Left positions.

The ordinary person only appears in the news when they are only a chalk outline on a sidewalk or when they have gone berserk and are in court for some crime they have done.

Sometimes the TV people will interview some poor citizen next to a gasoline pump and ask "how do you feel about higher gas prices?" It is an insulting reduction of the common person to a dumb prop. Blogging gives us back the right to turn the tables and say whatever we want, whenever we want. This is central to the rise of the blog, whatever the subject area.

In the town square of old, the most entertaining speaker with the best stories to tell could hold sway. This is the real free marketplace of ideas not the bribery ridden, fake marketplace of the media world. Natural ability can win out in the blog-a-sphere, as it did in the town square of the past.

Blog on everyone!