Joe's Jottings

Some years ago when I was engaged (in a small way) in the movie industry I read a rather interesting book of advice to low budget (or zero budget) film makers.   One of the most useful things I read was the advice to make sure that you kept the tank of your car full of petrol.  That way, if opportunity knocked, or you needed to get somewhere fast, then even if you were rock-bottom-skint you wouldn’t be caught by being unable to buy petrol for the car!

It’s a simple idea, and one that I’ve adopted to some degree with various aspects of my day to day life.  It’s always been particularly useful because I have a very up and down cash-flow – being self-employed can sometimes result in personal finances being like the Biblical 7 years of plenty and 7 years of famine. The money one is the obvious application.  Whilst it’s possible to stuff money in a savings account or, in these days of fiscal doubt, in a biscuit tin buried under the roses, it can sometimes be more useful to spend the money on things you KNOW you will need in the not too distant future – pay extra off your Credit Card, keep a few extra quid around to allow you to take advantage of ‘BOGOF’ offers in the supermarket, cheap deals in the local shops, etc.  We have a ‘stock box’ which contains cans, dried foods, rice, pasta, cooking oil, etc. that we keep topped up for use in winter conditions or as a stop gap when things might get tight.  The advantage of getting stuff rather than saving the money is that it prevents the money being spent on other things.  Of course, it doesn’t help with those ‘rainy days’ that always whack our lives, but it at least allows you to lay things aside for a rainy day. 

The ‘keeping your tank full’ approach also applies to time; whilst it’s true that you can’t store time in a bottle (except in the Jim Croce song) what you can do is make use of spare time that you do find yourself with to get things done that may need doing further down the line when you may be short of time in which to do ‘em.  My own ‘favourites’ in this category of task are quite often Blog Posts or at the very least ideas for future posts.  The WordPress software makes this easy; I can write a couple of posts in the same session and use the software to schedule their publication in the future.  Other tasks that I often fit in to this category are what I call ‘errands’ – doing some of the stock up shopping listed above, collecting and dropping off dry cleaning, sorting out files – anything that will be required in the next few weeks and that may get forgotten in the ‘hurly burly’ if time becomes short for any reason.

And I’ve also applied it to my health and well being; whilst I know you can’t stock up on sleep, I have been known to go and take afternoon or early evening naps when I get an unexpected opportunity.  Whilst it might only benefit me over the next 24 hours or so, it’s good to make sure that I don’t run up a sleep deficit – especially living with 3 cats, one of whom is a royal pain in teh arse at keeping the rest of the house awake!

So…keep your tank full and don’t get caught running on empty!

Some months ago, an Internet Form that I belonged to was taken offline after an internal dispute….and it never came back.  The upshot of it was that the content of the forum was no longer available – gone for good.  Of course, it wasn’t all pearls of ever-lasting wisdom, but there was some interesting stuff there that’s now gone forever.  A week or so ago, another friend commented on my Facebook profile about the ephemeral nature of a lot of what we put online  as ‘User Generated Content’, and it’s quality, and that got me thinking about just how much user generated content is worthy of any form of retention.

‘Web 2.0′ is very much about user generated content; a Web 2.0 site is essentially designed by the interaction that it offers users of the site – be it the ability to configure the user experience, participate in discussions, real time chat, post articles or images, whatever.   For those of us from the 70s and 80s,  it’s all very reminiscent of the paper based fanzines and newsletters we created, or the BBS systems of the 1980s and 990s – of course, the sheer volume and speed of communication offered by Web 2.0 exceeds the earlier versions of ‘user generated content’.

One might even include things like ‘Letters to the Editor’ in newspapers and magazines – how many of us knew someone who’d had a letter published in the local, or even national, press?  And then you get in to the rarer scenario of having an article, poem or story accepted for publication – and getting paid for it.  I still remember all the details of the first article that I had published in 1982 in the now defunct magazine ‘Electronics and Computing Monthly’.

The further you go back, the more important one thing becomes – and that’s editorial filtering.  Basically, space was limited in magazines, and so you wanted to fill it with what would sell.  And that’s where the quality control of the editor came in.  Even with fanzines, there was a similar need – you had a limited amount of space dictated by the cost of copying, postage and the time taken to type and duplicate it all.

Today, many of these limitations are gone – cost of publication is minimal, distribution is done by the reader picking their copy up form your site, etc.  Anyone can set up a publication in the form of a site, and expect to get a lot of content from users of the site.  In theory, a perfect world of conversation between similarly minded people across the globe, with no editor getting in the way and dictating policy.  It’s a wonderful dream.  And it doesn’t work.

To be honest, most people are just not up to the job of writing for an audience; the editor didn’t introduce censorship – he or she bought along quality control, focus and direction for the publication.  I’m far from perfect myself, but I learnt quite a bit about writing for an audience by having a couple of hundred article and a dozen or so books published in the days of the ‘paper press’.  If we forget the obvious nonsense that turns up as comment on blogs – the spam, the ‘me too’ and ‘I agree’ posts – then much of what does end up online is often poorly phrased rant or loosely disguised ‘advertorial’.   A lot of content on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and the online discussion forums is by it’s nature ephemeral – water cooler discussions enshrined in hard disc space – and the good stuff that you do find is typically drowned in the noise.

Like I said, I’m far from perfect and am conscious enough of my own abilities to know that my blog is simply the 2010 equivalent of a fanzine written by me and with a small audience.  But it’s important that we don’t get fixated on the idea that the removal of editorial policy on the web and the resultant ‘free for all’ for people to provide content is necessarily good.

It isn’t.  It’s removed quality control, and generated a Web that is increasingly full of rubbish.  If you want quality – look for sites with editorial policy or moderation.

As anyone who’s ever heard me rant about the ‘numbers game’ side of networking – especially on sites such as Ecademy, Linked in or Facebook – will testify, I’m a great believer in quality rather than quantity, and until the software on such sites can do more for me than it currently does in terms of augmenting my memory and the cognitive abilities I apply when trying to remember ‘Is Fred interested in Mousterian Variability or is that Jill?’ then I use these sites to more conveniently keep in touch with roughly the same number of people I would via non computer based means.

So I was pleased today to read this item, suggesting that the brain has a top limit on how many people we can keep track of.   It’s called Dunbar’s Number and is suggested by anthropologist Robin Dunbar to be about 150.  It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s been realised for years that there are optimum sizes for small teams of between 6 and 10 people, which fits with the old military idea of the ‘Brotherhood of the table’ – the ideal size of a small, self contained, fighting unit being a section of about a dozen men.  In such small teams personal loyalties develop and the team bonds quickly.  Larger groupings are employed in companies, but few large companies now look to any ‘business unit’ as having more than a couple of hundred people in them, as management becomes impersonal and the whole unit becomes less effective.

I’ve held for many years, even before the advent of Internet social networking sites, that the quantity over quality brand of personal networking is more to do with train spotting, stamp-collecting or the MI5 Registry than it is to do with maintaining close and friendly business or social relationships.  The numbers approach reduces everything to the level of transactions -’What can ‘x’ do for me today?’, or ‘I need to know ‘z’, who can help me?’  Whilst this is indeed part of social relationships, the more is beautiful version of social networking makes it all there is to having a network, which is painfully sad.

The natural extension to this approach is what we’re seeing now; many ‘numbers based’ networking sites end up as platforms for the exchange of low-value ‘opportunities’ between people, which are rarely of value to the recipient.  Spam may be too harsh a word, but what else can you call it?  If you have a network of 2,000 people, then you’re much more likely to feel OK about ‘cold calling’ them all than you would if you had a more tightly defined network of respected confidantes, friends and valuable professional associates.  Same on Twitter – it’s easy to spam 20,000 people with marketing messages in 140 characters because you simply cannot know them all.  You’re working as a publisher.  there’s nothing wrong with that but don’t fool yourself in to believing that your relationships with those 2,000 or 20,000 people are anything other than, in most cases, opportunities for you to push your message to them.

Of course, true relationships do develop from these large numbers of what I call ‘transactional friends’, but they enter in to the 150.  The vast majority of these thousands of friends and followers seem, therefore, to be just stamps in a collector’s album.

I for one don’t want to be a collector!

I came up with the title for this piece after reading this article on the BBC Website about people who the authors of a paper called ‘online exhibitionists.  The idea is that much privacy legislation is based around the idea of what levels of privacy someone can reasonably expect to have when out and about in public.  So, if we live in a world where people are relatively circumspect, photography and publication in public places is rare, then we can expect to have some right to privacy based on a reasonable expectation that you won’t be photographed.  If you’re a celebrity, then your expectation can be less because you might reasonably expect to have people taking pictures and hassling you because the nature of your work has put you in the public eye.  Right or wrong, that’s the way it’s tended to run over recent years.

Of course, with the rise of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites, everyone has effectively become a ZZ List Celebrity within their own group of friends or the town in which they live in.  In fact, it might be said that by the very act of registering an account with something like Facebook, we’re actually turning our backs on our right to privacy – and that’s wrong.  I recently covered this sort of ground in my post ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’. 

In my original plan for this piece, I was going to elaborate on this issue – but then a Tweet made me aware of a quote from Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook – “The Age of Privacy is Over”.  Here it is. He states that were Facebook being set up now he’d default all our privacy settings to Public.  Now, I quite like Facebook and have taken my privacy settings to a level with which I’m happy – but I can see Facebook losing users if they start regarding our lives as ‘entertainment feed’ for the real time Web.

Well, given that Zukerberg’s company rely on us letting go of a bit of privacy to communicate with each other, I can see that, in the words of Christine Keeler, ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’

But what has scared the bejabers out of me this morning is to see comments from some digital media folks along the lines that they feel it might be rewarding for us to ‘hide less’.  I’m sorry?  I can only imagine that those who say such things have never been on the receiving end of online stalking, have never been harassed for their sexuality expressed online, have never suffered a rock through their window from thugs because of their politics or race. 

It may appear to be ‘hiding less’ for people in the business but it can be a matter of staying alive for some.  Even when these people do not have online profiles, their privacy can be breached accidentally or deliberately by others who do.

Maybe the world of Big Brother has come 25 years late and is being self-inflicted.  Just how many people out there right now are echoing in their attitudes the final chilling words of ’1984′:

“But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

There is a wonderful phrase in film and TV script writing - ‘to jump the shark’.  It’s that point in the history of a TV series where the scripts veer off in to the surreal or when characters suddenly change their behaviour.  It’s reputedly named after an episode of the  popular 1970s sitcom ‘Happy Days’ when the hero ‘The Fonz’ ends up jumping over a shark on water skies.  Plausible, huh?

It struck me the yesterday, after seeing a site that had been bought to my attention via Twitter, that Web 2.0 may very well be at the point of jumping the e-shark.

Now, Web 2.0 has revolutionised the way we put web applications together.  Before we go much further, Web 2.0 is like pornography; we know what it is when we see it but we’d be hard pressed to formally define it.  So, here’s what I mean by Web 2.0.  It’s a piece of jargon that is used to loosely define web sites and technologies that facilitate interactivity, inter-operability between web sites, sharing of user information and user driven content, whether text, image or multimedia content like video and animation.  Web 2.0 sites are typically those where the content displayed to you and other site users can be easily modified and configured by the user.  Facebook is a Web 2.0 ‘poster boy’; my Internet Banking site is good old fashioned ‘Web 1.0′.

A lot of the technology that has been developed to make Web 2.0 possible has found it’s way in to all sorts of Web sites - things like Google Apps, for example, are a perfect example of the serious application of Web 2.0 technologies.

But for all the value, have we finally hit a point where many sites and applications being delivered as part of the Web 2.0 revolution are trivial, absurd and effectively worthless to the vast majority of Web users, effectively showing themselves to be ‘portfolios’ for developers or sites of interest only to the digerati being passed off as the next ‘big thing’?

Not that there’s anything wrong with either of these directions, provided that we appreciate it and that we don’t get ourselves so tied up in having the joy of having a Web 2.0 site that we miss the point of what the site is supposed to be doing.

And so on to  http://omegle.com/ .  To save you the job of visiting, it’s a chat site that allows you to talk to….total strangers anonymously.  Yes, a technology that trumpets the fact that it facilitates communications between individuals the world over now allows stranger to speak unto stranger.  Maybe I’m a bit hard on this site, but to me it encapsulates so much of what is wrong with some of the more over-hyped Web 2.0 applications.  It’s no doubt regarded as ‘cool’ and ‘clever’ by some; it’s essentially pointless, does little that can’t be done elsewhere.  It’s almost ‘out of character’ for the original aim of Web 2.0 – to facilitate communication and interactivity.  After all, anonymous communications are not that useful for most things.  And you have to admit that talking to randomly selected anonymous people is pretty surreal.  Assuming that the people on the other end are real people and not just ‘bot’ programs….

So…are we heading for Web 2.0 shark jumping in 2010?  And why is it important? 

Well, shark jumping almost always precedes the demise of the TV show.  And it would be a shame if the good stuff that the interactive web has bought us were to be drowned under a wave of over-hyped nonsense.

The Greeks had the Oracle at Delphi; we have consultants. A recent comment on Twitter suggested that the Apocalypse would be heralded by everyone on Twitter being a ‘Social Media Expert’ – sometimes this is how Twitter feels, with everyone who starts following me appearing to be the online equivalent of those guys who clean your car windows when you stop at junctions…

It set me thinking – is the whole Social Media field (that part of the media / Internet that deals with interactive and group based applications and developments, like Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, etc.) too young to have real experts?

Years ago I worked with a guy who hated the word ‘expert’.  His take was that an ‘ex’ was a has been and a ‘spurt’ was a drip under pressure.  Which sort of summed it up… A more widely heard belief in IT is that an expert is someone who’s read 3 pages further in the manual than you have….

Whilst I wouldn’t go that far, I think that at this stage in the social media game it’s too soon to tell what is true expertise and what isn’t.  It’s similar to the many people who thought they were successful property developers during the UK housing boom; the market added value; they did nothing, and when the market slipped the dilettantes got whacked.

At this stage in the game I believe the best policy to be to encourage the client to adopt the generally stated ‘best practice’.  This may be a conservative approach, but it allows the client to develop their social media expertise organically and as part of their normal marketing strategy.  Having said that, a recent discussion with a practitioner in the field suggested that we may not yet even have the maturity needed for ‘best practice’ to have evolved, so that approach may not yet be of value.

So, what is the answer?  Perhaps it’s time to stop going on about Social media as a separate discipline and start looking at the technologies and techniques it encapsulates as being just different aspects of existing business practices.  For example, a company may use Facebook to establish brand awareness and communicate with customers.  OK – that’s a new approach for both Marketing and Customer Care to learn.  Someone else may be using a blog; that Public Relations / the Press Office.  Twittering to announce special offers?  Sales, anyone?

The technology is new, and there will be a steep learning curve, but the business processes being supported are the same as we have seen in businesses for the last 60 years.  Any technology or technique applied to a business must surely have one objective; to ultimately increases the value of the company or organisation to it’s stakeholders.  We’re just using new methods, which means that we’re going to have to learn them.  Most of these technologies are so cheap to implement (and are usually pretty straight forward to set up in the first instance) that perhaps we just need to try a few different approaches out and take note of what works for us, and then implement what works, rather than expect ‘expert’ guidance to solve all our problems.

In the classic comedy series, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ the only guidance offered to cultures that hadn’t yet mastered the new technology of fire was ‘Keep banging the rocks together’.

Good advice.

If you take a look at the section of this blog that lists posts by the month in which they appear, you’ll see that whilst recent months have been pretty regular, there have been some hiatuses in the past.  Looking back over them I can identify the fact that at the beginning of the period of silence, something happened in the ‘day job’ or in life in general that broke me away from writing the blog post.  And I stayed away from the blog for a while after that for the simple reason that I hadn’t really become habituated to blogging.

I remember reading somewhere that you have to repeat a course of action a few thousand times before your mind and body really begin to treat something as a truly ingrained habit.  Well, I hope that’s not entirely correct because I’m working on making a daily blog post a positive habit in my life.

Here are some techniques that I’ve adapted from other places and that I’ll be using to get the blogging habit in 2010.

Publicise what you’re doing! 

A friend of mine set up a Facebook group where we could publicise our New Year Resolutions to other group members and see whether we could keep them!  It’s always good to have an audience of people waiting for you to drop the ball!   You’re making a promise now to others as well as yourself; many people find it harder to disappoint others even in small ways than let themselves down.

Set a time and a place

Stephen King, in his excellent book ‘On Writing’, suggests that any writer needs to make sure that they’re at their writing desk / writing place at teh same time every day.  Excellent idea!  It effectively makes an appointment with yourself to be in a place with all the conditions just right for writing.

Remove Distractions

Make that appointment with yourself in a place and at a time where it’s possible to remove distractions.  This doesn’t mean working in Monastic silence in a plain white painted room, bare except for a desk, chair and laptop.  It’s more a state of mind – whatever might give you cause to prevaricate – despatch it.  Don’t schedule your writing time around the time that your cats need feeding, the postie arrives, or when you might expect to get phone calls.  If you like to work to music, get your music on your computer so you don’t go grubbing around to find it.  If you like a lot of tea or coffee whilst you blog, get a thermos if you need it.

Set a SMART target

I set a target of a minimum of one blog post of between 400 and 600 words a day.  It’s a SMART target because it’s:

1. Sustainable – I reckon I can do this day in, day out.
2. Measurable- it’s easy to see if I’ve hit the target. 400-600 words.
3. Action-oriented – you gotta DO something, not talk about it! I will have at least one blog post to point at.
4. Relevant- the target you set yourself should be relevant to your ultimate goals.  It’s relevant to my aim of generating a popular blog.
5. Timely – should have a timescale attached to it. It happens every day.

So – there you go!  Join me in making good habits in 2010!

Incendiary political blogger Guido Fawkesmade an interesting observation the other day that the Left are once again saying that 2010 will be their year to dominate the Blogosphere in a run up to an election and beyond.    As he points out, they’ve also said this in 2007, and I remember similar thoughts being voiced when Labour first started playing with computers for campaigning back in the 1980s (as an ‘Old Labour’ member I was involved with Computing For Labour for a while, on and off up to my exit from the party in 1996).

The article started me thinking about the whole business of political blogging.  Just to provide a quick view of where I personally come from politically…. I come from the left, but have found myself for the last decade inhabiting the territory of the Libertarian.  I’ll get the joke out of the way now ‘Being a Libertarian is like being a Liberal; you can come up with lots of ‘out there’ policies because you’ll never have to bear the responsibility of putting them in to action’   My own take on Libertarianism is minimum Government, maximum possible empowerment of communities to provide services locally, with national Government providing only the necessary services and infrastructure that it would be inefficient for local communities to provide. On a personal basis I try to practice what I preach by involving myself in local organisations and efforts to develop local economies and local structures of service provision.

Enough about me – back to the blogging.  When a party member blogs they almost by definition need to watch what they say if they intend to adhere to the Party Line.  Whilst this may not be important for the ‘rank and file’, if you’re anyone with influence or position in the Party, stating anything that is not doctrine will probably get you a slap on the wrist (or a boot up the bottom) from the powers that be, especially when it is viewed as being important for all to be singing from the same hymn sheet.  Which frequently makes a political blog by ‘well known’ politicians as interesting as reading excerpts from the Manifesto document of that party.  It’s highly unlikely you’ll find anything truly radical and rare that you’ll find anything that confronts the existing status quo within the Party. 

My own attitude towards political blogging is to pay more attention to the more ‘independent thinkers’ outside the mainstream political parties, and also pay more attention to the ideas irrespective of who posts them.  Politics isn’t about politicians or political bloggers, spin-doctors, media pundits or journalists; they just practice the business that modern mainstream politics has become.  So, my advice would be to treat most blogs by ‘professional’ politicians as marketing efforts for the brand they’re working for.  As for the other political blogs – go for ‘em!  Try them out, whether you agree or disagree with their viewpoint.  It’s ideas that are important, not which doctrine they come from.  There’s a good list of Political Blogs compiled by Iain Dale here.

Real Politics is about our day to day lives, and how we are permitted to live them – whether that permission comes in terms of laws, resources, money, media influence.  The old labels are becoming just that – labels on political product that is less and less relevant.  Perhaps the real winners in the political blogosphere for 2010 will be ‘none of the above’ but the ‘Real Politics’ blog posts of the rest of us.

I’m old enough to have used an address book and still have a Rolodex on the phone table.  When I actually sit down and think about the people with whom I have reasonably regular ‘quality’ contact in a 3 month period, either electronically or face to face, it probably amounts to no more than a hundred or so.  I guess it’s safe to say that in the world of networking I’m a ‘quality over quantity’ sort of fellow.  I’ve never been a great collector of large numbers of business cards or people details – collections are fine for stamps, coins and locomotive numbers but are kind of creepy for people.

Back in the late 1990s / early 2000s I used a networking site called Ecademy – I stopped after a while because it seemed that people were making contact with you purely from a sales oriented viewpoint.  Allow me to explain – if I’m interested in AI, and someone brings something to my attention that’s even vaguely related to the field – that’s cracking!  That’s exactly what I’m there for – and hopefully I’ll be able to reciprocate.  On the other hand, if someone steams in with a ‘Hi, I’m Fred, I’m in marketing, blah, blah, blah’ I get the feeling I’m receiving a boilerplate message which is likely to end up as a boiler room selling attempt.  The site seemed to encourage numbers of contacts over quality – and that’s one of the reasons why I eventually jacked it in.

I’ve noticed in recent days that I’m being followed by people who are following thousands of others.  And the odd thing is most of them appear to be selling something that is as relevant to me as a comb to Sir Patrick Stewart.  The ‘Bio’ of one such follower (soon to be ex-follower in my daily purge) – “A Business Dedicated to providing free online MLM training videos, articles, books and webinars”.  If I received an email like this I’d call it spam – pure and simple.  I know that Twitter has policies around spam, but my point is that most folks following 20,000 people seem to be in the MLM, ‘sales and marketing’, ‘social media consultancy’ sort of areas.  They’re cold calling – they sure ain’t networking.

Bottom line – there is NO WAY, realistically, that the content generated by the 20,000 people these bods follow is ever registering in any meaningful manner with these people – I assume it’s simply being harvested electronically and searched for keywords that might suggest a sales lead. 

Joe’s categorisation of Twitter users…

1. Vast number of followers, smallish number of followed – publisher / celeb.
2. Vast number of followers, vast number of followed – probably sales / mass marketing
3. Smallish followers, large number of followed – probably spammer
4. Smallish followers / smallish followed – personal / business networking

OK – it’s not a brilliant classification but it works for me.  Just watch out if you’re in category 2 or 3 ‘cos I’m binning you!

 Whilst I was drafting this yesterday, I came across this piece on the same topic:  http://juliorvarela.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/when-twitter-numbers-are-meaningless/

Don’t get too hung up on your numbers on Twitter.  If you’re following lots of people, just check WHY.  Do they add value to your day?  Amuse / entertain you?  Educate you?  Guide or enlighten you?  If not, ditch ‘em.  And those following you – just take a look at their numbers and think about what I’ve said.

And I hope you don’t chuck me off your lists.

I recently came across a couple of articles about blogging. Well, I’ll be honest – they were in my Twitter feed and I took a look at them to see what other people’s views were on the subject of content in blogs. It was sort of distressing to me – according to those particular authors I’m doing absolutely everything wrong.  For example:

• I mix subjects – I have technical stuff sitting side by side with personal stuff.
• I rarely have articles that have ‘xxx ways to do yyy’ as the title.
• I definitely don’t have a marketing plan for Joe’s Jottings

There were a few other items that cropped up in these pieces – enough to make me sit back in my chair (carefully moving Marvin the cat form behind me – he’s a big fellow and would not tolerate being squished) and think about this article.  What goes in a blog?

I guess the bottom line answer is ‘What’s the blog about?’  If you’ve set out to write the world’s authoritative blog on Mousterian Variability then you will have a fairly shrewd idea of what’s good.  A blog entry on your trip toLe Moustier is good, 500 words on your views on nearby spa towns, not so good in the consistency stakes.  But if you’re writing a personal blog, then I’m afraid that as far as I’m concerned it should be a case of ‘publish and be damned’ – what you want to go in, goes in.  After all, one definition of the word ‘blog’ is very straight forward:

“A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links”

and applying this definition I hit the spot a little better.  Joe’s Jottings is indeed chronological, consists of personal thoughts and web links, and strives to be frequent. 

Unfortunately for the digerati and the marketing types out there, my personal thoughts do tend to wander around somewhat and very rarely do they include a line that says ‘How can I market / monetise Joe’s Jottings’ and even less frequently do I bother about whether I think about technical stuff after non-technical stuff, and whether I remembered to include a 5 point list in my thinking every 20 minutes.  People’s personal thoughts, to me the basis of a personal blog, don’t run like that.  They’re the stream of everyday consciousness that makes us the interesting souls that we are.  When we start filtering the contents of what is supposed to be our personal thoughts and writings to suit marketing demographics and audience statistics then we need not worry about censorship of the web – we’re already doing it nicely ourselves.

George Orwell wrote a column for the Tribune newspaper in the 1940s called ‘As I Please’ that would find political pieces next to home handyman tips, for example.  And that was the way that Orwell thought – he was a writer, a political thinker, but also a chap who had other interests that he felt were important enough to him to get featured in his ‘weekly bloggings’ for Tribune. 

Ha!  My question answered, indirectly by George Orwell.  What goes in to a blog?  Whatever you like…as you please.