Don't Blog

According to the New Zealand Herald, the Chinese government has been arresting people who spread 'rumors' about SARS via text messaging, saying that it is a 'subversive activity and a threat to stability.'

With its control slipping, the Government's response has been to combine cutting-edge technology with 'low-tech Leninist' repression. Its technology allows it, for example, to search the country's entire volume of email traffic for words such as 'Falungong', or to monitor any individual's text messages. Anyone snared in its high-tech web can expect surveillance, intimidation, arrest and prison. via boingboing

via Gizmodo

Doug Powell writes a great faux news release. ACLU officially applauds approval of The 2010 Digital Divide Act. Some choice soundbites:

The original debate seems to have centered around how blogs amplify each other. At the time no one seems to have recognized the beginnings of a scale free personal publishing feedback loop. The effect has since been labeled The Tragedy of the Blogosphere.

Endorsing celebrity blogs became a much sought after source of revenue after the $3 million a year Pyro signing of InstaReporter Inc. It has been estimated that corporate sponsorship of blogs will be a billion dollar business within two years.

Industry analysts have presented compelling arguments that the true cause is the sharp decline in blog software sales as more netizens perceive the blogosphere as a saturated medium dominated by a few A-list elites.

Like all good satirical science fiction, it pokes holes at today's social foibles in an entertaining way. A great read.

The Microsoft FrontPage product manager using the B-word in public. So we have a new slide:

• Microsoft gains 87% share of Enterprise Blogging Market. What happens if Microsoft provides fear, uncertainty, and doubt long enough to damage competitors? What if it sells well enough to swallow up entire blogging budgets? What if it executes so poorly that users never buy-in and management writes off the whole blogging thing? Not like this has happened before.

From Hackworth on Blogroots via thomas n. burg. Thanks.

• Wife Wins Joint Weblog In Divorce Court. What would you give up to keep your blog?
  
• Spammers Tailor Mail Using Blog Data. Unless you blog anonymously, your archives are a wealth of information about you. How will it be used? By you?
  
• Trackbacker Worm Shuts Down Blog Community For 3rd Day. How much are you willing to depend on blog technology you don't control?
  
• Google deletes 23,000 weblogs under PRC pressure; Terra closes division deletes 150,000 blogs. Big media closes radio stations, television channels, and newspapers. Why not weblogs? How much media consolidation is there in the blogosphere?
  

A forlorn Frank Paynter put out a missing persons report for George Partington. If you see this man... (foto) ... tell him his blog misses him. And I already miss him too. George Partington, Highwater." Blogging for less than three months, Partington takes the time to explain his autoblogicide in a departing post:

I haven't been very funny lately. Have I ever? Seems like I started out this blogging thing laughing at myself and my willingness to let a buncha stuff out online. I tried to be creative and it was fun. For a while there, it was like a great party where more and more people kept dropping in, drawn by some inexplicable energy. Not referring to my site specifically, just the whole blog ecosystem I found myself in. That would be the progressive one. The intelligent one, the humorous one, and most definitely the concerned one. I guess it was serious then too; it's just the laughter that's changed. The lack of it.

But I didn't know how else to be, or what else to be, or why I would be something else. Now, it's time to be something else. It's time to separate the blogging and the life. Yep, it's time to unplug a bit. It's time to welcome myself into the desert of the real, and see if I can coax forth some tender shoots. I've got two named Eleanor and Audrey. And blogging has given me some clues to some others.

I've about worn myself out reading blogs and other online content. I feel like snapping at every conservative I run across. I'm feeling stretched thin. Things are not funny anymore. Call it the post-democratic blues.

We live too much in our minds, and it's time for me to find some balance. Neither mind, body nor spirit have it, and consequently, none of them are terribly healthy. And blogging has brought on a vicious case of ADD. I'm so scattered, I don't even have time to read the stuff I've linked to. ...

It's time to work when I should work, and play when I should play. It's time to figure out what that means. I need to find the lightness in either activity, and in myself.

...

Time to take stock of my own personal wilderness, offline. So no blogging and much less reading blogs. That's gonna be hard, but I think it's something I need to do right now.

And if and when I come back to blogging, it will be a new site. So (sniff) say goodbye to High Water.

Might blogging cause clinical depression? Attention deficit? Political intolerance?