BBC NEWS | Technology | Internet serves as ‘social glue’
But the report, entitled The Strength of Internet Ties, found that e-mail supplements rather than replaces offline communications.
Funnily enough, this fits in nicely with what I’d been planning to blog tonight, although it has to be said that Jan removed most of my need to respond to comments 🙂
Just because I like blogging and communicating with strangers, doesn’t mean everyone does. WordPress has plugins that allow a whole bunch of different ways of using it, there are other cms systems that do likewise. I use it pretty much plain vanilla, although I do have some comment moderation stuff set up. Got more to do with stopping spam than stopping commenters I don’t know though.
Likewise the blogring has more than one purpose. It does gather home education blogs in a place for ppl who are searching for them. It also gathers them together to make life simpler for the ppl we know about who read them. Not all of those ppl are particularly capable technically, daresay not all of them have rss readers, it just makes life easier to click through the links. The only condition I’ve set on blogs with passwords is that ppl without the password should still be able to click through, and as blogring admin, I’m very happy with that setting.
I will be continuing to meditate on the blogring future, and by that I mean how I can help to enhance it rather than whether it has one 🙂 I think the blogring is a wonderful community – I enjoyed taking the time the other night to go around and comment places I haven’t for a while, and I enjoyed even more tonight discovering lots of other ppl have been at it too. It’s also a visual symbol of community (and don’t anyone tell me that it has to be visual to be a symbol, I know what I mean!) reminding us all that we belong to something bigger than our own blog. I think that’s important when so many of us are so remote from others in the same situation.
Grief, I seem to be doing a lot of pontificating atm. Something must have gone to my head 😉 I do apologise, I’m sure normal service will resume very shortly.
Oh, and Big lost another tooth, I did say that already didn’t I? The tooth fairy visited both times, and brought shiny coins. Big seems completely unconcerned that one was a pound and the second a 10p 🙂
Comments
7 responses to “BBC NEWS | Technology | Internet serves as 'social glue'”
Have you heard the one:
Great minds think alike. Fools seldom differ. :-
Check what I was talking about in my blog about 1 1/2 hrs ago.
Am currently playing with WordPress on my site. : Methinks I have a lot to learn. (eg, where on earth do I download the template to?)
Oh, and when you have a minute, I could do with a crash course in Thunderbird. I’ve routed my DOCmail though it, but can’t get my own email addresses through there.
I just hate it that computers are still so hard to use.
“we belong to something bigger than our own blog”, like um, ‘no blog is an island’, ‘man shall not live by blog alone’, that kind of thing?
Kris, templates are pretty straightforward, but if you’ve gone to wordpress 2.0 I’ll just be guessing on the detail as it’s a version up from me. Should be fairly straightforward though.
Is wordpress 1.5, I think. Have head on upside down at the mo so can’t actually focus on what I need to do. Explanations using words of one syllable and short sentences would be appreciated!
I’ll try to catch you online later. Easy explanations for blogging in return for easy gardening tips 😉