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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
Those of you who know Technorati , will know about its aims to keep track of all the blogs on the Net. Some task! At the end of last year it was supposedly indexing over 55 million blogs.
I can't say that I've really caught up with all Technorati does, but there's a blog - something I only just discovered today - and that has a lot of information on it.
The problem is that I'm already involved in I don't know how many sites, and trying to keep up with them all is a major task. (And I'm now working full-time again, so that's rather cut back on my 'leisure' hours!) So I haven't investigated what Technorati can or can't do for me with any degree of detail.
At first glance it seems just like any other forum, but there must be more to it than that...and it seems to have an awful lot of staff doing an awful lot of something.
So I'll try and spend some time on this issue, and maybe I'll get a clue or two...
I've just been watching a cartoon by Chris Landreth, a Canadian animator. The subject of the cartoon is Ryan Larkin, a fellow-Canadian, and a superb animator whose early cartoon, Walking, won an Oscar in 1969. His other well-known cartoons (cartoon seems such a cheap word for these works of art) were Syrinx (1965), Cityscape (1966) and Street Musique (1972).
Landreth's 13-minute cartoon is a kind of brief biography of Larkin, called Ryan. It also won an Oscar, in 2004.
It's a brilliant, somewhat surreal piece in which Landreth first explains a little about himself, and why his head has some rather nasty 'wounds' on it, and then goes on to interview Larkin in a dismally-lit bar where the other patrons, few as they are, are derelicts or disabled of one sort of another. Because this is a cartoon, the microphones occasionally take on a life of their own, as does Larkin's mug, which often demands he drink from it, and there are moments when the emotions or the thinking of the two participants are further exaggerated by colours and additional features. The 'drawing' is superb, the characterizations likewise, and the whole thing is an amazing introduction to two cartoonists whose work ought to play in movie-houses all over the world.
During the course of the interview we get samples of Larkin's Walking and another of his cartoons, while the other people who come in on the interview (Larkin's family and friends) are delineated in ways unique to each one.
Larkin had an abusive childhood, and turned to drugs and alcohol after his early successes. Consequently, he is shown throughout the cartoon with a good deal of his body missing: those parts of him, in effect, that have been destroyed by the abuse he's given to his own body.
I’ve stopped writing for Blogit.com. Not that there’s anything wrong with the site as such; it’s their approach to blogging that I don’t find ideal.
Yes, you can make money on Blogit. I saw that one writer’s income for a year was US$400. That’s pretty good money compared to most sites on the Net. But the problem is you have to pay up front to make any money, and somehow that goes against the blogging grain.
To get onto the site at all, you have to pay US$9.95. That’s for writers; for readers, it’s more, and there are bigger sums you can pay than this, depending on whether you want to put pictures on your site or not, or want to have other things that often come for free on most blogging sites. Thus I can see in Google that a post of mine is listed, but if I go to the site, I have to pay to see my own post!
Furthermore, this $9.95 is a monthly fee, and there’s no guarantee, short of working your writing butt off, that you’ll get that kind of money back. The money a reader pays ($12.95 from memory, per month) is divied out
between all the writers a reader looks at. So if you, as a reader, check out 30 or 40 or 50 writers in a month, guess how much they’re going to get each? 2 to 3 cents a month from you. Yes, of course, there are lots of readers, so obviously the money could increase. But in the month I was there, my income was possibly going to be 40c. Not exactly a big return on a ten dollar outlay.
I’m not at all sure why there’s this sealed castle approach on Blogit. No doubt this constant income also pays for the site and the staff, but it’s like a place where you get a key and have to lock the door behind you. No browsers allowed here!
Still, I should worry. There are literally hundreds of writers – and presumably readers – on Blogit. For a lot of bloggers it works. But for someone actually wanting to make a little on the Net, I personally don’t think this is the way to go.
Mike Crowl also writes here.
Ever checked out the Google ads that appear at the top of these pages, or do you only come here to blog? I thought they led directly to a particular site, so I was intrigued by one that said, ‘Shakespeare Buddhism.’ Connecting these two up would take a bit of doing, I thought, so I checked it out. There is no link to a site that tells us Shakespeare was a Buddhist (though I’m sure someone could come up with one). Instead we’re given a list of links in which the words Shakespeare and Buddhism both appear.
The only Shakespeare link amongst the ten links is one for Macbeth, where any year 9 or 10 schoolchild can go to get his home done for him by downloading the material on the site. The site is Skwirk, which presumably stands for school work. Here you’ll find a very good summary and several more shortish chapters on the subject. No hint that Macbeth was a Buddhist, however, something that would seem to be difficult to find evidence for.
I presume there’s more information about Shakespeare on the site called DueNow.com, but I didn’t go further than the home page. DueNow.com claims to have 40,000 essays ready-written for you to download and print out…as if they were your own! No wonder Jeff from Kansas writes in a testimonial: "Kick ass site and papers dudes. You guys are the shizit!" I’m not sure that I’d want to be recommended as a ‘shizit’ but we’ll let that stand. (Apparently there is/was a band called Shizit.) Obviously the site isn’t too good on producing papers on spelling, as another testimonial says, "Very Very Good Papers -- I'm impressed with their quality. I will definately (sic) tell my friends about you."
[ Click here to read more ]
Of course it’s yet another Commercialism Day; this one happens to be called Valentine’s Day (rather obscurely, if you investigate the life of the Valentine in question).
And one of the continually expanding areas of the Net are dating sites. It doesn’t matter how modern we think we are, and how much we can ‘do without relationships’ and how much the Internet is supposed to reduce human interaction, dating sites have proliferated.
And because there are so many of them, they have to try and distinguish themselves one from another. NoMoreFrogs.com, for instance, uses psychometric tests to help people find their true love. It doesn’t solve all the issues of dating, but it does iron out some potential problems early in the piece. There’s an interesting article about this site at FirstScience.com
[ Click here to read more ]
Penguin - the publishers - have launched a Wiki to see if it's possible to produce a novel by collaboration,
collaboration that is not just with a few people working together, but with writers from around the planet via the Internet. I quote from their intro:
"Penguin is launching its first wiki and in a project called A Million Penguins we've created a space where anyone can contribute to the writing of a novel and anyone can edit anyone else's writing.
[ Click here to read more ]
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