Week 8 of DIGC101

More on blogging this week and we coupled up to find some of the popular bloggers out there in the blogosphere. Technorati is probably your best friend in such a case, as you try to learn about the authority attribute that Technorati gives to measure blogs. I still haven't quite figured it out but i'm sure an exploration on Wikipedia would turn for some results. But as Chris and David seem to point out its not so much how many people read a blog as how many people link each other in a sort of virtual mafia of its chosen topic. I'm not big on American political election blogs so I didn't know too much but if we were to do something like Hip Hop music, I could easily tell you which ones (and when I briefly looked over them, most didn't have blogrolls).

On to more interesting things; I watched my first episode of South Park in a while and it was awesome. It was an episode which opened with Mr. Garrison talking about how kids get high, and explain a way where kids take cat piss. Lol funny stuff, Trey and Matt pick it up and sensationalise it by getting FOX news to blow it out of proportion so that police confiscate all cats in people's homes. Haha, Kenny's delusions were hilarious (and a tribute to a movie Heavy Metal, which I hope I will watch some day in the future).

To finish things off, here's a clip of Kanye West performing a new song Love Lockdown at the VMAs.

Week 7 of DIGC101

Today we did a bit on blogging - what a surprise. I particularly found Katie's insights into her blogging interesting, she was a guest lecturer for today. She keeps three blogs - her personal, research and LiveJournal blog - and has these clear delineations for a reason. She told us of how she got fired because she defamed the company on her personal blog using a work computer. Not only that, but she told us of the extensive action the company took - "Someone in IT will always be reading your blog" - and the threat of legal action. It was quite an awakening for me because I like to think I like to drop in and post on my own personal blog from time to time and (as my prior post noted) I just ran into a bit of exposure. Maybe its a sign...

We also did some presentations today for different questions in relation to gender on blogs. I don't remember much of it now, but my argument was pretty baseless (we won though so all good).

Private becomes public

Ok so I mentioned something about blogging in my post for this week's contribution to eLearning and I don't remember what I wrote - but a few days later something very interesting happened. I was at the RTA (I got my Ps! lol that's another story for a different context) and I ran into one of my mum's friends whose son had just recently passed away. I was very close to him because he was like family, we grew up together (and it's also the reason I was away two mondays ago - I was at his funeral). Anyway, long story short I wrote up a little thing about him on my own personal blog and what do you know? Somebody found it (it's actually the first result in Google if you type in Alexander Howes). She was a friend of Alex's mother who lived in America.

Now at first I didn't mind but then my mum who heard about it says "Oh I have to read it!". And then I thought... oh, what about all the stuff I've written on there. This is very much a matter of private becoming public because I always felt that noone is really reading my blog because I must admit-- it's trash. I laugh at myself when I read it but I suppose that was a different me at a different time. I just hope other people know that too...