Wiki Wiki

Well, for this weeks assignment I had to find a way to contribute to Wikipedia. I looked at a subject I knew well, Charter Schools, but then I realized it is edited by a lot of teachers and there shouldn't be any errors. Then I tried searching for words that could have been misssspelllled, but to no avail. Finally I found the Utah State University page and found a couple of miniscule grammatical changes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_State_University#Media

I'm sure if I searched a few more pages I would have found more errors, but it seems to me that wikipedia is well cared for. It is nicer than a textbook or page that is created by Encarta or Britannica because if there is a typo I can change it right away. Most people wouldn't be willing to send an e-mail to the webmaster of the others to tell them of errors. That seems to be a big advantage of Wikipedia.

Information Overload

After a week of subscribing to almost twenty RSS feeds, I have learned that there is too much information available. I like having all of the latest news available, but I need to trim the fat out of my aggregator. I don't know if I can handle more than one or two feeds per topic.

On my bloglines account I found a couple of feeds that repeat stories two or three times, or the same story comes up each day for a couple of days in a row. Then, there is the issue of sorting through all of the uninteresting garbage. Though RSS is troublesome at times, it's definitely better than reading through all the different sites, or sorting through several newspapers.

Here are some things I found during my first week of RSS:
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Vilhjalmur_Stefansson

http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/20/autonomous-non-violent-agents-protest-bots-who-spread-peace/

How to get people to read your blog

After writing my first entry, I was naively hoping someone would visit. I figured at least a spambot might be interested in my opinion, but nothing. So, I decided to research a little and try to find some information about "getting traffic to your blog". There was one thing that stood out to me which seems to be true about most publicity. Make it controversial!

So, in order to get traffic to this blog, maybe I should talk about sexist or racial subjects. If I were to say that I hate someone or something, maybe people would want to read it. Blogs seem to work like the nightly news; It has to have sex, violence or controversy or it just won't sell to the audience.

Maybe it's better for me to be in solitude, or maybe I will open up and actually start some controversy.

The First of Many

This happens to be the first blog entry I have ever made. That might not sound strange to some, but to people that know me, it seems a bit weird. Since I am a professional computer geek people think that I would be doing everything that involves technology. Honestly I get burned out at times and I just want to do something that doesn't require electricity. So, instead of blogging, I have taken up a hobby of woodcarving. I have carved some pacific-islander style faces into a birch cane that I found right after the spring flooding this last year. I really enjoy it, and it's a great break from the constant connection to the information world. Don't get me wrong, I like technology, that's why I've based my career around it, but sometimes you have to get away.