Tuesday, 1 October 2013

Making a moral point with your blog.

It's late August and Mr Lee is signposting people to a particular post on Laughing Ferret's blog because the chuckling Mustelid has hit the milestone of 300,000 views or something.

Anyway, the entry conditions are to promote the post and signpost Laughing Ferret's blog.  He makes a couple of points as he describes the criteria for entry.

One point he makes is that you don't have to be a follower using blogger as he is aware that some people follow by email and some just lurk or browse.  So he doesn't want people to change the way they use the interweb just 'cause he says so.  Which on a moments reflection I think is an enlightened outlook that ought to catch on.  But it might not as *we* internet users in general, are getting more and more used to being channeled into certain behaviours.

huge deleted rant 

Ahem.  The sort of behaviours I was really alluding to are things like accepting cookies.  When it first broke that cookies existed and what they were for, what they did, people would read the cookie acceptance piece on a website.  Now we largely don't.  We just click it without reading it.  Which has to be a mistake.  The last time eye toons updated, did you read the whole thing (again) or did you just 'accept' the new terms and conditions.  Similarly, the point made by Laughing Ferret - there are other ways to get your interweb without using google's blogger - lots of people use wordpress for example.  But a lot of people (me included) prolly started using blogger just because everyone else does.

Now I know that cookies can be turned off and I do have that IXthingy as my default search engine and am aware that my blog can be imported wholesale into wordpress and so on.  But that's not my point.  My point is that we should all think a little more carefully, perhaps, rather than just accepting every T&C that the interweb throws at us.

And harking back to the title of this post, I'll point you to Laughing Ferret's little exposition on the increasing use of the word 'pimp' as an adjective.  Such use of the word might be etymologically correct, but similarly, his interpolation of the word's use as noun and adjective is at once insightful and his stance on its use, morally courageous.

Well done, Laughing Ferret, I raise my blog hat to you.

4 comments:

  1. Um, its actually Oct now.. not late August :) But the point of the article is clear.. I need to paint more of your models.. dully noted and will make headway on it once more starting..... tomorrow :) :) :)

    Oh, and Captcha sucks.. just saying ;)

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    1. Dude, these are lined up months in advance; It was late August, honeest injun !

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  2. Thanks for the mention :)
    Sometimes I get like my cat: if she sees a box, she has to sit on it... sometimes I see a soapbox and have to stand on it ... Maybe a nasty habit, but it is a compulsion. ;)

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    1. It's a good thing too. There should be less sitting idly by and more standing up and being counted. Otherwise the few being counted will win and they might not be the best ones for the job....

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