More and more people are now able to blog. With technical barrier lowered, more information can be delivered more quickly, whether we like this or now.

Most bloggers prefer mundane tidbits to deep thoughts, and backed by voice transcription and video sharing, the cell phone may soon be the tool of choice.

The prevalence of blogs is (just as expected) sucking some of the fun out of it. This lacks the appeal of a unique occuption. For myself, I predicted this over 2 years ago.

Are blogs dying as a whole? Not quite. Instead, blogs with a particular focus — blogs that deliver consistent content (not streams of consciousness) appear to survive. Here are the words of a man who cannot stand the disruption to his profession.

“Millions and millions of exuberant monkeys … are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity,” Keen writes in a book published Tuesday.

His views have infuriated bloggers and others, especially in Silicon Valley, who argue he is an elitist intellectual, a conservative pining for a return to old ways, and a writer who cannot keep his facts straight.

As you look around the Web and track blogs that you used to read, often you find that the pace of blogging has declined significantly. In retrospect, blogs became very popular very fast, so they attracted many millions, which in turn led to the anti-climax. Long live the culture of personal blogs that were actually lively! Not many of them are left, unless you focus on “Internet celebrities”. Professional blogs replace drivel. I too have moved on.

couple of years ago I complained about AdSense placing anti-Linux ads (from Microsoft) right inside my Linux pages. It was then that I was told about an option which prevents this from happening.

Earlier today I logged in to my AdSense account again. It’s something that I only do twice a month. What did I discover? A new little feature that apparently gives advice to publishers. Here is the message I received:

Aha! So the high payers are apparently not allowed on my sites. Who could that be?

The apple does not fall far from the tree. This may explain why many Linux sites out there still display blatantly anti-Linux ads from Microsoft. Isn’t advertising lovely? Microsoft knows no bounds.

EB statistics/tracking services share some very encouraging figures which suggest that Netscape and Digg lead the pack of social-driven news sites. As I am active on both sites, I am more than pleased to see this. Some time this weekend I will have submitted my 10,000^th story to Netscape.

Knowing that Netscape attracts roughly 5 million unique users per month, I am certain that my contributions have an impact. They primarily promote digital freedom — something which I passionately believe in and therefore perpetually promote.

Y blogging pace has certainly changed recently. I have slowed down in order to give way and priority to other activities. Regardless, I have also been inactive because my father was visiting. He departed this afternoon.

All in all, however, it’s acceptable and very much aligned with my intentions. I am beginning to think of rearranging my blog and let is revolve around links and short opinions. I’ll make a start with a piece of news that caught my sight the other day.

Study Commissioned by AMD Reveals Scope of Annual U.S. Data Center Energy Consumption: 45 Billion kWh, at Cost of Nearly 3 Billion Dollars

AMD Calls for Increased Collaboration between Technology Industry and Government Officials to Track and Reduce Energy Consumption

suspect that for the first time in about a year, a comment on mine in Digg was deleted. I can still see a link to that comment my the feeds reader, but the comment is not there. I can also see the item on which I commented in my profile, but the comment itself is invisible by all means. I have left over 3,000 comments in Digg, but never once did I find that a comment of mine got deleted.

All I posted was a factural statement, a link to a news site. The comment was neither overly long nor obscene. Given the context, it could have been interpreted as inflammatory to some, but I very much doubt it because it is nothing on par with trolling that goes on in that site. What’s more, there is at least one more comment that I can recall which also vanished. Maybe even more got deleted, but I cannot say for sure. The one which I replied to disappeared as well.

A database glitch seems unlikely given the outcome, so I suspect there was clear human intervention there. The same type of thing rare (if ever) happens in Netscape, unless there is racism or a personal attack with strong words.

Little update:

I notice that the address in question is http://digg.com/tech_news/Microsoft_to_deliver_patches_by_the_dozen_2

There is a two at the end, which indicates a duplicate.

http://digg.com/tech_news/Microsoft_to_deliver_patches_by_the_dozen points to an error page, so maybe there was some form of relocation. This would also explain the missing comments from other people, but then again, why would the comments list point to the newer item, which also excludes comments? It is more likely to just be a duplicate. So, at the end of that day, I am not entirely sure what happened. It clearly was an irregular event.

Mobility of data is becoming an important issue these days. Many people’s data is stored on third-party Web sites, whose data formats are not specified. The data cannot be exported (e.g. for upgrades or migration) either, so there’s a lockin involved in many such Web services (think Web 2.0).

Possession of one’s data would be a selling point. So why are sites not providing this facility? Why is its implementation assigned such a low priority? Simply put, sites wish to elevate exit barriers and make it hard for customers to walk away. But there is a cost here. This leads to resentment. This leads to backlash, which DRM, for example, comes to show us.

Let’s just integrate facilities for import and export in all user-driven Web sites. Export at the least — one that relies on standard protocols for containing data — should be crucial. Without import facilities, quick flow of SPAM is not an issue, in the case of public-facing sites such as Digg.com. Just take del.icio.us for example.

My two stories at the very top of Digg.com (click for full-sized image)

IGG has possibly made a mistake by opening its doors to a wider crowd by augmenting its sections and encouraging short and lame postings. I was at times modded down because my comments were “too long”.

A friend of mine tends to agree that Digg was much better over a year ago. Even Slashdot is orders of magnitude more mature than Digg nowadays. Slashdot’s trolls have moved elsewhere and someone must ‘absorb’ them. Also, Digg is increasingly becoming people’s blog aggregator (just seen someone submitting 10 links to his blog in one day). This lowers the overall quality and raises ‘noise’ level. Maybe Digg is a victim of its own traffic-generating reputation, as well as ‘democratic’ nature (making it possible for inaccurate news to hit key pages).