like most of my security posts, this one is from bruce:
The courts have ruled that the police can search your data without a
warrant, as long as that data is held by others. The police need a
warrant to read the e-mail on your computer; but they don't need one to
read it off the backup tapes at your ISP. According to the Supreme
Court, that's not a search as defined by the 4th Amendment.
moral of the story? if you have info online, the govt (or anybody else, really) can get to it. so dont come crying when it gets stolen.
so i recently discovered that 6apart, makers of this blogging software (movabletype) acquired LiveJournal (another blogging system) sometime a while back (who knows when).
while reading about this, i was directed to this article essentially about why people shouldn't blog
this reminded me to post to my blog, but that i shouldn't apologize for not posting in so long, cause "Who cares?"
the comparison between blogging and macramé is pretty good, but the one thing that macramé blogging is ok for is communicating between family and friends on a one-to-many level.
for example, i read trissy's blog and she reads mine. the same with jim and yes, even sometimes andria (when she posts, that is). this way each of us can write what we want to share with each other, when we want. the others can read at their leisure as well. its a very comfortable method for dissemniating personal updates.
im not meaning to replace the phone call to a family member, but for little stuff that happens every day, things that would come up in conversation if you saw the person everyday, thats the kind of stuff blogs are good for.
so, you have two choices as a blogger: 1) global audience, and 2) personal audience.
the former requires thought and insight, and should follow the ideals mentioned in the link above. quality, not quantity. see alacrity for a good example.
the latter is more about quantity and i believe is what most blogs really are. they are meant for people who know the author personally and read all the posts in context. they are a continuous storyline that started long before the blog itself started.
i believe there should be a distinction between the two of these. people visit boingboing and relative blogs for very different reasons. why are they considered the same thing? because they use the same technology? does that make personal letters and magazines the same? imagine if cory doctorow wrote about how he loves washing his new car between boingboing posts? it doesnt work, there is a distinction. you send links to your mom from one category, to your coworkers from the other.
my problem is i merged the two. my blog is a great example of what not to do.