babbling blue

Dueling technology bloggers! I don’t know if one of these was written in response to the other, or if this was coincidental, but it’s kind of amusing either way.

David Coursey from PCWorld.com weighs in with “Five Reasons the Palm Pre Won’t Prevail” (see what he did there? clever, eh?). Unfortunately he doesn’t really have simple one-sentence summaries for each of the 5, so I’ll let you go to the site and read them yourself.

Then we have Jason Hiner over at ZDNet.com giving us “Palm Pre: Five reasons to expect a homerun“. He was considerate enough to give us short versions for each of his points, so I’ll include them here.

5. Palm knows how to build an ecosystem
4. The carriers want an iPhone competitor
3. The webOS will be a strong development platform
2. Touchscreen + Qwerty
1. It is the first true multi-tasking smartphone

Who’s right, who’s wrong? Who can say? Not I. The naysayer has a bit of an odor of iPhanboy about him. An “If it ain’t iPhone, it ain’t worth it” sort of mentality. One commenter had an excellent response, but to keep this brief I’ll quote it in a separate post. Either way, the fact that the Palm Pre is stirring some debate is a good thing for Palm and Sprint, because it means people are talking about it.

Have you heard about NaBloPoMo? It’s National Blog Posting Month, which asserts that bloggers should post to their blog every single day in the month of November.

Why? Who the hell knows! Don’t worry, I’m not participating. First of all, I don’t have the time. Second of all, I am not nearly interesting enough to find something to post every day. There’s just not that much going on in my life. Oh, but the folks at NaBloPoMo have some ideas…

This year, for those of you who suspect you might run out of gas, maybe you’d like to try blogging on a theme. Follow a news story for the month; get deeper into an issue that you want to educate yourself about; keep us abreast of how your yoga practice / daily muffin-eating regime / matchstick Eiffel Tower is progressing.

Umm… daily muffin-eating regime? I think they have just given a strong argument for why you shouldn’t participate in this silliness. If you are going to inundate the blogosphere with such inane drivel just for the sake of having posts, you are going to dilute the effectiveness of blogging in general. Now I know that there are indeed bloggers who do that sort of thing anyway; they either think people out there actually care about all the vapid details of their mundane lives or they are just blogging more as an open diary for themselves than for other people to consume. And don’t even get me started on Twitter.

Regardless, I don’t think posting blog entries for the sake of posting blog entries should be encouraged. By no means do I claim that every (or any) post in this blog is some sort of masterpiece of journalism or satire or . . . anything. But with few exceptions I only post when I have something to say. Not that what I have to say is always interesting, but that’s another matter. . . .

I don’t think NaBloPoMo (what a stupid friggin’ name!) folks realize they are contributing to the poor signal-to-noise ratio that leads many people to feel disdain for blogs and bloggers. Another example of good intentions gone awry.

Well, I know something that a lot of bloggers do is link to other bloggers. And the circle of internet life goes on. Anyway, there are a couple I just discovered.

Doug Savage, at savagechickens.com, likes to draw chicken cartoons on post-it notes. He did a week of Star Wars cartoons. This is the best:

And another one I really like is PostSecret. According to the site:

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

It’s something you should definitely check out. Some are funny, some are sad. Some are uplifting and some are incomprehensible. See for yourself.

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/