Mini-milestone for the blog

On Sunday, April 4, this blog had its 1,000th page view. It’s a tiny blog, a mere spec on the interweb, but I never could have imagined that anything that I’ve done (cumulatively) would get 1,000 hits.

I guess it has probably happened with my MySpace and FaceBook pages, but those are sites that have high traffic built in as sort of a mechanic, and I actually intentionally leave my FaceBook page devoid of much content at all at the moment. I’m considering putting the URL on my FaceBook info page, but I’m… still thinking about it.

You may think, “Yes, you must put the URL on your FaceBook page! It’s a no-brainer!” But it’s not like I have a ton of “friends,” like many of my other “friends” do, and so I’m not convinced that the exposure would change too much. In addition, I kind of enjoy the anonymity of my blog, and by publishing it for all of my friends to see, I’m putting it out there for more than just the greater interweb universe (plus the couple of friends that I’ve told about the blog), which is, interestingly, further from my comfort zone than my current, “semi-anonymous” status.

However, I am leaning toward doing so. The major issue has been whether I feel I can write at a high enough level that I am not embarrassing myself in front of friends or family, but that’s just an internal issue that I think I am getting past. Dipping my toes into the blog waters indeed, but only when no one’s looking.

Another issue has been content. While I started this as a casual blog where I can publish whatever I feel like publishing, about half of my posts have been about World of Warcraft, and my header, title, side bar content, avatar, and list of tags all reflect that. However, I never set out to make this a WoW-specific blog, and I guess that, here at the six-month mark, I am still somewhat disappointed that I haven’t written on the breadth of topics that I would like to. However, perhaps that’s part of growing as a writer. And I DO enjoy the game!

Anyway, given that I have done very little in the way of promotion for this blog, I’m proud of it. It looks nice, thanks to WordPress and the WoW screenshots. It’s fairly well-written and -edited, and contains a minimal amount of L33T-speak/lolcat and emotes. It has some nice screenshots, and some nice photos (although not enough of those). It has changed a lot in 2010, as I’ve tinkered with simple things like how to arrange widgets (and which widgets to use).

Above all, I think I’ve proven to myself that I can write for a blog, which was my main goal when I started. Thanks to all who have visited or who have my blog in your reader, and thanks for those who have left comments. And please, feel free to comment as well! If you like what I’ve written, or think I’m totally off-base, let me know! I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Facebook, tentatively

As I told my each of my employees last week that I was leaving my job, some of them commented, “You need to get back on Facebook, so we can keep in touch with you!”

Because, even though we all live in the same area, they’re kids, and I’m supposed to be an adult, so the fraternization-outside-of-work thing is pretty much nil.

I laughed them off, because my discomfort with Facebook and its security issues is well known at my former job.

However, on Monday morning, I found myself reactivating my account. It turns out that, in the time I had been away, I had received several friend requests and messages that I had to sort through, reply to, etc. I also received “gifts” and invitations to play Farmville, Petville, Mafia Wars, and a couple of other casual “games.”

Once the sorting/responding/ignoring was complete, I then had to decide on which info to enter and make public. When I last participated in Facebook, I posted all kinds of info about my interests, along with several dozen pictures. This time, with lingering uncertainty about this type of info being available on something so rife with issues as Facebook, I decided to do things a little differently.

• Picture: Anacrusa
• Info: High school and college info.

Simple. Since I’m not trying to recruit old friends or hot girls to my Friends list, and the info on all of the musicians, books, games, etc. that I’m interested in is superfluous, this information will suffice.

So we’ll see how this goes. I’m still not too keen on the whole thing, but so little info is exposed, and my natural tendency to delete emails (from anyone who isn’t a family member, friend, or a company that I buy stuff from) should keep me relatively safe from most anything that can go wrong.

Ugh, I can’t believe I’ve actually written this much about it already!

Some thoughts on online privacy

Gordon at We Fly Spitfires posted a very good article a couple of weeks ago entitled Online Privacy And Why It’s Important, and it got me thinking about this issue again.

There is all manner of information out there on this subject, and people have many different opinions about it, ranging from ultra-conservative fear to complete lack of interest (or discretion). Any time I read anything about online privacy, I find myself revisiting my feelings about it, which I would generally term cautious.

What comes to my mind most often is Facebook and its myriad privacy/stability issues, and the way that people make use of it to broadcast their lives at whatever level they are comfortable with to whomever they choose, for better or for worse.

There are two parts to that thought: Facebook’s issues and people’s usage. While it is a social-networking phenomenon, Facebook has been the center of several controversies surrounding its privacy policy (and changes to it) and security. My unhappiness with the reality of the format (read: all of the crap in my News Feed) soured me on the whole “reconnect with long-lost friends” premise that initially drew me to Facebook, but security issues were what finally drove me away (see my initial post on this blog). When I initially created my profile, I filled in as much of the information as I felt comfortable with, and had a rather significant Info page. As time went on, I added some photos, linked a few videos, and wrote a couple of blog posts. I mainly used Facebook as a means of reconnecting with old friends from high school or college, and to communicate with some of those people through the email system, which was one of the benefits/draws for me anyway.

My initial enthusiasm for Facebook dwindled when I saw what was happening to my News Feed as I added more friends. It became filled with three kinds of what to me was spam: quiz results, casual game activity updates, and an insanely high amount of status updates. I know that status updates and “tweets” are the way of the world at this point, and I understand the potential value of the status update, but when someone is telling all of his “friends” that he didn’t shower today, I’m not interested. And when someone else is announcing that she is having problems with her husband to all of her “friends,” many of whom happen to be church friends, the level of discretion/tact/forethought is low, in my opinion. Unfortunately, my feed was rife with this type of information, and I hated sifting through it (when I did) to see if there was anything interesting there. It eventually became an unbearable time sink for me.

My enthusiasm sunk to a new low when I added a few of my younger cousins to my list of “friends” at their requests. My feed instantly became inundated with photos of one of them, who had just graduated from college, apparently loves to party, and has no shame about posting drunken pictures of herself on her profile with captions such as “me totally wasted on (fill in holiday/reason to be totally wasted at a party here)” for all of her friends, family and co-workers to see. There are hundreds of these types of photos on her profile, and along with my irritation at being sort of forced to see them came a sense of dismay at the thought that she could be endangering her new consulting job by posting this type of content.

I wonder if there will be some type of fallout from all of this. How much of this over-saturation of public personal information will come back to haunt people in years to come? How many careers and personal relationships will be affected? How much of what you say can and will be used against you?

I’ve considered these questions at times, along with some of Gordon’s other points, as I’ve worked on posts for this blog. I know that I am relatively new to blogging, but I’ve tried to write with some level of maturity and responsibility in my posts. I can’t think of anything that I’ve written that I would regret saying, want to hide from anyone, or that I wouldn’t show my parents. And while the subtitle of the blog is “formless, random, casual,” the blog is not a diary of everything that goes on in my life, but is rather a medium of expression, one that allows me to practice writing and editing, share thoughts, and enjoy the experience.

As a side note, I have found my blogging experience thus far to be very rewarding – it’s a completely different animal than Facebook, and I love the freedom that it gives me. I am writing on a semi-regular basis for the first time in my life, and while I don’t have a high-traffic page, I don’t aim for that. The process is the reward.

I’m finding that I don’t have a good way to wrap up this post. I think that my main point was to share my thoughts on the subject without stuffing a 900 word comment on We Fly Spitfires. My final thoughts are that 1) I love the fact that there is a world of possibilities for creative expression online, and 2) while we have more ways to connect with others than ever, I don’t know if enough people understand the ramifications of what they say on their blogs, comments, and social networking media of choice.

If you haven’t read the article linked above, check it out. It’s worth the read.

Dipping my toes into the blogwaters…

Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster: 3-tone sunburst finish, rosewood fretboard

Goodbye, Facebook!

This week, I made a decision that was months in the making, which was to quit using Facebook. It presented some nice opportunities to reconnect with old friends and stay up-to-date with current friends and family. However, there were many drawbacks to having a Facebook account, (generally) presented here in no particular order:

1. Some people keep you way too informed, with status updates on their grooming habits or lack thereof, lunch times, bed times, Starbucks purchases, monthly cycles, weight issues, relationship issues, general sadness, etc… not to mention exhibitions of horrible spelling/grammar.
2. My expectation of Facebook was that it would be a forum for connecting with people and sharing pictures, but along with the status update hell mentioned above comes the reality that Facebook is a casual gaming and quiz-taking quagmire. What started (for me) as a simple way of keeping up with friends became a nightmare of logging in and wading through all of the notifications on my Home page informing me that So-and-so #1 gave So-and-so #2 a gift of such-and-such in whichever game they were playing, or that So-and-so #3 took the “Which Star Trek Character Are You?” quiz and the result is that So-and-so #3 is Mr. Sulu. I ignored every game invite and blocked countless games and quizzes in an effort to clean up my news feed, but they just kept coming, which contributed to my diminished enjoyment of the Facebook experience.
3. The final straw came when I went to log in on Sunday, and Facebook did not recognize my (correct) password. I changed my password, and, later on in the day, was unable to successfully log in with that (correct) password as well. Having had issues with the overall security of Facebook previously, and considering my growing disenchantment with my overall experience, I decided that I had had enough.

So I pulled down my photos (which I’m sure Facebook will have on file forever anyway), deleted my links, emailed all of my friends who provided addresses in their profiles, and deactivated my account that evening. I have to say that I have not missed it in the least. It had become purely a time sink, a place to be bored with other bored people. As I get older, I remind myself that, while I enjoy wasting time when it’s fun, I do not need to be wasting time being bored and annoyed.

[Update (10/9/09): My friends are telling me that "Facebook got hacked" (indeed!) last weekend, and that some users were affected. One of them said that he still cannot log in...]

Why blog? Who cares?

I have been interested in getting into blogging for a little while now, and have been interested in writing, to some extent, for years. However, I am without a purpose or focus, so I have let that get in the way of actually starting a blog. And the interweb world is full of bloggers and thoughts and feelings and whatnot…

But I’ve decided to give it a try. I don’t have to have a focus – I expect that I can write about my interests – music, politics, games, the outdoors, sports, and other subjects – competently enough to satisfy my urge to publish something. If I get enjoyment out of it, that should be my main focus…