Routine Order

Thoughts is a place you can create a free blog. There are lots and lots of free blog providers and this is one of them. I got there by typing in the url, I was just curious to find out what’s at the URL thoughts.com - it sounds like the perfect URL for a blog, or, rather, a journal. Now the difference between a blog and a journal, in my opinion, is that a “weblog” or “blog” is a collection of articles and links to sites, and a few opinions from the writer. A journal, on the other hand, is a more personal thing, written for the benefit of the writer more than anyone else.

Most of the free blogs on thoughts come under the latter category, with most of the posts being introspective and very personal. I wonder if the folks blogging there got there the same way I did, and decided to start writing there that way. There’s also a thoughts forum that seems quite young. Mostly bloggers asking about thoughts, and discussing general stuff. The thoughts.com domain name must be worth a lot, and I hope the thoughts free blog service ramps up to realize the full potential of the domain name.

I unsubscribed from Gizmodo and Engadget today. While I don’t expect this to change the internet, I wish it did.

Let me try and explain why I unsubscribed in the hope that you see my point, and you too unsubscribe:

1. They are not blogs any more

   They are more like dedicated newspapers that cover the latest shiny “bling” on the street.

2. They suffer from article diarrhea

   The number of posts they put out is ridiculous. Part of what I trust the people who write the blogs I read is to use their judgement to reduce the amount of data I have to sift through. Human filters, that is what blog authors are, or should be. A good blog will only have good stuff - common sense, really.

3. The blogs are incredibly sexist

   Some, if not most of the posts on either blog are offensively sexist - and I not even female. How do you justify the use of words like “broad”, “chick”, etc, and the gross sexual language that is seen from time to time.

In short, I used to read the blogs, but now, I find that I can use less than 5% of the posts I see on these blogs. Somewhere in the past few months, they went from being interesting to plain irritating - writing about all kinds of junk in impolite, unprofessional language. Maybe that is what keeps most of their readers happy, but sadly, I don’t belong to that section of the population that likes it. I gain very little useful information, news, tips or insight.

And I am not alone, this post from kottke.org reports on a former editor of gizmodo who winds up a rant about gizmodo with “..because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket.” That’s precisely the kind of language I have come to expect from the “editors” of these blogs(more evidence that these are not blogs but tech-pornographic newsletters).

So off you go engadget and gizmodo - find some other feed reader to infest.