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AOL Journals: Next (and last?) installment of The Blog Clone Wars…
Here it is, my opinion: AOL Journals-based blogging is a piece of crap. I cannot cut and paste from a word processor to the AOL Journals editing window. In other words, AOL expects a blogger to type a complete post in the Journals editing window, use the limited editing tools they provide – no spell check or grammar provided – and post from there. (And a blogger can't copy-and-paste from that editing window to another software either; it must be copied from the posted and published site!) This may be their way of putting up not just "a wall around the garden", but an invisible fence. Whatever it is, it sucks. I can’t do two blogs this way, a clone in either Radio or in AOL. Okay, I could, but what a major pain in the ass. I’d have to type it in AOL; heaven forbid I should ever have AOL crash or lose my connection or what have you in the middle of an unsaved post. Then after submitting the post, copy it and paste into Radio. I’d probably have to paste it into Word first, edit the formatting, spell check and grammar check, then paste into Radio. Not gonna’ happen. Lastly, posts are limited to a 2,500 character limit. Sheesh!! I don’t know about you, but that won’t work with the way I blog! Especially since AOL hides the HTML characters used in the posts; I won’t know how many characters are chewing up my limit besides those I’m typing as text. (Heck, this single post is over 1850 characters if you includes spaces, over 1500 if you don’t – and I’m holding back!) I’ll mess around with my new toy for a while, but I think it’s already on life support, just short of DOA. If any of you have an AOL account and are game to try this, please give it a shot. Tell me I’m wrong or validate my findings. I’d like to hear from you. In the mean time, blogging will continue here at the original Rayne Today in the Salon blogosphere, using the devil-that-I-know Radio on the Userland server. What was I thinking anyhow? Could I ever really clone this baby? She’s one of a kind!  comment []AOL Journals: the saga of the clone continues…
I'm logged into AOL from another screenname, with a login to IM under the screenname of my AOL Journal. I'm going to enter a test post -- then try to add the other post I couldn't cut-n-paste earlier. Frustrating, really, was hoping for something a little cleaner and simpler to this.
comment []Did you notice? My hit count is weird. I see only a fraction of the hits in my referral log that tally in my Rankings. There was a weird reduction in the total number of Recently Updated Blogs, too. Server reboot or something? I also noticed my traffic is off by 30 to 50% since 1) going on vacation in July; 2) deleting my lower traffic categories like "BookReports". Hmm. Maybe I should be Googleslutting for more little cheating bookreport writers. 4:33:59 PM comment []AOL Journals: Icky Feature #5 Damn, I can't cut-n-paste from Notepad or from Word into my AOL Journal for some reason. I could try to cut-n-paste to IM, but IM won't permit a full post. It'll only take a fraction of the post. I'll have to figure out how to add comments about Icky Features 1 through 4 without completely retyping them. Grrr... comment []
Birth of a clone blog Yeah, there’s been some buzz about the new AOL Journals. I thought I’d go and check it out, see if I can clone this blog over there. Will it be a solution to Radio Userland’s quirkiness? Let’s try it and see. The clone address: http://journals.aol.com/raynetoday1/RayneToday/ Okay, so far, so good. I’ve successfully set up a new Journal site. Looks fairly easy to do, although I can see where there will be problems for folks who are new to either blogging or to the internet in general. Cool feature #1: “Now, anytime you want to update your Journal, you can just send an instant message to AOL Journals. Your message will be instantly transformed into a new entry on your Journal.” Cool feature #2: “Just make a call to AOLbyPhone and choose "Journals" to record your new audio entry.” I won’t be using this feature, though, don’t look for my voice any time soon! Icky feature #1: Keyword “journals” doesn't work without selecting “AOL Keyword” button in v.8.0 -- goes to AOL Search, with AOL Journals appearing as suggested link. Icky feature #2: Interface is typically braindead AOL-ish, very little real customization. Icky feature #3: Journal entries are limited to a total of 2,500 characters. This includes spaces and invisible HTML that's used to add hyperlinks or change the look of your text. Icky feature #4: Flooded, completely – the place is crawling with newbies who can’t find their spellchecker…Eeeewwww, there’s road kill all over the place. Remember the Star Trek ep, "The Trouble with Tribbles"? Yeah -- only worse. Like Tribbles mating madly with those weird little creatures that aren't supposed to have water after midnight, only under a running lawn sprinkler. More later as I explore the terrain. comment []
Semi-ordered thoughts Dang it all, I’ve been messing with email again instead of blogging. A shame really, stuff being tossed around that’s worthy of a bigger audience. Like this bit in response to a blog-compadre’s rejection of astrology and affirmation of belief in science: Hmm. What does the world look like from an ant's perspective? from a microbe's perspective? In the big picture, are we merely ants or microbes or viruses? Even science cannot really say this with certainty; look how much theories of the nature of dinosaurs has changed in 30 years. Once giant lizards, they are now the precursors of birds. Our perspective has changed and will continue to change, depending on our point of view. Not being particularly religious (probably more Buddhist than anything else, Buddhism being non-theistic) and being familiar with science, I hold open to possibility. I subscribe to the idea that the universe is a self-organizing structure (see Bohm's Wholeness and Implicate Order), that it may have the potential for consciousness which we at this miniscule scale maybe unable to comprehend or calculate within the current capabilities of our science and consciousness. I also subscribe to the idea that as conscious creatures we are challenged to exercise our conscious agency to overcome the limitations of hardware (genetics) and the limitations of software (memetics or human knowledge) and create something new and good. But is that really the programming set in motion by the self-organizing universe at the time I was conceived? Hmmm. It's a little deeper shit than astrology; I think astrology is an archetypal, primal attempt to describe the indescribable. I suppose I better get my head out of email and resume normal blogging, else I’ll never hear your thoughts on the subject (nor will the recipient of the original bit above). comment []
Bridging the gap Our Hot Eye, Ojo Caliente, observes after a Dean MeetUp: …Still, when the Meetup is done and folks split up for coffee, or a beer, the "twenty-somethings" and the "fifty-somethings" seem to head off in different directions. Is there really a divide between generations, in spite of unifying objectives? Yup. Affirmative. It can’t be helped; we are shaped by the events of our time, our mores molded by our fears and our loves. Someone who cut their teeth on Watergate and Technology, too, has its place in dividing us; Gen Y, for example, won’t know of a time before cell phones and text messaging and IM. They’ll expect access to and by anyone, everyone, 7x24x365. Their parents will only remember black and white TV as a quaint antiquity. The grandparents may think of newspaper as their primary news outlet, waiting until its arrival each day to know what’s happening around the world. Each of these generations is shaped by their expectations of technology. (Funny, my grandfather always dreamed of having a two-way walkie-talkie-video wrist watch like Dick Tracy in the funny papers; he’d probably be tickled pink by today’s cell phones. But he’d be three generations removed from Gen Y.) Morris Massey’s work back in the late 70’s outlined the progress of human emergence; he describes the differences in values that separated generations. The things that scared us, that drove our fundamental needs, shaped us; as one example, look at adults who were children during the Depression and the mindset they developed. What Massey didn’t realize and didn’t articulate is that emergence comes in waves; there will be a thin group people who live at the outlying edge of the curve who can bridge the gaps between generations. I’m in that bridge group myself; I came of age as the last of the Boomers and the first of Gen X. My earliest memories of music are of the Beatles, dancing with my late Boomer aunt to “I Want To Hold Your Hand”. I altered too many white polyester suits while working as a teenager in men’s wear retail, dancing away the evenings to Donna Summer. Too many mornings during my college years I woke up hung over after partying to punk and then later to grunge. Yeah, there’s a big difference between the Me Generation, those post-hippie yuppies who rebounded after the protests of the sixties. Like night and day from the folks who smelled the Teen Spirit and lost their religion. You just have to look at their music to see it; how was it that people who believed in the free love became so materialistic in the course of a decade? How was it they became so detached from their children, spawning that rebellious anger we heard simmering in grunge? It’s necessary – we must detach from our parents. That’s just the nature of human infrastructure, the way we’re made. We have different goals to accomplish at different stages of our lives; a 20-something is still in the mating game, a 50-something is beyond that, no longer possessed so furiously by their hormones. Naturally they’ll drift apart. They have to. One thing that Massey did say was that people separated by a generation – grandparents and grandchildren – may actually find more in common in terms of values. That’s in a large part due to the oscillating, spiraling effect of the pendulum of human emergence. If we swing too far in one generation towards freedom, the next generation will push towards restriction. (This may explain the rebounding effect which propelled this nation towards the right and George Bush – an excessive rebound to the right, which in turn may rebound left.) This may propel multiple generations back to a place where they have more in common. (Quite possibly this is the appeal of Dean across generations; he’s offering that common ground.) What I do see is that though events, technology, and our life status separate us, that events and technology have a unifying capability. 9/11 was one such unifying event; we were reduced, all of us, to a single, simple state of humanity. The internet is a commonality amongst all of the Dean supporters I’ve met with so far. The challenge will be maintaining that bridge, staying in that connection when we find it. After my local Dean MeetUp last night, I found myself talking with a woman half a generation older, a man half a generation younger, and a man old enough to be my father. We were sharing links on the internet and strategies for using it as a communication and educational tool. There was still a gap between the comprehension of the older two and the younger two of us – but reducing the terms to the lowest common denominator made it easier for us to work together. It may simply mean understanding this gap and finding those folks who are in the gap to bridge it. It also means refusing to allow others to use technology and events against us, dividing us even further. Don’t let them desecrate these opportunities for unity. comment []
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