BLOGGING ALL OVER THE WORLD
From London, 15 October

“More and more people are logging on to the internet to unburden themselves in web logs,” according to The Daily Telegraph writer Tom Leonard.

“All the world’s a multimedia platform, and all the men and women merely bloggers. Or perhaps to blog or not to blog sums up better the sense of Hamletian introspection, the solitary unburdening of one’s hope’s and fears. Whichever, Shakespearean references to the blog seem appropriate, for it is well in the way to establishing itself as the 21st Century’s soliloquy–heartfelt, impassioned, candid, self-absorbed and delivered to nobody in particular. And, it has to be said, more often than not read by nobody in particular either,” writes Leonard.

CDR Bob Burke, USN (Ret), with the extremely competent work of webmaster Gloria, created the CAL-MOAA weblog, our blog, for the purposes of greatly expanding interpersonal and interorganization communication up and down the state. It is our primary means of communication, a way to quickly and effectively deliver news, opinion, viewpoints, and more. And it is a way to write and preserve the organization’s history.

For full effectiveness, and to get a satisfactory return on the investment, it would be important for others to write and post items and comments to the Council’s weblog. And that’s true as we approach Rally 2006 and the need to share ideas and concerns in advance of the annual meetings and voting sessions.

According to the Daily Telegraph, “In 2206 people could be reading about your every move today–the proposed fulfillment of One Day in History, a mass “blog” by the British people to give a snapshot of life on October 17, 2006. The History Matters campaign, which is headed by the National Trust and English Heritage, is asking everyhone with internet access to write an account of their day. All 2,000 computers in the easyCafe network will be set to www.Historymatters.org.uk as a homepage. The results will be preserved in electronic and print form by the British Library. The aim is to provide future generations with a huge database of information from all sectors of society, to show how we lived and, in particular, what we thought about our heritage. All 29,000 schools in Britain have been sent leaflets about the campaign, which is supported by The Daily Telegraph. The hope is that by making history relevant to the future, it will also make it part of our present, too.

There are many obvious and not-so-obvious advantages to the blog, and plenty of opportunities to keep in touch with one another and our thinking.

But the vast majority of blogs remain those written by ordinary people about their ordinary lives. The popularity of the medium is surely rooted, above all, in the fact that it allows people to talk about themselves. Inevitably, this leads to over-supply and under-demand. “Put simply, more people write blogs than read them,” said an IT industry executive just yesterday. Eric Schmidt, chairman and chief executive of Google, pointed oout that “the average blog has one reader: the blogger”.

Again, most of the talk is about blogs in general, how people get on the internet to talk about themselves and their lives. In the case of CAL-MOAA, the blog feature of the web page has been designed for an altogether different purpose: get the late news out effectively.

All CAL-MOAA chapter members are invited, really urged, to use this technology to share insights, opinion, current thinking, and needs. It’s really very easy to access the blog and write and post a message or comment. At the very least, we hope members everywhere will choose to read the weblog posts; after all, it’s the primary means the Council has to distribute the news.

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