another one bites the dust

Vox, a blog hosting site, is going the way of Yahoo's free photo-hosting service, AOL's free web hosting service, and even what was once the biggest and best-established free web host of them all, Geocities. It's closing at the end of this month.

a short aside (part 2) (second go-round)

This time it didn't work -- wouldn't upload the text file. This time, what worked was to copy and paste the text into a blank Google Doc (at which point it was one long line running off the righthand side of the page), select the whole thing, then choose Format: Styles: Normal paragraph.

Go figure.

a short aside (part 2)

Although a file copied and pasted from my Linux computer won't preserve its word-wrapping, nor accept word-wrapping added by the blog page, it turns out that if the file is saved as plain text (in the plain-vanilla text processor rather than Open Office) and then uploaded to Google Docs, it will work just fine.

-- Which means I can post from my itteh-bitteh cutie-pie sooper-kewl netbook. :)

a short aside

This is a test of an online word processor. There should be three paragraphs here, each separated by a blank line and word-wrapped to fit the screen. Yes, I'm aware that web-based apps are Thing 18, but while trying to upload the blog entry for Thing 11, I ran into a problem. I prefer to compose offline and copy and paste from a leisurely-written and proofread text onto a blog, webpage, or whatever. (Yeah, it's a digital immigrant thing; some of us even like to compose with quill and ink first.) However, from my Linux computer the blog template wouldn't word wrap, nor would it accept the word-wrapping from any file saved to emulate any format (plain text, rich text, or Open Office "MS Word").

Of course, Google Docs isn't offline, but it does have the advantage of saving just the text in a separate place. (In a probably unrelated problem, in the last entry I tried to put up, the blog site added a metatag that the blog site wouldn't accept. I don't want to have to re-write the entire post from scratch, just because the blog's website makes a programming error that may persist in any of the versions it saves.)

Why Google Docs instead of Zoho? -- I'll get to that when it's time to report on Thing 18.

a word of explanation for the puzzled

Some blogs are public, not much different in nature from an opinion column in a newspaper or magazine. Some blogs are truly private. (This one is obviously not, since you are reading it without special permission.)

A recent book, Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky (2008), points out that, in a break from past patterns of communication, much of what is on "Web 2.0" -- blogs, pages on social networks, etc. -- is private communication (and some, I would add, is introspection) written for a target audience of one or a few, but published where all can see. There are imperfect precedents, for instance, a personal diary or a ship's log being published later, or an interview being broadcast to an audience. But for the most part, this phenomenon is new, and, being new, can be confusing.

So here is an explanation of this blog, and several others like it that are being created around this time:
It's an assignment (and will refer to other assignments) in a class,"23 Things," given by a library to its employees, exploring various aspects of Web 2.0. The target audience is other members of the class. However, because of the value held by librarians and teachers that information should be shared, anyone is welcome to read and learn. And in the spirit of the mixed-up mash of public and private that is one of the salient features of the new internet culture, it will also contain information that is of more general interest. (Warning: there may be, due to the topic, some navel-contemplation). It may even continue as a "real" blog after the class is over.