Izdihar - Magic Kingdom Escapology

Not an obvious title for most I grant you, but he has cropped up in my browsing twice in the last two days, before which I'd never heard of him. Sisyphus was cursed to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, for all eternity as a punishment from the gods. My first encounter was as a comment on a photograph by Joannablu over at flickr yesterday. The second was at a blog post called Commuters Exchange Interaction. Now in and of themselves, neither on their would have raised an eyebrow - it would have just been something new I'd learned. The unusual thing is that both of the ladies who raised this mythological individual are listed in my blogroll here. Admittedly, it's only very recently that The Daily Smoke has been added to the list, but it was before Sisyphus ever got mentioned.

It got me thinking about the kind of connections that blogging makes and I finally think I twigged why so many people do it - it is those coincidental and unexpected links between people that join us to the rest of the world - it should be stated here that I'm referring to personal rather than business related blogs. Where the pace of life and the promotion of the individual over the collective have given us the disintegrated society we witness today, blogging somehow recreates the connections and sense of community that have been lost in most of our daily lives, albeit a community linked electronically rather than geographically. Now I'm no student of social anthropology and can offer no evidence to back up this supposition, but it seems to me to be one of those ideas that just makes sense. Does this explain the rush to follow a cause and support fellows individuals perhaps in BlogWorld? I don't know, but it could happen.

Wonder whether Sisyphus knew what he was starting...

Have any studies been done to understand the relative importance of blogs in disseminating news when compared to more traditional media (newsprint, books, radio, TV)?

I mentioned in Reading Material that I'd read Girl With a One-Track Mind by Abby Lee. The briefest moment of Google based curiosity turned up the circumstances around what happened next. For anyone who might wonder where I've been for the last 3 years, I've been living in a vacuum constructed of sand.

Following the trail through from 'Outed' to yesterdays' 'Integrity' paints a very sordid picture indeed, and I don't mean Abby Lee's extracurricular proclivities.

The banner of 'public interest' has long been one that the press have been fond of quoting in justifying the sometimes dubious means by which they 'create' copy. They are happy to let the public believe that 'public interest' is synonymous with 'what the public is interested in'. It's long been known that 'sex sells', and on that basis, surely 'more sex sells more' doesn't it. So having gained the rights to serialise excerpts from 'Girl...' and presumably in the process exhausting what it could reasonably include in a national newspaper, it went after the identity of the books' author. The manner in which they went about this resulted in Zoe Margolis losing any semblance of privacy she had enjoyed and her career into the bargain, all for the sake of a 'work experience' journalist trying to get onto the bottom rung of the ladder. Was it not enough that they ran up the circulation with the serialisation, did they really need to go for the vinegar stroke [if you'll pardon the expression]?

There is a fair case for saying that in running the blog, the success of which resulted in her securing a publication deal for her words, Zoe was reliant on exactly the same public reaction to the subject matter as the newspapers rely on to sell copy. I cannot argue the point either that there was probably some naivete on her part to believe that her anonymity could be retained for any extended period of time given the interconnectedness of all things web and the need for interaction with others to put a book on the bookstore shelves. If you want to keep a secret, tell no one, not even that there is a secret, should be the adage here.

That said though, this just one of the very many non-stories that we're fed on a daily basis, to titillate and distract us from what is often the mundane life we lead. I mean, what sort of story is "man and woman have sex; then do it again shock!" - isn't the entire history of evolution predicated on the experience? I'm not suggesting for a moment sex is boring, far from it, but I really don't care who is doing who no matter how well known or otherwise they may be. Was there nothing more valuable to society that could have been typeset?

Seems our hack journo is now crying foul over the reaction caused in Blog World because it turned their attention on her - frankly, 'Unlucky'. The only silver lining I see in this is that in publishing this latest article, perhaps some of their customers have had their attention drawn to the furore this has caused - many of them will never have engaged with blog world and to quote Anton Ego, maybe some are due some "fresh perspective".

OK, so I broke the layout a bit. All will be fixed shortly, assuming I'm reading the b2e forum advice correctly - needed to restore the index.main.php for Vastitude to how it was around 6 months ago first though.

EDIT: All done and I can now sleep soundly at night.

EDIT2: Upgraded b2e to 2.4.7 whilst I was at it.