Tuesday December 05, 2006
Hello World, I'd Like to Vent
Hi all, I'm Jamey Wood. Like everyone else posting on blogs.sun.com, I work at Sun.
It takes a lot of nerve to join a club and start throwing out complaints at your very first meeting. So naturally, I'm going to do exactly that in this first foray into the blogosphere. Complaint #1: "blogosphere" is one horrid word. It may have started out well enough (per the Wikipedia article, as a joke). It may even have some elegant ancestry behind it (the same article notes that "logosphere" comes from Greek roots meaning "world of words"). But it just plain sounds ridiculous in any serious use. It stands alone as the ugliest term in the crowded field of far-too-ugly modern web terminology (where many of us still struggle to say "Web 2.0" with a straight face). I'm not downplaying the importance of the concept--there really is an incredibly important community and interplay around blogs and bloggers. It just deserves a decent name.
On to Complaint #2 (which was actually all I intended to cover, before realizing I was using "blogosphere" in a sentence): I hate when a blog doesn't include its author's name. Yes, I realize that any such blog will still have some kind of identifier (at the very least a URL, though often also a screen or login name), but I'm talking about an actual "real world" name. If I'm going to link to you I will, of course, need a URL. That's mechanics. But chances are I'll also want to say a little something about your page--and aspiring to be a good blogger, I'll want to do so in my own genuine human voice. That means I'll need to refer to you by name (as in an actual sentence). And I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't feel very genuine or human throwing around names like Dilbert-27.
That's why I felt it was important to start with an introduction, however brief. Now on to the hard part: coming up with something interesting enough to make people worry about what to call me when linking here...
Tags: blogosphere identity
Posted at 03:08PM Dec 05, 2006 by Jamey Wood in Potpourri | Comments[0]
This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.