Paying lip-service
The BBC is reporting a new proposed scheme from the Environmental Audit Committee. They’re suggesting the introduction of “personal carbon credit” system, in an attempt to limit the amount of energy that we all use.
The big hole in the plan is the same one that effects carbon offsetting; people who exceed their limit will be able to buy more credits from people who use less than their limit. The problem is that there’s no reduction in the amount of carbon being used, so there’s no reduction to the pollutants being pumped into the atmosphere.
Closing down? Maybe…
No longer the Mecca that it once was, the New Wolfs Howl Forum is becoming painfully neglected; moss is growing in the cracks between the paving stones, the paintwork on the windows is cracked and peeling, the shingles on the roof are loose and several are missing. The once busy house is empty and quiet, a patina of dust lies on everything and if you listen closely you can hear something scurrying in the crawlspace. Rats? Maybe. Ghosts?
But the place had a heyday, when it was the place to be. The social venue of choice for the great and the good, where intelligent conversations took place between intelligent people and everyone got along. The heady days before familiarity set in, before the next big thing came around the corner, before everyone became too busy to stop by anymore.
So now the New Wolfs Howl Forum is dying. Like a leaf at the end of summer it’s drying up and turning brown; losing it’s vitality and returning to the earth from which it sprung. But it is not too late. This particular leaf can be saved if we all believe in it enough, if we wish and wish and wish…
… and if we visit a bit more often and actually start some conversations. Left in its current sorry state and given no life-saving sustenance, I fear the New Wolfs Howl Forum will be gone forever very soon.
Trade Association for bloggers
I’ve been browsing discussions over at BlogCatalog.com (if you haven’t already, you should check it out – puts you in touch with lots of new bloggers, and can be really good for promotion) and came across this post about a Professional Blog Owners Association.
The guy that started the discussion is involved somewhere along the line (open and frank he has not necessarily been) and he was looking for people to sign up. He was probably expecting an overwhelmingly positive response; if so, then he must be mightily disappointed. Whilst some have said they would be interested, more voices have been raised in opposition, for various reasons. Some have taken him to task for his lack of openness about the whole project, others have argued that they can’t see the relevance or point of such an organisation.
I chimed in with my own two cents, which – as it had grown to blog post length – I’m republishing here.
According to Wordpress.com’s homepage just now, there are 3,160,529 blogs hosted with their service. Even if only 10% are active, that’s still in excess of 316,000 – on one blogging service. Think of all the blogging services there are, and all the self-hosted blogs there are and you come up with a huge number – and you’re starting with 25. Hardly representative and not a very good indication of whether the software will scale properly.
For a ‘Trade’ or ‘Professional’ association to be successful and representative of its industry (as opposed to a bunch of people trying to make themselves sound important) it needs to have a large proportion of the industry as active, supportive members. It doesn’t seem like you’re going to achieve that.
Also, an industry association should work for its members. I don’t mean perks like free hosting, I mean proper work, supporting the members, and the needs of the members. If a member blog gets sued for copyright infringement when in fact they’ve done nothing wrong, will the association be there to fight the bloggers corner with legal advice and representation? That’s the sort of thing I’d expect from an association and what you’re suggesting sounds more like a club.
And what about those members? If you’re only going for the ‘big’ bloggers (which is why you’re only starting with 25 – because there aren’t so many blogging stars to choose from) like Arrington, Scoble, Calacanis and such then I think you’re going to be out of luck, as they won’t want to know; why do they need an association to tell them how to blog? They’re the ones that continually tell us how we should be doing it.
So, perhaps you’re going for the ‘intermediate’ level – those bloggers that run a bit of advertising, do sponsored posts for PPP/Izea/SocialSpark, PayU2Blog, ReviewMe, etc and have a bit of traffic. But they’re not going to want to join either because those services already restrict what they can and can’t do to earn money off their blogs.
Which leaves you with the Wordpress.com, Typepad, Blogger multitudes. Who aren’t going to care because they just blog in their spare time about what interests them, and by calling it a ‘Trade’ or ‘Professional’ association they’ll think it isn’t aimed at them anyway.
I hate to pour water over your idea, as you’ve obviously put work into it and feel it’s worthwhile but I think you’re missing the boat both with the type of organisation you’re putting together and the type of membership that you can expect. Sorry.
But who’s right? Would you – as a blogger of whatever level – want to join such an organisation? Do you think the world of blogging needs it? I’d be intersted in your views, or you can head over to BlogCatalog and leave them there.
Stephen King vs some guy
Stephen King’s taking some flak at the moment for comments he made about the US education system and how it’s failing its students. He suggested that many leave with barely enough education to function and have limited career options. He goes on to suggest that, because of this, many end up in the armed forces and are nothing more than cannon fodder in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A US commentator, Noel Sheppard, has attacked King for these remarks, claiming that King is betraying the brave American troops fighting to protect democracy and, further, that he’s called them all stupid. Commenters on Sheppards blog have attacked King for his liberal views, his writing and for being too dumb to get out of the way of a moving truck.
But I think they are all missing the point. From what I’ve read, King is saying that if you don’t get a decent education your career options are going to be limited; when your options are limited, the armed forces are an easy way out of the unemployment / poverty trap. That’s not to say that there aren’t very many armed service personnel who have got a decent education and have still made a positive choice to join up.
And once upon a time you might well have been able to come out of school with no qualifications, joined up, trained and be sure that you’d come out ten years later with a good education, a wealth of skills that you could apply in the private sector and the same number of limbs that you went in with. But those days are gone. We live in a world that is constantly at war and the ‘developed’ nations – the US and the UK especially – seem to feel the need to police it all. This means that if you sign up today, the chances are you’re going to see active service. And that means you’ve got a better than average chance of dying or being severely injured.
To me, what King is saying is that if you get a decent education you give yourself options. If you still want to join up, off you go and may your God go with you – but please be aware of what you’re getting into.
At the end of the day, Sheppard is entitled to his opinion and he doesn’t have to agree with anyone else if he doesn’t want to but what he seems to be doing – in telling King off for calling soldiers dumb – is saying that there’s nothing wrong with the war in Iraq; it’s a perfectly legitimate conflict that the US has every right to be involved in and that the 4,000 US service personnel that have died there have done so in the glorious service of their country – rather than so some dumb southern redneck can tell his Daddy: “There, I finished what you started”. The war in Iraq is wrong, it has helped no-one and it has cost thousands of lives – so who’s the dumb one, Sheppard?
All four trotters in the trough
These two stories from the BBC concerns a wider issue that has been bubbling away in British politics for a little while now, the issue of MP’s expenses.
Given that an MP currently earns just over £61,000 – and a Cabinet Minister earns an extra nearly £77,000 on top of that – it seems somewhat obscene that they can claim £23,000 for running a second home. There are those (and I would be one of them) who might think that if they need a second home then they should damn well pay for it themselves. After all, no-one forces them to take the job, so why should the taxpayer be forced to support a lifestyle that the majority of taxpayers cannot afford for themselves?
But the one that takes the cake (at least today – this one promises to run and run, so there’s bound to be one that beats it) is the Speakers wife claiming over £4,000 in taxi fares which were “mainly for shopping trips”. Apparently, these trips met the criteria for assisting the Speaker to carry out his official duties, which seems odd. If that is the case, then it’s time the criteria were changed!
Apparently “the House of Commons is fighting to avoid releasing the details of expenses claims under the allowance of 14 MPs and former MPs under the Freedom of Information Act.” Could that be because they don’t want the great British public to find out how much they’re being fleeced by their elected representatives?
Of course, this all comes on top of the fiasco that has been the scrapping of the 10p tax band, leaving several million taxpayers worse off than they’ve previously been. Alistair Darling’s hastily announced ’support’ package makes a mockery of the whole affair; rather than just re-instating the 10px tax band, he instead raises the personal allowance for everyone that earns less than £40,000 a year – even though it’s only those that earn up to £18,500 and who either are aged between 61 and 64 or who don’t have children that are affected.
I’m not sure I’d trust this lot to manage a piggy bank properly, let along the finances of the whole country!
Wolfs Helpers
