The JimH Blog

Introducing the JimH Crossword Blog

Do you love crosswords or just wonder why some people do? Check out my new blog at www.xwordblog.com.

Wow this blog has been abandoned for a long time. What have I been up to in the world of social networking? After all, it's my job to think about that. Starting this new blog is part of the answer. I've wondered what it would be like to blog on a single topic instead of random life philosophy. I'll find the answer at www.xwordblog.com.

Why crosswords? I don't tell many people but I'm addicted to the ones in the New York Times. Maybe you saw the film Wordplay? Those people (including Bill Clinton and John Stewart) didn't seem odd to me at all. :)

Check it out.

Google ads are more fun than I thought

It turns out I wasn't getting rich quick enough with the Amazon links here on The JimH Blog. I get a kickback every time you buy anything at Amazon if you go through my book or CD links, but the traffic volume hasn’t allowed me to retire quite yet.

Not to fear, I’ve upped the ante by including Google AdSense ads in the left-hand column right under Recent Posts. You start making money for me just by clicking on those ads. Signing up didn’t cost me a thing. What a deal.

But that's not the most interesting part. The Google engine uses sophisticated A.I. technology to decide just which ads to display. The goal is to provide ads that seem appropriate to the site. This makes sense. Google doesn't want to annoy the website owner by showing inappropriate ads. More importantly, Google wants you to click on the ad so, making the assumption that you arrived at this site because of some particular interest, it tries to show other similar items which, in theory, might also interest you.

What fun. My blog is all over the map, so what will Google choose? It might have changed by the time you see this, but as I type the ads have titles like "UFO Video – Is it Real?" and "Want to see Real Ghosts?"

What's going on, here? Well, a recent blog entry was about Satellite photography. Good try, Google. And what the heck, I’ve always wondered if ghosts were real…

Constant change

I didn’t express myself clearly in my last post, probably because I’m incapable of constructing a coherent sentence. I’m not bemoaning the state of American education. I’m not even making fun of America. I wouldn’t do that. After all, none of my friends would make fun of Canada, eh?

The loss of skills we consider important today is inherently neither good nor bad, just inevitable. Kids today can’t even use a slide rule. Oh well. We just need to remember that many things we think are important today will be rebelled against in the future, and then forgotten. The only constant is that the music your kids listen to will be crap.

Finally getting to my real point, the other reason I didn’t express myself clearly is because I don’t think through my posts before I write them. I just sit down, type as fast as I can, and when I seem to have enough characters on the screen, I post. I don’t think I’m alone or even unusual in that regard. That makes blogging much more like conversation than any conventional publishing platform. It’s too easy. It’s too inexpensive. So you get meaningless posts. Like this one.

In my day, kids could never get away with that kind of slap-dash thinking. This blogging is rotting their brains. Where’s the discipline? We used to walk a half mile through the snow to get our moveable type before we could post. You get the idea.

Windows, Windows, Windows!

It used to bug me that I don’t have a window office. The view out my office door is a blue wall. It’s weird psychologically because the day progresses, the weather changes, it gets lighter and then darker, but of that all happens outside my field of view so it’s as if it doesn’t happen at all. Just in case my previous weather forecasting tip wasn't accurate enough, the JimH Blog now provides Instant Weather. I can check conditions on-line without all the downsides – nasty glare from too much sun, distracting noises from raindrops hitting my window, etc.

The banner here will eventually scroll off the page so I’ve also added a Weather Part to the column on the right. You might have to scroll down to see it. In a blatant attempt to drive traffic to my site and sell more DVDs, I even included McMurdo Base in Antarctica. After all, those guys care a lot about the weather, and they don’t have much to do in the winter (our summer) other than watch movies.

Don’t you wish you could rely on weather banners instead of real windows? Drop me a line. I’ll trade offices with anyone with a window. We can completely swap jobs too. It’ll be fun.

The unique flavor of the blogosphere

Duh. I finally figured out something you probably already know about what makes blogging unusual.

I used to get paid to tell stories as an Arts Correspondent on CBC FM. I’d write my stories, record them at a studio, and people would listen to them on the way to work the next morning. In some ways it was a lot like blogging. I could talk about whatever struck my fancy, toss in a few jokes, and try to sneak in something if not profound, then at least interesting. But here’s the key difference. On the radio, my stories were all vetted by an editor. Blogs have no editors.

Many people don’t understand what editors do. Editors don’t just whine about active voice, noun-verb agreement, or other style or grammatical issues. They give objective advice about the writing as a whole. They can tell you your story isn’t interesting so write about something else. Or more often they can tell you that three quarters of your story isn’t interesting, but that one bit at the end, that’s a terrific insight so go expand on that. All good writing comes from a collaboration between writers and editors because the writers are too close to their work to be objective. Is this post even mildly interesting? I literally have no way of knowing.

I’m not advocating that blogs should have editors. Part of the joy of reading blogs is that the writing comes raw from the heart. It may not be slick or polished but the best blogs are deeply real.

Buy DVDs here and make me rich

One of the nice things about TypePad is that there are no ads. No overt ads anyway. Not usually. But they have a clever marketing gimmick. You can more than cover your monthly fee if you sell enough products through Amazon.com. Music and books in the list on the right automatically get linked to Amazon, and if you buy through my links, I get a nice 5% kickback. Even if it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever buy a single one, let alone cover my expenses, the mere fact that it's possible softens the blow of the blogcosts.

In fact, no need to stop at just those few products I happen to have accidentally promoted. Click the ugly ad above and buy anything at all, and soon I'm getting rich.

Wait a second; this is better than I thought. Sometimes I buy stuff at Amazon. Since I'm an Amazon Associate, I guess that means that if I remember to go through my link, I give myself 5% off. The more I spend, the more I save. Good grief, I will be rich after all!

By the way, why does TypePad do this? The links to Amazon get set up automagically. If I go to the trouble of setting up the (free) Amazon Associate membership, I can get the 5%, but it's a bit of a pain. If I don't bother to do that, TypePad gets the 5% instead. Sweet deal.

Suppose you wrote a blog and nobody read it?

One of the more fascinating aspects of blogs is that it’s the first publication system that might have more writers than readers. In the olden days (you remember them) one could scribble one’s thoughts in a diary, but blogs are meant to be seen. And a few are. If your name is Scoble or Drudge or Wonkette you have fans who follow your every meandering thought, but I would argue they’re more like traditional web sites than blogs anyway.

What is it that compels people to not just diarize but do so publicly? Even if most of the words committed to pixels are never seen, at least they can be. Is it just cheaper vanity publishing? Is it a yearning to be discovered by some kindred spirit whom the gods of Google will somehow direct to your blogthoughts? Is it that fantasy of maybe getting caught doing something private in public?

Understanding this will be key to understanding the blog phenomenon, to predicting whether it’s a fad or a cultural shift, and to making blogging even more compelling in the future.