Sunday, June 30, 2024

For 22 years reflecting on 1980: You Can’t Go Home Again

You can learn a line
from a win
and a book
from a defeat.
~ Paul Brown who shared with deep bloggers the old saying "no good deed goes unpunished."


Media dragon started in the evening on 30 June 2002 at the end of financial year Down Under …  (Czech Out Media Dragon Museum)

In the world of blogging, 22 years is a momentous milestone … and in the Internet years MEdia Dragon is thousand years old relic …  Back in June 2011 Steve Jobs observed that Media Dragon was even back then craziest and ancient …


Our Complicated Relationship With Nostalgia

Even if nostalgia is a less “dangerous emotion” today than it seems to have been to the Swiss soldiers, it well deserves to be taken seriously and sympathetically. - The Guardian

Lou Martinez’s favourite President Joe Bidden awarded posthumously Steve in 2022 The Presidential Medal of Freedom which is the highest US honor that can be given to a civilian


When you consider that statistics show 80% of new blogs fail within 18 months following their launch, it really puts into perspective how massive over two decade of blogging is.


The best preparation for blogging is a lifetime of paying attention and sticking your neck out - have your skin in the game of level playing media fields.  Crossing the deadly Iron Curtain also helps to ignore even no one was reading anything I wrote …


Over those twenty two years, I’ve written well over 15,000 posts, some brief, some long, some silly, some serious and linked to some  impressive bloggers, writers, heroes

From Cold War River to Sultry Antipodean Sea 


“”You learn something every day" is the motto of this blog. As courageous Kate Braverman observed: 

"Writing is like crime. The page is about what you can get away with. We break and enter, transgress, autopsy the living and dead, rob, exchange identities, lie, confess, steal. The arts of writing and successful crime are the same. Opportunity. Robbery. Seizure. Con. Misdirection. Theft. Fiction is a form of fraud, the most elegant, exquisite and complicated forms of creative fraud."


Why put up with the grief that writing a blog guarantees I’ll get? Funding the Future

Political and philosophical blogs especially have always been an incredible source of inspiration for me.

Note for example that philosophy blog Daily Nous Turned 10 in 2024 AD!


Blogging appealed to me because it was positioned in this unique digital space somewhere between storytelling, scrap-booking, learning, helping me to listen more, and finding brothers and sisters who make the world tick ...

It is hard not to be appreciative of the little engine community of Media Dragons that could when you consider that there are over 1.5 billion blogs worldwide.  About 30-32% of those bloggers are in the US. Australian πŸ‡¦πŸ‡Ί bloggers like me comprise of 1% of that total.  I am also in the 7.1% group of bloggers aged over 50. Over 7 million blog posts are published every single day! 77% of internet users read blogs. 


When I think of who I was back in 2002, how much I’ve changed, how much my life has changed, how much the world has changed, it’s a little surreal. When I wrote my first blog post, Kindles and iPhones didn’t exist. And computer monitors were still fat and chunky and the operating systems were in towers. I still used a camera with film of my two daughters that had to be developed. I’m pretty sure accessing the internet was still via dial-up. Gracious! That was a long time ago. I was based at Brisvegas then, lived such a different life - as philosopher keep telling us past is such a foreign country 

 I certainly didn’t anticipate the adventure my journey would be. . . Almost three (3) Million views from all corners of the world even the King of Bohemia did not reach as far as this dragon-folklore fuelled blog  πŸ˜‡


How lucky to be alive at the same time as Vaclav Havel and characters like Steve Jobs who  said the following in a 1994 interview with the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association:

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That's maybe the most important thing. It's to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

I think that's very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you'll want to change life and make it better, cause it's kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.


Louise Dodson Nov 5, 1996 NSW joins Canberra on the Internet

The NSW Parliament has now joined the Federal Parliament with a range of parliamentary information available on the Internet. However, the NSW Parliament World Wide Web site will provide the most comprehensive information. 
It includes explanations about the operations, procedures and legislative processes in NSW, historical information, biographical information about all the ministers and members, daily Hansards, business papers, bills before the House and daily "whats on" information for both the Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council. 
"The development of this site gives the people of NSW unprecedented access to information about the workings of democracy in this State," the president of the Legislative Council, Mr Max Willis, said. 
The speaker of the Legislative Assembly, Mr John Murray, promised it would be updated daily.

"This will be a valuable education and business resource," he said. The NSW Public Accounts Committee's Mr Jozef Imrich said the Web technology gives users the opportunity to bring government within easy reach of people irrespective of geographic barriers. 
In the United States, the Government has developed an Interactive Citizen's Handbook, as an electronic guide through government agencies and departments to bring a new "town hall-style democracy" to the people. 
The versatile Internet is also being used for telemedicine services.Australian medical technology company, Micromedical Industries, is using advanced Internet technologies for accessing doctors via a modem. 
For instance, the Internet can be used for a heart check-up by uploading one's ECG to a central server. Mr Peter Ludemann, the chairman of Micromedical Industries, said: "We have paved the way for a system which is accessible to remote communities, the home bound or even the world's fitness enthusiasts who want access to online medical expertise."

Almost three-million clicks and counting for MEdia Dragon πŸ‰ 

I am old enough to remember theofficial birthday of the internet 1st January 1983. The period takes me back to manual media clippings area at the NSW Parliamentary Library. Although the Internet  wasn't until 10 years later, in 1993 when it became available to the public. My first parliamentary email address was for work shortly after that date. I remember using the terrible Alta Vista search engine because Google did not come along until 1998 when we invaded Czech πŸ‡¨πŸ‡Ώ and Slovak Republics.



A global, 16-year study1 of 2.4 million people has found that Internet use might boost measures of well-being, such as life satisfaction and sense of purpose — challenging the commonly held idea that Internet use has negative effects on people’s welfare.
Is the internet bad for you?

“A good, blogger, intel analyst, writer always works at the impossible.”


If you think you're too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito

Accents Can Be Contagious

That foreign accent students sometimes come home with after studying abroad isn't (or isn't only) an affectation. - The Atlantic (MSN)

Fifteen Year Blogiversary for Whispering Gums, with a Giveaway


Brat from Bratislava


Quoting the social theorist Bruno Latour, Becker encourages us to think of time as less like an “irreversible arrow” and more like a “plate of spaghetti.” The past is perpetually “recombined, reinterpreted, and reshuffled,” Latour ventures; it loops around and doubles back on the present. All this may sound like postmodern esotericism, but the idea of the past overlapping and entwining with the present is not some recent import from French theory. The rabbinic scholar Lynn Kaye has found a similar temporal flexibility in the Talmud (for example, in the Passover rituals with which Jews attempt to merge the present with the long-ago events of Exodus). More plainly, we can see in the built environment of any city the commingling of past and present. 

You Can’t Go Home Again The uses of nostalgia



Whatever the history, whatever the nuances, whatever the charged sentiments associated with political realities, the thirst for freedom is very simple: It means believing that if regimes built 10ft wall you will create a 12ft ladder




When Online Content Disappears

“38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view. A new Pew Research Center analysis shows just how fleeting online content actually is:

  • A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible,as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
  • For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.

This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023…” [beSpacific – free – solo owned, researched, edited, published online since – 2002]


Without Main Street media most blogs would be up the creek or cold river

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