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
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 π¦πΊ 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 π
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:
Louise Dodson Nov 5, 1996 NSW joins Canberra on the Internet
Almost three-million clicks and counting for MEdia Dragon π
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 π¨πΏ 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
Fifteen Year Blogiversary for Whispering Gums, with a Giveaway
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