You know, sometimes I love living in South Carolina, and then there are days like today, when I hate and despise it simply because it sits nestled comfortably in the bloody bible belt…
Through a link on Scoble’s block (check my blogroll for a link), I found BlogMap / FeedMap. Basically, this service attempts to create a list of blogs, indexed by the physical location of the author. For the hell of it, I decided I would put my blog in, just to see who was nearby.
Much to my surprised, there were 4 blogs in what it defined as “nearby” (1 was mine, 2 were close, and 1 I certainly wouldn’t want to drive to).
Well, the first one I skipped over simply from the description “Viewpoints from a Christian-worldview”. Yeah, next…
The second one I actually checked out, becasue the tagline “the perfect string of user input” was intriguing. Turns out, the guy is heavy into .NET (which I’m slowly becoming interested in), and mixes in a little humor and randomness with his various posts. Surprise, new blogroll entry! Please check him out at Bill’s House O Insomnia!
And then we come down to our final contestant “nearby”. Yeah, this is the one I wouldn’t want to drive to. The tagline was “STOP! LOOK! & LISTEN!”. Well, while I don’t like being ordered around, I’m used to being so… And therefore, I stopped and looked.
The first thing I notice is god… How much more pink could we get on this bloody page? And then I see the MSN Spaces logo at the top. Yeah, not a good start… There’s a picture of this old woman in the “Profile” box. It says she’s a grephic design / artist by profesion, and she’s 62. Well, ok, that explains the pink.
Then I get to the first entry in her blog. The entire thing (title and body) is in ALL CAPS. I read the title: “PRAISE GOD FOR LOVING US ENOUGHT O SEND JESUS TO SAVE US”, and instantly close the page. Absolutely no listening will be done here…
So out of the surprising 3 total matches in my local area, I actually come out better than I expected with one quality entry, and 2 entries that further my hatred for organized religion, and the desire of the members thereof to force it upon those who don’t wish their minds and judgement to be clouded.
Redundancy in the Newsroom
You know, with my mom’s surgery the other day, I spent several hours in a hospital waiting room, mainly staring blindly at the TV. I do the same thing whenever I have work done on my car, or even when I’m at some gas pumps these days.
As usual, most of these TVs are tuned to that time-old classic: CNN (ok, sometimes it’s MSNBC, and occasionally Fox News). I have to say, this is one reason I think I miss having cable at home (no, we’re still living in the stone age… hence the HUGE pile of DVDs we own, which would probably more than pay for cable for 20 years or so). I like to think that if we had cable, I’d not only watch some of the HBO specials (can you say Sopranos?), but I’d also really enjoy some of the specials that are on CNN, the Discovery Channel, the History channel, etc.
Unfortunately, while some of those still hold true (like the Sopranos, of course…), after spending more than an hour in any waiting room watching one of the news programs (really regardless of what station it is), you realize one thing above all others:
There isn’t SHIT happening 99% of the time.
That’s right, NOT A DAMN THING! Hour after hour, they report and recap on the exact same stories, usually adding absolutely no new data or information. Now, I suppose in my waiting room situation, that tends not to be a big issue, since most people (hopefully) aren’t there for more than 1 recap of every story, but there’s no way any sane person could sit down and watch CNN for multiple hours at a time and remain in any state resembling sanity.
So how can CNN survive? Are they thriving on this waiting room market? I mean, every other television network has to actually entertain viewers, why are these networks dedicated to news not held to the same standard, and how can I cash in on this market?
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