Blog popularity has exploded
in the last year. Not only are they good narcissistic vents for people
to express their views to anyone who will take the time to read them,
they’re becoming increasingly useful as a means to spread information
on such current topics as the tsunami disaster.

But are blogs ready to take on the mainstream media?

Also to be considered are the potential hazards of writing a blog, especially if you intend on writing about or even posting pictures of yourself at work.

I’ve got one, so I suppose my views are biased, but I believe that the
blog movement will keep going from strength to strength, and the power
it has in relation to the mainstream media may even turn the tides on
what people choose to believe when they read the news.

Do the mainstream media consider blogging a threat? I hope they do -
and if they don’t, they should. Bloggers at the scene of a story can
post what they see as and when it happens, and can update frequently,
and instantly. Major news carriers don’t have that luxury, since
everything has to go through their own internal scrutiny and editing
process.

Obviously, the disadvantage of blogging is that the content will be
affected by the author’s personal opinions and/or views. But since
there are so many blogs around nowadays, you don’t have to look far to
find alternative viewpoints for consideration.

What I fear is people going too far with what they publish, and
the already crazily litigous society we now appear to live in turning
up hundreds of cases like the US woman who was fired for showing a picture of her in her uniform.

I’d recommend getting a blog to anybody. But I’d say be careful - it’s a legal jungle out there.

If you know me, you’ll know I delight in playing with CSS. You may also know that this site is not only a portfolio/blog site for my own narcissistic purposes, but a learning excercise, and an attempt to create my own personal CSS playground in a vein similar to CSS Zen Garden.

In attempting to recreate a CSS Zen Garden-style approach to site theming, I’ve learned one thing: it’s difficult to achieve such diverse design and flexibility with dynamic content. CSS Zen Garden has one advantage over my site: its content is static. This means that the XHTML provided to people when they want to create their own stylsheet for Zen never changes. I don’t have that luxury - although I’m not far off, the amount, size and shape of content does change on a daily basis.