Re: can someone please explain what this blog tagging this is all about?

On Jan 20, 10:51 am, hpuxrac <johnbhur..._at_sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> On Jan 16, 7:52 pm, hjr.pyth..._at_gmail.com wrote:
>
> snip
>
> OK I took a quick look at Tim Hall's blog ... he posted the following
> info ...
>
> ***************************
>
> just got tagged by Chris Muir, so here goes my 8 things you may not
> know about me:
>
> When I was 14 years old I weighed 19 stone. That's 266 pounds or 121
> kilos.
> I was a distinctly average student at school. A few of my friends were
> surprised when I passed my exams. Education only really started to
> click with me after I left school and could focus on subjects I was
> interested in. At sixth form and university I started getting into my
> groove.
> I've been a vegetarian since I was 15, so that's about 23 years and
> counting. Even before that I ate very little meat and I never ate
> fish. I don't like eggs and I can't drink milk on its own. I love
> cheese. Life without cheese is not life.
> I have a form of diabetes known as MODY. In my case it relates to a
> mutation of the Glucokinase gene. It's no big thing, but I have to
> avoid getting too fat and I have to be careful with sugary food
> (refined or natural).
> I played guitar in a couple of bands (Pondlife and Coppertongue) at
> University. The bands were pretty good, but I wasn't. I specialized in
> making weird noises with my guitar effects, rather than actually
> playing.
> I love singing. If I'm alone I sing out loud. If I'm in public I sing
> in my head. If you see me in the street or in a shop I'm not a crazy
> guy talking to himself. I'm just singing. I can hold a tune, but I'm
> no star in the making.
> Most of my adult life I've been an insomniac. I find it very difficult
> to get to sleep and when I do I wake up a lot during the night. As a
> result I tend to remember lots of dreams. On average about 3-5
> distinct dreams a night. I keep meaning to start writing them down but
> I've never got round to it yet.
> I started working with Oracle by accident. I was at an interview and
> they asked me if I'd heard of Oracle and I said, "Is that the teletext
> stuff on TV?" At the time Oracle was the name for teletext on ITV, so
> it wasn't as dumb as it sounds. Somehow I got the job anyway and the
> rest is history.
> I'm going to tag Andrew Clarke, Andy C, David Aldridge, Dimitri
> Gielis, Howard Rogers, Jeff Hunter, John Scott and Kevin Closson.
> (Alphabetical from my blogroll, hopefully not repeating anyone. )
>
> *********************
>
> Yes I guess I agree this is kind of sophomoric and I don't see any
> real connection except near the bottom with anything oracle related.
>
> As I noted in my first post the material and quality of stuff being
> blogged about for oracle has suffered over the last couple of years
> ( well Kevin Closson and Jonathan Lewis may be exceptions ) IMHO.
>
> Guess you have a good point and if you were paying for bandwidth
> getting monopolized by content like that above ... well say no more.

I'll just say this one more time, because otherwise I look like I'm trying to censor content on other people's blogs (and indeed, that's where the 'when I signed up for a blog I didn't sign your terms and conditions' fatuous comment that one person sent me comes from)

It doesn't matter that the content you quote was not Oracle related. I WELCOME non-Oracle related matters on blogs. I've posted plenty of it in my time. I expect others to do likewise. Whether the above is "sophomoric" or not was, to me, 100% irrelevant. Tim Hall, like any other blog owner, is entitled to fill his blog with whatever content he deems fit and proper, and I'm not making one iota of protest about that.

What causes me problems is the "I'm going to tag..." line. It was the encouragement of an explosive growth in this sort of thing that was always going to be a problem. It was also the fact that when I pointed out what an explosive growth in this sort of thing was doing to blog aggregators Tim replied, 'so what, I don't use the site so it doesn't matter to me, I never asked to be aggregated in the first place, blog aggregators are skimming my work to their own personal advantage anyway, I don't care, this is fun'.

In the IT world, anything that generates an exponentially-growing volume of traffic is a problem. Encouraging it is therefore just plain daft. Not caring about it once the damage has started is just irresponsible and rather anti-social.

*That's* the problem here, not the nature of the content. Received on Sat Jan 19 2008 - 18:40:07 CST