Blogs and Hacking?

In class today, I showed a few others this blog and was warned that I shouldn't be posting from a free blogging site (i.e. blogger) because hackers can track me that way and delete files from my computer.
"My uncle's a hacker," my classmate said. "He got into someone's computer like that and deleted his dissertation."

Is there truth to this?? What are the security issues involving blogs, well other than the obvious possibility of stalkers tracking you down..

Anyone with techno-knowledge, feel free to clarify this query.
Otherwise..I will research this...

Blogs and Tsunami

Firsthand Reporting on Asian Tsunami Catastrophes

This week, their influence has become readily apparent. Dozens of bloggers have been filing firsthand reports from the areas devastated by southern Asia's deadly tsunamis.

"There is kind of an immediacy that people can relate to — can't help but relate to that in a very intimate way," said Jardin.

"Day three," one blogger writes from the scene, "this may be an unexpected challenge and responsibility, and it hurts to see people in pain. But it's also a remarkable experience to be on hand to do something modest, but useful, in the aftermath of a disaster."

Bloggers around the world have made themselves useful, encouraging donations to relief groups, posting the names of the missing and expressing sympathy for the victims.

(From ABC News: People of the Year: Bloggers)

See it for yourself:

IANS[ MONDAY, JANUARY 03, 2005 08:08:11 PM ]

NEW DELHI: As the survivors of the Dec 26 tsunamis in southern India try to piece their lives together, many have been deprived of vital relief supplies pouring in from various parts of the country and the world.

Stacks of food are lying kilometres away from affected villages full of hungry people in some regions while used clothes are lying in piles outside fishing villages where people are rejecting old, torn textiles.

The Southeast Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog

"10 Things We Learned About Blogs"

This is from Time Magazine. I especially like the part about bloggers being titillating.


10 Things We Learned About Blogs
by Chris Taylor

Radio had its golden age in the 1930s. In the 1950s, it was television's turn. Historians may well date the golden age of the blog from 2004—when Merriam-Webster.com's most searched-for definition was blog. How long can it last? Who knows? Here's what we discovered about the new medium this year.

Posted Sunday, December 19, 2004
Blogging Can Get You Fired
When Delta flight attendant Ellen Simonetti, 30—a leggy blond and self-styled "queen of the sky"—began her blog, she thought it would be fun to post pinup snapshots of herself in uniform. Delta wasn't amused and promptly fired her. Undaunted, Simonetti retitled the blog Diary of a Fired Flight Attendant and detailed her legal battle to get her job back.
GO TO: queenofsky.journalspace.com

Bloggers Get Scoops Too
After book editor Russ Kick read that the U.S. military was clamping down on press photos of coffins coming back from Iraq, he didn't just pen an angry rant on his blog, the Memory Hole. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request—and embarrassingly for the Pentagon, was mailed a CD from the Air Force with 361 coffin snaps, which he promptly posted. The national press, which hadn't thought to ask whether the military had pictures, beat a path to Kick's door.
GO TO: thememoryhole.org

Bloggers Keep News Alive
So your blog hasn't succeeded in getting national attention for your pet issue? Don't lose heart. Just blog, link and repeat. It worked for conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, who trumpeted the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's claims this summer, as well as for liberal blogs like Daily Kos, which investigated evidence that President Bush wore a wire in his first debate. Some of the issues had questionable merit, but persistent bloggers made the subjects tough to ignore. Say it enough times online, and someone is bound to hear you.
GO TO: Instapundit.com, dailykos.com

Bloggers Can Be Titillating
In May a blog graphically detailing the sex life of an anonymous Capitol Hill staff member prompted D.C.'s most intriguing game of guess-the-author since Primary Colors. Jessica Cutler, a.k.a. Washingtonienne, was later outed and fired by her boss, Ohio Republican Mike DeWine, for "inappropriate use of Senate computers." (Her site is not for kids.) In another sign of the times, her first postfiring interview was with Wonkette, another Washington blogger.
GO TO: washingtoniennearchive.blogspot.com, wonkette.com

Bloggers Can Be Fakers
Plain Layne, a highly personal blog supposedly belonging to a Minnesota lesbian named Layne Johnson that drew thousands of fans over 3 1/2 years before mysteriously disappearing, was revealed to be a hoax. Hundreds of fans helped track down the real author, Odin Soli, 35, a male entrepreneur from Woodbury, Minn. Later in the year, fake Bill Clinton and Andy Kaufman blogs became hits.
GO TO: plainlayne.dreamhost.com, billclintondailydiary.blogspot.com

Bloggers Make Money
Earn a living in your pajamas! Online ads (along with Google's automated ad server) allow popular bloggers to go pro. Joshua Micah Marshall of talkingpointsmemo.com, a political blog, says he makes $5,000 a month from banner ads—enough to hire a research assistant.
GO TO: talkingpointsmemo.com

Most Bloggers Are Women
Men may have taken the lead in the early (read: geeky) days of blogging, but that's not the case now. According to a survey of more than 4 million blogs by Perseus Development, 56% were created by women. More bad news for the boys: men are more likely than women to abandon their blog once it's created. Call blogging a 21st century room of one's own.
GO TO: blogsisters.blogspot.com

Candidates Love Blogs
O.K., so Howard Dean never wrote his blog. But his campaign workers posted a surprisingly intimate online diary of life on the road, and Dean had collected $20 million in contributions via the Internet alone by the end of January 2004. It didn't take long for other politicos to catch on. When New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer announced that he was running for Governor this month, he did so on his blog.
GO TO: blog.deanforamerica.com, spitzer2006.com

Pets Have Blogs Too
It started as an in-joke among feline-friendly bloggers: why not post pictures of their cats every Friday afternoon? Friday catblogging became a hit, and soon even NASA was playing along by posting pictures of the Cat's Eye nebula.
GO TO: carnivalofthecats.com

Anyone Can Do It
Blogs wouldn't be such a democratic medium if they weren't so easy to set up. The most popular service, Blogger, owned by Google, boasts features like push-button photoblogging. Microsoft has launched a trial version of its own blogging service.
GO TO: blogger.com, spaces.msn.com

X-mas Special

From the journal of Ted Jesus Christ GOD (the second coming of the massiah):


11-08-04 - This was COVERED UP for about 6 months and Satan or Devil CONVINCED Ted to COVER THIS UP COMPLETELY for a while and this is INCRIMINATING and EMBARRASSING and will make some more NOT believe in Ted Jesus Christ GOD and I have decided that this is worth the Tradeoffs and also will UPSET some Mafia. This is Free the Sexual Slaves!!!!!!!

11-07-04 Late - Ted AGREES and COMMANDS that if Ted is not having enough SUCCESS in Business and Politics and Personal and More that the Hosts of Ancient Heaven FOCUS on Religion MORE!


Notice how TJCG uses capital letters, third person (even when speaking of himself) and strung out sentences to put a Biblical sounding authority to his voice. It almost makes me believe in the guy.

Blogs Turned Books

A New Forum (Blogging) Inspires the Old (Books)
Article from the New York Times on blogs that have been turned into books.

Several factors make bloggers' books attractive to agents and editors. "Word-of-mouth buzz is much more valuable than paid advertising," Ms. Lee said. "I think if there's a reason people come to your site, there's a built-in audience."

Publishers were always happy to have authors who already have a platform, said Mr. Hornfischer, who also has started contacting other bloggers he enjoys. That built-in blog audience is growing; because the Web has no boundaries, it is international. The Perseus Development Corporation, a research-and-development firm that studies online trends, estimates there will be roughly 10 million hosted Web logs by the end of the year. Nearly 90 percent of blogs, Perseus says, are created by people under 30.

*

Not everyone, though, is convinced that bloggers' skills translate to longer-form books. "The style of blog writing is more oriented towards short form one page, set in the moment," said Scott Rettberg, an assistant professor of new media studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Pomona. "The sense of immediacy is quite important in blogs."

Even bloggers who have sold books agree that there is one topic they would not focus on in the longer-form novel: blogging. "I don't know how interesting a book just about the blogosphere would be," Ms. Cox said. "It'd just be people sitting in front of their computers."

(That's right. We just sit here all day, right? lol..)

Birth

Alright, since all of you out in blog-space have given me such great input (well, um, not really...but it's only been a day), I will lead, first with the story of my blog's birth.

Lake Allison was discovered on May 7, 2004 while I was homeless, "couch-surfing", as one could call it gently. Never without my little plaid suitcase, I was fully at the mercy of my friends (deepest thanks) and non-hateful relatives for a piece of soft couch or floor to crash on and a few scraps of meatless something to eat. (Awww..are you misty-eyed, yet?)
For many nights, however, I was camped out on the living room couch at my dad's house. (My youngest sister had comandeered my old bedroom.) So there I'd be at night: alone with no room of my own, my stuff in boxes in the garage, no transportation, the suburban quiet stinging my eardrums. It's no surprise this time in my life was also the height of my psychosis. I was hallucinating and having a whole host of magic delusions that I believed in wholeheartedly.
Er..pardon my tangent. I guess the point here is that my blog was born when I had nowhere else to call "mine". I latched my drifting spirit tightly onto my corner of cyberspace. It was something real for me at a time in which my reality had blurred, in which my perceptions had betrayed me.

For my early entries, I had no audience in mind except for myself and perhaps a few close friends I had sent the Lake Allison link to. Thus, the tone of my writing was snippy and self-indulgent. The content was mainly one-liners which refered to inside-jokes. Quotes and links slapped up without much grounding context. I was writing in a typical online journal voice. Ripping open my virtual trenchcoat and verbally "flashing" on the screen. "Me-me-I-I-I did this, I said that, look at meee! Today, I bla bla bla...I'm so cool."
Until:

Allison: While doing a google search on my book, checking to see if any new reviews have appeared, I ran across your blog. Thanks a ton for listing it as one of your favorite books. And look at the company I'm in! Shit. Anyway, thanks. I was in Chicago last weekend and saw you and a bunch of other Columbia folks at BEA, but as I started making my way toward all of you to say hello, you were summoned and took off running. So...a belated hello. Hope this finds you well. Enjoy the scorching Chicago summer.
Cheers, John
P.S. -- Do you really want to post your phone number on your blog?

Woahh! What the fuck?!

Thursday, June 17, 2004
Did you know that this blog will appear on search engine searches? I thought it could only be viewed by those I sent the link to. I had my phone number and location on here, in addition to gushing mounds of personal information, arranging me easily stalkable. The common sense fairy doesn't leave much under my pillow. But how unsettling....that anybody could stumble upon this..the cops, my family, that guy who was barfing under my window, last night. Ex-boyfriends, kids from school. Hell, even John McNally could see this. Imagine the horrors!

John McNally is a writer who was at Columbia College for Story Week, last Spring. I had just read his The Book of Ralph, and liked it, and gave it a mention in the book section of my Lake Allison profile. And he found it. This shocked me into a broader sense of audience, but also a new need for censorship. From mid-June on, though I still did write primarily about myself, Lake Allison being a personal blog about..well, me, I tried to elaborate more upon events and thoughts that I felt readers from the non-me webworld would find engaging. I began to integrate different forms in my posts, such as list, fictional instance, poem and letter.

I found that, once my entries were a bit less alientating to the reader, people would actually leave comments...

Which is what I would like you to do, right now! Leave a comment in response to my post, about the birth of your own blog/online journal, telling me to go fuck myself, anything!

This blog now allows "anonymous" comments.

Welcome

This is the exhibition stage where I will fuck around and somehow come out with a journal-format research paper on blogging for my story and journal class.

Comment as often and thouroughly as you can!

Topics that will be covered:
-Online Journals vs. Weblogs
-Exhibitionism?
-The immediate, interactive audience
-The blog "voice"
-Blog teams and guests
-Censorship and security
-Comments
-Types of blogs: political, personal, etc..
-Blogged novels
-Blog/online journal process
-More!