Al's Blog-o-Sphere

Everyone has been talking about the Obama Administration’s Health Care Plan. No one seems to know very much about it, though. Rumors about what it includes abound, but real information on the several proposals working their way through congress is in short supply.

Here’s my wish list…

What we need for Health Care: Continue Reading…

It’s been a while since I complained about TV commercials. Does that mean all is good in couch-potato-land? No, it just means things haven’t changed.

But I’ve noticed a new form of commercial lately and it’s – for some reason – particularly annoying to me. Let’s call it the Commercial Introduction. It goes like this:

This episode of Burn Notice is being brought to you by Hyundai.

or…

This weeks CSI Miami is presented by T-Mobile.

Almost every sponsor and show is using this in some combination, followed by, you guessed it, the commercial. Continue Reading…

Have you noticed that the Sci-Fi channel has changed it’s name?

From Sci-Fi, the widely recognized short name for Science Fiction, they’ve changed it to SyFy. What does that mean?

Did people have a problem with Sci-Fi? Were they mispronouncing it as Skiffie?

Or is this a move away from being associated solely with Science Fiction? Now that they’re spending as much time with ultimate cage fighting, as they do actual Sci-Fi programming, maybe that’s the intention. Continue Reading…

I’ve noticed a lot of people who used to write in their blogs are now abandoning them and concentrating on things like Twitter and Facebook. I’ve been sucked into that myself to some extent.

I don’t think it’s always a good thing, though. Maybe for some people. Some should be limited to 130 characters. But for anyone who really has something to say, Twitter is just too short. Facebook is better, but it’s so transient, that no matter how good what you have to say is, it’s soon lost and fades away among all the other clutter.

Even old, passé MySpace was a better blogging platform. It actually had a blog section for every account. Most people never used it, or only tried it once or twice. Most people never read the blog postings of other people there either because it wasn’t on the profile page.

But anyone who had a real blog, like a Blogger or Blogspot page, usually had something to say. You can do anything, get any point across with a real blog. You can add photos, embed videos, music, whatever it takes. Sure, you can do that on Facebook, but not as well.

Yet many people confess to blogging less and using things like Twitter and Facebook more. I guess it’s instant gratification at work.

But to all those who still take the effort to write in a real blog, Thank You! Thanks for taking the time, for being eloquent enough to make your case, even if it doesn’t fit into 130 characters. There’s till a place for Twitter and Facebook. They’re a great place to announce that you’ve written a new article in your blog. That’s what I’m going to do from now on. (actually have been doing for a while, when I remembered.) Give it a try. Just announce new posts on Twitter and Facebook and let them point people to your blog. And keep writing. We’ll be reading.