Just participated in the Liz Strauss’s Open Comment Night 2. Think of it as an Open Mike Night for blogs! My comment was on something I noticed about Toronto’s Mesh Conference. The conference ended today. Particularly I pointed to the fact that:

Someone noticed [on the Mesh blog] a visible audience limitation in cultural, ethnic, or socio-economical make up. Even in a culturaly diverse city such as Toronto. And it took a person named “Lee” to notice it. Guess what, nobody responded to that comment .

All right, ’nuff said. I’ve given you the topic, now discuss amongst yourselves because I don’t have the answer.

Remember my previous prediction about the blogosphere? It has only been two months but here’s stage one in progress! I guess I’m better than Nostradamus?

One of my motivations for starting AmBlogger is to hopefully contribute original thoughts to the Blogging community. As such, it is not very often that I use the daily stuff I read to generate new Blog ideas. I mean, I try my hardest not to. I wanted to sound in about blogging with passion, referring to Paul Chaney’s “The Joy Of Blogging“, but Darren has already done it.

I held off for more original ideas but none have come to me in the last few days. But if you enjoy my writing, please stay tuned. I’m not creative like Chartreuse but damn it if I got something to say one day, you’ll miss it if you don’t stay tuned!

Myself, I’m like the many bloggers that read a lot of other blogs and draw their inspirations from those. But too often I see the “echo chamber” in progress and though I try my earnest not to be a part of that problem, I’m not sure I’m part of the solution yet. I have an example that I would like to bring to dicussion in the near future about not being part of the “echo chamber”. Till then, I leave you with a quote I absolutely loved from a ThreadWatch discussion.

many bloggers do what a spam bot does, but manually, and then give quotes like:

“the ends wouldn’t justify the means in my books. They are using the hard work of others to launch their own business off.”

Its really nothing but a bunch of self-referential hypocritical bullshit.

I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with drawing inspiration from the writings of others. However, whether you’re remixing or you’re copying, it is really a thin line that still results in the same thing - a derivation of a product that was not your original thought. We keep saying content is king, but what we fail to say is that the content doesn’t have to be yours, it can be your version of some other people’s thoughts. Let’s all think about it!

… that the most popular pro/am blogger or blog site has not been born yet! I also see that the blog will be in a non-english language with a potential audience of over 1 Billion. If this person chooses to monetize (or ever finds a way to do so), he (or she) could make Six Figure Blogging look like kindergarten?!?

[voiceover: this rant has been inspired by the many postings/comments about the results of the 2006 bloggies]