Category Archives: Using Weblogs and Technology

Sarapocial Relationships

Posted on November 10, 2023 by Dave Pollard

Cartoon from the New Yorker by the late, great Lee Lorenz A parasocial relationship is that between an individual and some fictional character or some real or idealized group — an entity you can never really know. So I might … Continue reading →

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves, Using Weblogs and Technology | Leave a comment

The Real Problems With Artificial Intelligence

Posted on July 5, 2023 by Dave Pollard

a collage of some of my favourite Midjourney AI images, none of them my prompts; to view larger size, right click and open in a new window/tab and then simultaneously press CMD and + to enlarge (CTRL + in Windows) … Continue reading →

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves, Using Weblogs and Technology | 7 Comments

Longing to be Free (a guest post)

Posted on March 24, 2023 by Dave Pollard

LONGING TO BE FREE Amidst the chaos of our modern days, A call resounds that beckons to our soul, A whisper in the wind that gently sways, And bids us to embrace a primal goal — To roam the earth … Continue reading →

Posted in Creative Works, How the World Really Works, Using Weblogs and Technology | 3 Comments

The YouTube Power Law, and My Favourite Subscriptions

Posted on December 17, 2022 by Dave Pollard

When blogs were new and all the rage, Clay Shirky published something called the “Power Law” that said the popularity of blogs followed an exponential “power curve” that looked like a curved hockey stick — Y=mXb. That meant that 1% … Continue reading →

Posted in How the World Really Works, Using Weblogs and Technology | 2 Comments

None of the News That’s Fit to Print

Posted on October 8, 2022 by Dave Pollard

If you read blogs and other information sources regularly, it’s probably because you know you’re not getting the information you want from media publishers, either mainstream or alternative/independent. As I wrote last year, media publishers can no longer afford to … Continue reading →

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves, Using Weblogs and Technology | 2 Comments

Do We Know Ourselves Only Through Our Relationships?

Posted on May 1, 2022 by Dave Pollard

Aaron Williamson‘s Model of Identity and Community, 2013 Most of us define ourselves in terms of our relationships — who we work with, who we live with, and who we consider to be in our ‘circles’. When we write a … Continue reading →

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves, Using Weblogs and Technology | 4 Comments

Switching from Feedburner to Follow.It

Posted on June 15, 2021 by Dave Pollard

Google is abandoning its free RSS-to-email service Feedburner (that I’ve used for a decade) in two weeks. My brother Alan (thank you!) has arranged to transition my blog’s subscription service to Follow.It and that transition starts today. If you’re an … Continue reading →

Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | 4 Comments

Weather ‘Tis Nobler

Posted on January 7, 2021 by Dave Pollard

I‘ve had a personal weather station for about four years. Living on a small island with microclimates, where the weather doesn’t quite match that of any of the nearby places served by Environment Canada (shown as red dots above), I … Continue reading →

Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | 3 Comments

Blogging Without Facebook

Posted on January 22, 2019 by Dave Pollard

Cartoon from the New Yorker by Lee Lorenz Five years ago I summarized why I still blog this way: I keep blogging because I owe just about everything about my current situation to my blog. My writing and my readers’ … Continue reading →

Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | 3 Comments

The Circles We Move In

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Dave Pollard

Seb Paquet put me on to a free (limited, demo) app called TouchGraph that analyzes all your ‘friends’ on Facebook, and colour-codes them depending on the number of connections they have to your other friends. Mine is shown above, with … Continue reading →

Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | 1 Comment