We’ve been waiting for this day to come for years now, and finally, it has come to pass: the United States has chosen her next leader in Democratic senator Barack Obama.

This blog congratulates the president-elect. I hope, pray and believe that he can lead America and the world to better days. I know it will take time, as these things often do, but I know just as well that we will get there soon.

God bless America, God bless her new leader, and God bless the world.

(Original image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom)

Book cover of my NaNoWriMo project.

The National Novel Writing Month begins in just 24 hours, and I’m participating for the first time! I’m going to use a long-forgotten plot from a story in one of my abandoned Mibba accounts, and my novel is tentatively titled “Calhoun Beach”. I even have a book cover already!

NaNoWriMo, as the project is often called, is a monthlong event that encourages you to write that novel you got around to doing. The goal is 50,000 words by the end of November, and you win if you get to—or better yet surpass—that threshold.

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, although I only began dabbling in novel/story writing in my freshman high school year after seeing some friends doing it (“it” being writing, of course, you naughty boy/girl you). I can’t tell you how many novels I’d begun to write and scrapped because I was discouraged by my own work.

But the NaNoWriMo’s all about hussle. It doesn’t matter how bad your writing will become, how senseless your plots will turn out to be, or how gooey your brain will be at the end of the month. What will matter is that you write.

If you’re an aspiring novelist who’s never gotten around to writing your masterpiece, NaNoWriMo might just be the spark to ignite your career. Head on over to the NaNoWriMo website and sign up. When you’re done, add me to your buddy list—my user handle over there’s dlozarie.

Oh, and semestral break hasn’t been as productive as I hoped it would be. It’s back to school this Monday, but I plan to write, write, and write (blog posts) over the weekend to catch up. (For now, I’m plurking and looking to upgrade my Ubuntu install—8.10, Intrepid Ibex, is out!) I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t taken care of my blog as much as I ought to, but what the hey.

I’ve also implemented a new theme on the blog, and it’s something I created myself. Yay me! If you’re reading this in a feed reader, you might want to check it out. Feedback is welcome. If you spot a bug, please, please, please report it through my contact page. Thankies!

Let’s face it—personal blogging is a profitable niche no more. It’s a sad fact, seeing as how the original purpose of blogging was to serve as a sort of online journal. People’s tastes have changed, and blogging isn’t the obscure medium it used to be. Now, no one can wade through the Interwebs without hearing the word “blog” being mentioned—and boy, what a meaning the word has. The term now conjures images of fat geeks making money from home, and of websites that deliver to us breaking-news information even before television and print media get a hold of the tip.

True enough, amidst all this information being shared at the speed of light, the personal blog has become lost, obscured, inglorious.

Here I am, a personal blogger, one of only so many, lost in the buzz of daily life. Why has personal blogging become so recondite, why haven’t I stopped personal-blogging, and how does a personal blogger in this blog-eat-blog world where personal blogging has gone to the dogs?

Reasons why personal blogging has lost its luster

So, exactly why has personal blogging stopped appealing to writers/bloggers? Maybe because of the following reasons…

Changing tastes for the changing times

In the twilight of the 20^th century and in the dawn of the 21^st, I would’ve guessed that personal blogs were all the rage. And why not? After all, it was an ingenious idea—the thought of having your journal published online and being viewed by the world. Brilliant!

Not so now. Somewhere along the way, people began realizing, “Why the hell should I care about your personal life?” The blogosphere evolved into an information portal that rivals conventional media, and in that riptide of megabytes being zoomed back and forth across the Internet, personal blogging has lost the luster it once held.

Social networking is the new personal blogging

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace make it more convenient and less tedious for people to share their lives online. To be perfectly honest, it is so much easier to simply upload a picture or video onto MySpace or Facebook than to write, in a dull, tedious fashion, about how your day went on a weblog.

Personal blogs tend to spread out too thin

In the world of niche blogging, there is a rule that goes, “Look for a nice, profitable niche you can blog about constantly. A niche you’re interested in. Blog about that niche, and that niche only—never step out of topic.”

Personal bloggers needn’t have such a rule, simply because “personal blogging”, in my opinion, isn’t a “niche” in the same sense as, say, technology or lifestyle. We can therefore write about anything and everything under the Sun. Although that means that we have potentially limitless topics to create content around, it also means that we spread out too thinly—and blog readers aren’t too keen on following blogs with no specific niche covered. Do you think this is why personal blogging has lost its grandeur in recent years?

Why I haven’t switched to a niche

So, personal blogging has lost its appeal. Some would argue to the death that it has lost its importance and relevance. So, why am I still writing a pesonal blog and not a niche blog?

I suck at niche blogging

Hey—better to shamelessly admit your imperfections than foolishly pretend you’re good at something you’re not. I’d rather enjoy writing about something I’m comfortable with (i.e. my life and thoughts) than to try to write good content about something I know nothing about, or have no interest in.

Freedom, baby, freedom!

I’d mentioned earlier that niche blogging means you have to restrain yourself so you don’t step “out of bounds”—that is, to write about something outside your niche.

Personal bloggers know no limits. Admittedly, it doesn’t come with much promise, financially speaking, but the freedom to blog without restrictions is… well, it’s amazing!

Training ground

Darren Rowse started his blogging career in the personal blog world. In his outrageously popular blog, he even wrote a blog post entitled “Seven Reasons Why Personal Blogs Rock“. I can certainly say that some, if not all, of the reasons Darren wrote about in that blog post, apply to me and my personal blogging life.

Anyway, in that post, Darren says:

My first entry into blogging around four years ago was on a free blogspot blog which was largely a personal blog in which I reflected upon many aspects of life including spirituality, movies, politics, my church, work and miscellaneous ramblings from the various hobbies that I have.

And look where he is now. Personal blogging is to bloggers as boot camp is to would-be soldiers; as infancy is to humans. It’s the formational years of a blogger’s life, the era of “discovering oneself”. As Darren said in the aforementioned blog post, personal blogging opens your eyes and reveals to you how the blogosphere operates and helps you define yourself.

Over to you

I’d love to hear your take on personal blogging. Is it being driven to the extinction, or is it very much alive and well, if obscured? Do you think the personal blog can make a comeback? Are you a personal blogger, and if so, then why choose personal blogging? Did I miss a point in the blog post? Fire away.

Twitter‘s been down in the dumps for a long time now. Downed servers, features being disabled (as of this writing, IM still hasn’t been restored). Twitter blog posts are never about new features, but instead about what has gone wrong with their system (and about how they’re “working to fix it”). Nobody knows why our favorite microblogging application’s so buggy—it might be because they use MacBook Airs, it might be because they use Vista—it could be anything!

Enter Plurk. Apparently using the wtf-is-wrong-with-Twitter buzz to generate buzz for their service, Plurk opened up to users only very recently and was (unsurprisingly) met with cheery welcome. Personal observations reveal that Twitter has become quiet of late, while Plurk is always busy.

Which can only mean more people are Plurking than Twittering! Countless people have “converted” to Plurk from Twitter—author included—and for good reason: Plurk. Kicks. Twitter’s. Ass. Why? Here’s why.

Timelined updates

Twitter shows you a boring old list of updates—observe my timeline, for example. It’s nothing but a vertical pile of words. My Plurk timeline is a much more enjoyable place—a draggable horizontal list that makes pagination obsolete, and the page more visual instead of textual.

Threaded Plurk replies

Granted, Twitter basically allows you to reply to tweets (updates) made by other people by doing this:

But it doesn’t foster discussion (because of the fact that a reply to a tweet cannot be readily viewed by another user). Plurk encourages discussion because you can reply to a plurk (Plurk version of tweet) by clicking on it and then typing in your reply, like so:

I don’t know about you, but I’d choose the service that encourages replies. This puts the blogging in microblogging. Comments are the life of every blog—the same goes for microblogs, and as you know, people on the Interwebs are a busy bunch who don’t like having to go through a lot of work just to find conversation.

Bolden, italicize, underline, and hyperlinkify your text

Say for example I want people to check out my blog. On Twitter, I do that by typing “Hey fellas! Visit my blog at www.deanlozarie.com!” Whereas on Plurk, I just type in “Hey fellas! Visit my http://www.deantastic.com/ (blog)!” and the plurk would come out as “Hey fellas! Visit my blog!”

If you want to italicize the word stinky in “boogers are stinky”, just Plurk in “boogers are *stinky*” (asterisks before and after the word), and Plurk processes it and outputs it as “boogers are *stinky*” (yes, asterisks are retained). Four asterisks—two on each side of the word—make it boldface. Two underscores (“__stinky__”) will underline the word.

To the best of my knowledge, Twitter has no such formatting options. Twitter=Phail.

Karma and Smilies

To encourage user activity, Plurk employs a point system called “Karma”. Basically, the more you plurk, the more Karma you get; the less you plurk, your karma is decreased. More Karma gives you access to more features, like the ability to name your timeline, change the creature on your timeline background, change your display name, and get more smilies.

Onto smilies. Know how when you type “: – )” into your favorite instant messaging client, it turns into a ? Twitter, very much like the French, refuses to do that for you, instead choosing to leave the semicolon, hyphen and closing parenthesis alone. Granted, : – ) and mean pretty much the same thing, but looks a helluva lot cooler, don’t you think?

Plurk has a whole array of animated smilies for you to use. Some of the cooler ones can only be accessed by plurkers above a certain karma threshold. Still, many websites such as this one have lots of smilies available for embedding into your plurks. Which brings me to my next point:

Ability to embed images and video onto plurks

Twitter folks type something like this: “Check out this YouTube vid: [enter URL here]“. Plurkers needn’t go through such tiresome work, thanks to the ability to embed images and video into your post. How, you ask? Simple! Say for example I want to insert this video into my plurk. All I need to do is type in some text (e.g. “check out this video”) and then the clip’s URL. Heck, I could even plurk only the video. So, I type “testing image/video insertion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk9QGZUYcEE” and here’s what appears:

Look closely, to the left of the “Plurk v Twitter: A First Look” mini-window, and you’ll see the plurk containing the video.

No downtime!

Now, in fairness to Twitter, saying that Plurk suffers from zero downtime would be preposterous. However, one thing’s fo sho: Twitter not suffering any problems is an uncommon occurence, while the reverse is true for Plurk. Right now, Twitter replies are disabled. Replies have been restored, IM functionality still down. Plurk’s all good and well. Plurk even automatically checks for new plurks and new replies for you without refreshing the page (contrary to Twitter, where if you want to check if there are any new tweets, you have to hit F5).

Conclusion

Overall, it’s Plurk FTW. Don’t get me wrong—Twitter used to be good, until the database crashes and server downtimes came. Plurk took over, and although the great exodus from Twitter (to Plurk) hasn’t quite happened yet, it’s bound to soon. Still, all hope is not lost for Twitter. What they have to do, IMO, is get their act together, fix their database crashes, earn some money (plaster one or two AdSense units on our pages if you have to), and then invest that money on more servers, developing more features, etc. It’s a microblogging-platform-eat-microblogging-platform world out there, and Twitter’s down for the count. Can it get back up in time?