Monday, April 25, 2016

Ten Years A'Blogging 1 : 2006 - Predictive Blogging

This year marks the tenth anniversary of my blog News From Nowhere. To celebrate "Ten Years A'Blogging" I am going to revisit a blog post from each of the last ten years, starting with a post from November 2006 which speculates about the nature of predictive texting.


CALIFORNIA SOB


Cousin Dave called in for a cup of tea this morning. Whilst we were drinking tea and avoiding work he received a text message from his son. Like everyone of a certain age, Dave struggled with his attempts to send a message back - and we got to thinking of the perils of predictive text. What if they had predictive text back in the days of semaphore - a useful way of saving on arm-power. Or what if the early Morse-code operators had predictive Morse. Imagine the conversation between the sinking Titanic and the Steamship California :

TITANIC : S.O. ...
CALIFORNIA : Sorry!, Sorry For what?
TITANIC : S.O. ...
CALIFORNIA : Sob? What are you sobbing about?
TITANIC : S.O. ....
CALIFORNIA : Oh For Heavens' Sake, SOD OFF then.




Whilst my first blog post wasn't until 2006, that was not my first introduction to blogging. Eight years earlier I had been involved in a project with my brother which - although back then the word blogging hadn't been invented - was in all effects an early form of blogging. At the time my brother Roger, a celebrated artist and sculptor, was living just up the Calder Valley and he wanted to produce an on-line diary for some of the projects he was involved in. So each day he would prepare some material and we would use an early digital camera for the photographs. And then I would work late into the night converting the text and images into html coding and load it to a dedicated web site. By the time I started blogging for myself in 2006, things had become much easier as Blogger and similar programmes removed much of the technical hard work, and made blogging simple.

11 comments:

  1. I remember the days when blogging seemed incredibly advanced and cool. I am impressed that you were one of those pioneers!

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  2. So glad you're still finding inspiration, Alan. Hope News from Nowhere is around in another 10 years. My first introduction to blogging was via a package that pre-dates Blogger. Or maybe it was an early version. Would have been 1998/99. Our team at work was very excited about the potential, but the Uni introduced a new shiny CMS, and that rather put an end to our plans. I rarely post these days, largely because Facebook has made me an offer I can't refuse. What a lazy blogger I've become!

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  3. Must be 40 years since I last used semaphore, and then it was in an exam. BLOG.

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    1. I was going to write "Hello Chairman Bill" but it was too many words. You would think there would be an app which could produce semaphore wouldn't you?

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  4. Html coding was my beginning computer class and I almost bailed out on it. I didn't start to blog until the easy way was in existence. I still find people who have a hard time with blogger itself and want me to tutor them on how to use blogspot. They would have never survived html. I am glad I can check in on you once in a while and see how the far side of the ocean is doing.

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  5. This will be an interesting series of posts. Congratulations on ten years.

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  6. Well! Congratulations on your ten-year anniversary! Nice to get to read the "old stuff."

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  7. Congratulations on sticking with it, Alan! I started my blog in 2006 as well; I'll have to go back and look at that first post to see what date it was.

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  8. A decade of blogging! That is quite an accomplishment! Congratulations to you. The blogging world is better for having you in it, Alan!

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  9. Coincidentally, I’ve just come across a hard copy all my notes for those early diary pages – they amount to the length of a good sized novel. I never trusted computers and I still can’t feel comfortable with the term, “blog”.

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  10. I used to blog before there was blogging using html too. Wish I had saved it all. I deleted it in one fell swoop after finding someone had taken my family photos and was using them on their blog. I was so happy to find it had gotten easier when I discovered blogger and then wordpress.
    Finding Eliza

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