Never mind the quality...

According to the New Scientist, scientific research shows that it is quantity and frequency that make one a good blogger, not quality or controversy. Whether you are postive or negative, hardly matters. If you want to be successful, it's quantity that builds readership.

That explains a lot. I have tended to spread myself rather thin over the blogs I write, and consequently, my contributions when I have had busy periods have been few and far between.

Not that I have been short of things to blog about, but it is one of the ironies of life that the time when one has most to say is likely to be the time when one can least afford the time to indulge oneself by sitting and blogging it. Perhaps I should learn how to blog from my phone or put more effort into spending a little time every day to do it, the way I used to keep my diaries.

Maybe I will see if I can keep to one blog a day, the way that I used to.

At the moment I am working, trying not to get too behind on my tasks, longing to spend time on my genealogy, outlining a novel and writing music. It looks as though the next couple of weeks will be mostly work, and not much of the fun stuff, but that's ok.

This means my avatar in Second Life has had a considerably more lively social life than I have, recently. I have been struggling to cope with the transition to the new Viewer (and failing, every time I have to build). Things have been dodgy in world this week, as a power outage and server upgrades seem to have conspired to add wonkiness to everything.

I've made contact with a cousin of my husband's through Ancestry.Co.UK, which is why I have been itching to do more to the family history. I was feeling very angry with Geni, the family history site, which has announced they plan to share all our research, outside the immediate family, and so I have been dismantling my stuff in Geni, and transferring whatever I didn't have to Ancestry. It isn't even that I object to sharing my information, I have always done my best to help others with their family history, as I have been helped in my turn. It's the lack of respect it shows for the rights of their members which really gets to me. I'm not even sure that deleting my data is going to take my things out of their system, despite their reassurances that it will.

The surveillance society has been in the news recently due to a forthcoming film, Erasing David. Both the Times and the New Scientist (and many others, I am sure) have interesting articles about it. I realise that I have voluntarily allowed a lot of information about me to escape into the wild, although neither Sainsbury's not Tesco can have much data about me. I have lost my cards without registering, or registered and then lost, nearly all the loyalty cards I ever had. Thus I can probably dredge up a ten-year-old W.H. Smiths card I used once, or nothing. Hah! Make what you can out of them data apples!

I think most systems in the country assume most people won't pretend to be someone else, and that's either touchingly naive or normal, depending upon your point of view. Sometimes I think that people don't think clearly about what they are saying really - although I haven't seen the film, only read the articles. OK on one level it is worrying that someone can pretend to be you and garner details of your antenatal appointments... on the other hand, does one want to live in a world where people are so distrustful of each other that your doctor's surgery/hospital won't believe you're you without asking lots of security questions? I dunno.