WORLD OF MONSTERS

A few days ago I mentioned that I was getting a little frustrated with Blogger's "noodling" around with so-called improvements to my "Blogging Experience". I know that it is the nature of this industry, as well as the digital industry as a whole, to constantly evolve, grow, and (hopefully) progress. My most recent experience with this not-always-welcome phenomenon was seeing the news about Nikon's next gen line of cameras about a month after I bought a D5100. While it probably won't put this model to shame anytime soon, it still illustrates the fact that electronics manufacturers seem to revel in constatntly dangling the digital carrot in front of consumers.

But, like everything else in life -- artificial or otherwise -- this all comes with a price. Hackers, spammers, and other unsavory characters are out, surfing the bandwith for cracks in any firewall that they can get their nefarious string of code through, all for a buck -- and a lot of times just to see if they can frack up someone's day.

Case in point: I have a link to Jim Clatterbaugh's MONSTERS FROM THE VAULT blog on the sidebar of MONSTER MAGAZINE WORLD. I hadn't seen anything new on it for a while, so I decided to drop Jim a line to see what was up. He replied that his blog had been "temporarily" shut down by Blogger because their security software had detected that his site was being used as a host for a spammer. I don't have any other details except that he has to go through some sort of "authentication" process before he can resume. There was even a cryptic implication that he might have to even vacate his space because of all this. As of a few minutes ago (Monday, September 28, 5:00 PM PST), his blog remains shut down.

So, in my mild rant of a few days ago I mentioned that Blogger had suddenly started using an image interface pop-up that was similar to Facebook. My beef was that you couldn't resize the image easily to read smaller scanned images that had text in them. Well, this condition seems to have returned to the original setup where, after you click on an image it will open in another window where you can click again on it to enlarge the picture. Yay!

Seems like my worries are slight compared to my friend, Jim Clatterbaugh's, though. What does raise a larger question with me however, is that this huge, seemingly chaotic miasma of online madness -- despite the prevalence of "social networks" such as Facebook -- is creating an ever-widening gap between the individual and more meaningful human interaction. And, as with everything else, there are outlaws, predators and flim-flam artists to watch for, along with scams and schemes that serve no pupose other than to either cause someone misery or remove them from their money as quickly as possible.

Now, I don't mean to paint a dim picture here. This all has its bright spot, and it is mostly bright, I might add. While I am a veteran computer user and fairly adept at the use of the Internet, I was once extremely averse to jumping into the world of blogging -- not because I was a Cyberphobe, but because I thought the idea of "journaling" about my life and my interests to anyone who cared to read about it was, well, kinda dumb.

Boy, was I wrong.