Monday, November 3, 2008

Dallas Road November

While autumn definitely brings some brownish hues to the shoreline, things are still pretty green in this photo taken this afternoon. It looks warm and lots of people were out enjoying the sunshine and dramatic cloudscapes, but the wind was cold.

Awards Part 2

The Kreativ Blogging Award (see yesterday's post below) requires me to list "six things that make me happy." In my contrary fashion I instead am going to list 5 reasons why the City Daily Photo Blog World makes me happy.
  • Nice Talk
    In an internet that is constantly cruised by trolls and foul-mouthed cruelies, somehow the City Daily Photo Blog world remains a network marked by truly civil discourse. Its members one and all seem to work consciously at keeping it nice, friendly, and supportive, both in the text of their posts and in their comments when visiting one another's sites. This is quite remarkable: an online community of people from all over the planet, representing many different cultures, political persuasions and religions somehow managing consistently to be nice to one another. The City Daily Photo Blog world is a shining example of Global Village consciousness being realized on a day to day basis.

  • Entertaining
    The photographs that people post are often beautiful and always interesting.The accompanying text is generally informative, usually good-natured and often witty or downright funny. These City Daily Photo Blogs are quite addictive. I'd rather browse them for an hour than watch anything on TV.

  • Photojournalism
    The mix of a photograph and some text is just right for me, both as an online browser and as a blogger. A photograph may be worth a thousand words but a photograph and a hundred words is probably equivalent to about three photos or three thousand words. That metaphor's a bit overextended but you get the idea. That complementary mix of text and graphic information is what made magazines so popular and it works in the blog world too.

  • Discipline and Freedom
    I like the discipline. To post a photo and say something about it every day is not as easy as one initially considers it to be. Yet the supportive, interested atmosphere of the City Daily Photo Blog world makes it a pleasant task to work on improving one's communication skills every day. And while there is that discipline, there is also the freedom to post pretty much anything one wants.

  • Learning
    I learn a lot. Particularly I learn that the world is modernizing rapidly. When I was growing up we thought North America and Europe to be the most technologically advanced societies on earth, the only really modern cultures. This mindset continues for many, as if we constantly move into the future while the rest of the world slumbers in their grass shack colonial past. It's the same kind of jolt I got when I travelled to South Korea a few years ago, expecting to find a somewhat backward Asian country yearning to be modernized. Instead I found a culture more plugged in and online than my own Canadian culture. Thus, it is salutary to see the fantastic malls and skyscrapers of Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Tokyo and to learn that the people there are meeting the same types of challenges and problems as I am and share many of the same joys and sorrows.

Well, that's more than enough for today. More, tomorrow! In the meantime, I'm interested to hear what you have to say about this.

No comments:

Post a Comment