Why Blog?

Riding home in the car yesterday my father and I decided to start a blog. An unemployed college student and her underemployed father from the corporate world, it is a perfect example of how the current economy has the potential to encourage new ideas and new growth (exactly how this is growth is somewhat debatable). This seems like an excellent project to help with our current boredom. As we both want to protect any chance at a future status of full employment we needed to remain anonymous. First we decided on nick names. They needed to be cool and sound like good spy code names. Thus Donissimo and Whispers were born.

Part of the process of setting up this blog has been explaining to my father how blogs and other online tools work. He knows some stuff but has never really had the opportunity to use many online tools (he still doesn't use tabbed browsing!). We had the “what is Twitter conversation” but I’m holding out on getting him an account. 69% of Americans “don’t know enough about Twitter to have an opinion about it”. My father is ahead of most Americans so I’m holding out on actually getting him an account. It seems like an interesting combination, a baby boomer and a Gen Yer. Given that we’re a father and daughter we share a lot of beliefs but we express them in different ways. I’m hoping this blog forces my father how to learn how to embed a video (that is a challenge daddy!). The blog is about the conversation and also about the method of conversation.

We decided together that we should write mostly about public affairs. It’s an interesting subject and we both read the news compulsively. Though I suspect, given our demographics, that we get our news from different sources.

I’ll start off with some questions for my father. The U.N.'s World Intellectual Property Organization released a ruling on Tuesday saying that the man who owned facebook.ir would be required to turn the domain name over to facebook. What do you think this means for Iran (they continue to block facebook anyway)? What role do you think technology will plan in democratizing the world?