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Day’s Verse:

“If, then I am a wrongdoer and have committed anything worthy of death, I do not refuse to die; but if none of those things is true of which these men accuse me, no one can hand me over to them. I appeal to Caesar.”

Acts 25:11

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Bonus Round: Unfortunately nobody figured it out, but then I expected as much. Today’s title is the answer.

As part of my Ethics and the Professions class, we are studying a fellow called LeMessurier, who designed the Citicorp Tower in New York. Then he found out that it was liable to fall over in hurricanes, so he went to a lot of trouble to get it fixed (more at OnlineEthics). LeMessurier spoke to MIT students at one point on engineering ethics: “You have a responsibility beyound yourself, if you see something that is a social risk – good heavens! This thing would kill a thousand! – You must do something.”

So I have a blogging question. Does traffic to a blog measure its quality? Sometimes I get to thinking how I would like to have a wider audience, how very Podunk-y my friends-and-family blog is, and should I try to change it to attract more people? How would I do that? Should I do that? It actually reminds me of two things: AIM buddy lists and thefacebook.com. In both people tend to judge their self-worths based on how many “friends” they have. Yet truly are people on Facebook your friends? Or do you want to just feel popular or appreciated? With instant messenger buddy lists, you may get a the screenname for a person but never speak to them; or your lives may separate so that you don’t speak for years, yet their name remains on your list. Why? Because you want to have over 100 contacts? Similarly, if you count how many visits your site receives, or worry a lot about getting comments, is that another way of trying to feel like you’re valuable? Just because somebody to take a couple minutes out of their day to look at your site? I’m thinking that it’s another deceptive way of trying to feel important or worthy of attention so you can tell people your blog is popular: therefore you gain some worth. I guess what I’m really trying to get at is the motivation behind blogging. I know why I do it, and though I don’t know if my motivation is reasonable, I still wonder why other people blog if they don’t worry about things like comments or traffic.

– KF –