Is The Sky Falling?

The sky is falling
The sky is falling

Is the sky falling? The main stream press and my favorite blogs have come to the same apparent conclusion; The sky is falling. But I agree with Mark Dykeman. Now is the time to be calm and not to panic.

In fact as I posted on FriendFeed the other day, I believe,

“The market is down but the sky is not falling. Many economic factors have converged to be fueled by greed and an election year. 2009 will be great. There is no reason for despair. Undervalued, undervalued, undervalued. Things will go back up. Our future is bright and our economy is resilient.”

There is plenty of cause for concern and despair is all around us. The world economy is flailing, we are in a war with no end in sight, there is an energy crisis, and a fuel shortage.

Despite the outlook I am optimistic. Our country has a storied albeit short history of being resilient, strong, and courageous in times of crisis.

Where has our optimism gone? Perhaps it will return on November 5th. Regardless of the election’s outcome I believe the current problems are exacerbated by an election year.

The future is bright. I look for 2009 to be a great year. In the meantime I will keep looking up at the sky but I am sure it is not falling.

P.S. I promised on FriendFeed last week that I would begin posting again. I have several posts in the works and will get them out soon.

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FriendFeed on My Blog

Beijing 2008 Michael Phelps
Beijing 2008 Michael Phelps

It has been a while since I have posted. I have been working on several projects in my spare time. Most of my free time has been spent lately working on a WordPress theme from scratch and watching the Olympics. Michael Phelps is the man!

But, I have still been feed reading and staying up to date via FriendFeed. Jeff of Jeffisageek.net posted a great post about getting friendfeed to your website. In fact he went so far as to add it as the main content on his site.

Today I have added a friendfeed link at the top of the page. I simply wrote a Wordress page template and embedded my FriendFeed content using the instructions from Jeff.

I am working on several new posts so stay tuned. But when my posting is sparse though find out what I am doing by checking my FriendFeed page.

Bloggers Will You Proofread For Links?

ProofRead Errors

I am a horrible speller.  Yes, I said horrible, and I mean horrific.  I am uncertain the reasons why but spell check is my friend.  When I write a blog post I spell check and proofread every time.

As I have said on this blog before quality of content is important to me.  I will post when and what I want but I want to produce some level of quality content.  I have a sense as I write a post that a certain value of content should be reached.

I have established that I strive for a level of excellence but more often than not I fall short.  I always find typographical errors in the form of misspelled words and left out words.

I seem to always leave out words.  Always!  I can read a post 10 times but the moment I have released it to the wild I find a left out word.

I published a post titled “Down with FriendFeed Etiquette.”  I had worked on this post for quite sometime.  I wrote the bulk of the writing last week and had done the research weeks before that.  Despite the effort in crafting a post I still have numerous errors in it.  I found links that do not work, words that were missing, and sentences that simply made no sense.  The spelling was correct in this case.  Well, maybe I did not find any spelling errors.

Trusted Editors

The best candidates for proofreading my blog posts would be trusted individuals.

Friends and family make great although unsuspecting proofreaders and potential editors.  But, in this case I am looking for some expertise in the subject matter of the post.

Friends and Family can do a great job at simple editing.  They can find missing words and assist with general editing.

Proofreaders for Hire

Here is my proposal.  If you are a blogger and would be willing to proofread a blog post I will give you link credit as a proofreader.

Interested?  Sign up as a proofreader and when I get ready to post I will email you several hours in advance.  As a proofreader you promise confidentiality of the post content until released.

Then your job as the proofreader would be to look for spelling, grammar, and general nonsense in the post.  I am looking for the following questions to be answered:

  1. Are there any spelling and grammar issues?
  2. Do the post links work?
  3. Do the sentences make sense?
  4. Can you understand what I am talking about is it clear?

As for style and general sentence structure my style is obviously my style.  I am looking for help proofreading not rewriting or critique.

After proofreading you the reader would email me what you found.  If you were helpful I will include a line at the bottom of the post stating:

Proofread by: Joe of Joe’s Blog, John of John’s Deer, David of TechBlog, & Mary of TechStuff

Each name will be linked to each blogger’s blog.  Would you like to join my proofreading squad?

I will choose arbitrarily a squad of 5 people or so.  If you would like to try leave a comment on this post.