George Bush announced today a $7000 bailout plan (per person) for obese Wall Street Bankers. “They are just too big to fail,” he stated. “We have no idea what went wrong,” he added.
Top Nine Topics Bloggers Blog About
Credit to Technocrati for the survey of 1000 bloggers that identified them. They also noted that most bloggers say they cover about 5 topic areas covering multiple topics in their blog.
1. Personal/Lifestyle Issues
2 Technology
3.News
4.Politics
5. Computers
6. Music
7 Film
8 Travel
9 Business
To me, the most interesting finding was that books did not even make the list. Blogs about books are a natural, but this trend has not yet caught fire. While blogging taps into the creativity and time/energy of authors, they are certainly among the best writers, so their blogs should be quite central to the blogosphere.

Women Who Blog are Not Neurotic
A recent post by Kitsune discussed blogger personality styles. He noted research that revealed that all bloggers are more open to new ideas and creative, but some also may be more neurotic. The observation that female bloggers score high on “neuroticism” needs a closer look.
As a psychologist, blogger, published test author and digger, I am fairly qualified to dig a little deeper. The study uses the five factor model, and two of the three rersearchers who did the cited study are females. The term neuroticism is “old school” in psychology and fell into disfavor many years ago, partly because of gender bias issues. That doesn’t mean the research cited didn’t mean anything, it just says that we need to be careful how we interpret it.
The dimension in question really gets at a tendency to be open to emotions, especially the negative ones. I can believe that female bloggers may be more emotionally available than me (and most of the other male bloggers), and possibly even more vulnerable. But the use of the label “neurotic” has long been used to diminish women and keep them down as second class citizens. Women in general and especially female bloggers are not only first class, but more often than not, they are classier, at least than the male bloggers I have met.
One of the ways women bloggers have a leg up on men is that they are more open to their emotions. Rather than call this “neurotic” why not, instead say women are more interpersonally sensitive?

PR Community-
Peter Shankman , whose helpareporterout (HARO) service has been very popular, hosted a teleseminar on the 9th of September co-hosted with Bad Pitch Blog co-founder Kevin Dugan.
I noted an account by a marketing intern Richard Millington of his positive experience as an intern and wondered if we all should not all be using interns more. Not only is it free or inexpensive help when you bring an intern into your community, but of course the young guns bring new ideas and paradigms. Also, a useful post on recent changes in building blog traffic by Mark Cahill is interesting.

Change and Variance, a Statistical Look at Politics
Change is the big buzz word in this election, but let me raise up instead variance, a statisticians way of thinking about change. If you are for change you are for having things vary. The more they vary the less predictable they are. Thats a statistical fact. The more Obama succeeds at convincing us he’s all about change, the more fear we will see however, from Joe Public. Because while some change is good, in times of stress most people also want some predictability too. The Republicans have in recent years played the fear card, and McCain, who stands for “just a little change” is trying to offer change thats not scary, while the other guy’s is dangerous. The fact that he is the traditional white male surrounded by lobbyists and big oil is in some way reassuring to some who might otherwise take a gamble on a black man or an idealist but not on an idealsitic young black man who wants to change several things.
I was teaching my introductory class in psychology today and realized this basic tension is being played out in our election. I was talking about how research that is predictable and close to the ground serves one purpose, and innovation typically results in research with greater variance, and this research typically does not get published as easily. If McCain is re-elected it will because he sold the USA on just a little change, and not anything scary. If Obama wants to counter that he should consider labelling McCain’s change as scary as well. I bet his better minds could scare up (ahem) some examples of scary McCain change.. like what he will do with Iran, and with nuclear waste, and with his choices for the supreme court.

On a lighter note- McCain Cartoon
Please check out the following link:
http://www.stripcreator.com/comics/authorfriendly
Tags: Comedy, economy, McCain, political commentary, politics, social security, wall street