Learning To Be A Good Netizen - Not A Well known One Perhaps, But A Good One

My new blog Milestones For A New Millennium is turning me into a netizen.

The word netizen seems to have two similar meanings. A citizen who uses the Internet as a way of participating in political society (for example, exchanging views, providing information, and voting). An Internet user who is trying to contribute to the Internets use and growth....

Source: www.synergy-uk.com/glossary.php

A Netizen (a portmanteau of Internet and citizen) or cybercitizen is a person actively involved in online communities. ...

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netizen

Starting this weblog gave me an online personality, now I am becoming engaged in World Wide Web citizenship. The new blog engages both the World Wide portion of that concept in the work with the Millennium Development Goals and the Web portion because I am making a concerted effort to get the word out to a greater degree than with this blog.

I am trying a number of new things, more on that later. I am also attempting to avoid some of the faux pas of the Internet. The first was deleting two posts that I have on Newsvine that linked back to my posts. That turns out to be frowned upon, and I want to establish some trust with this endeavor. I honestly thought that since my post had additional links to other information that it was the best which to link plus it was easier since the Newsvine button is below every post. I am going to leave that to others since reputation is more important than forcing numbers.

I still have limited impact as a netizen with my online persona. In some ways though, I have greater impact on the World Wide Web Stage as a netizen than as a voter in the "real" world. In the real world, my particulars can be fairly well known, fairly easily. It is my vote that is secret and only combines with others in aggregate. On the World Wide Web, my particulars are for the most part of no consequence and it is my publicly accessible vote through my blog posts that define me. My vote may not at this time reach more than 10 people, but it has a chance to cascade and there are millions of others making the same cascading votes on these issues (I get to do it on my own blog). This means that there is a force beyond the aggregate of people passively voting for whatever program is put in front of them to a level of actively engaging in the issues on an ever expanding platform.