Dating A Blogger, Reading All About It is an article in the New York Times that will help push blogging closer to the centre of popular culture. It was also one of the most entertaining and well-written pieces on blogging that I've read so far, focusing as it did on the difficulties that are thrown up when non- or semi-anonymous bloggers reveal details (sometimes intimate or disapproving) of people/places/things in their lives.
| Heather Armstrong, a 27-year-old Web designer from Utah whose blog is at www.dooce.com, might be the ultimate example of blogging gone awry. Her parents are devout Mormons, she said, but because they are also technophobes, she felt perfectly comfortable publishing an entry on her site in which she harshly criticized her Mormon upbringing.
Unfortunately for Ms. Armstrong, her brother in Seattle stumbled across her Web site that very day and alerted her parents to the entry. After that, Ms. Armstrong said, "all hell broke loose." "Next to my parents getting divorced 20 years ago," Ms. Armstrong said, "it was the worst thing that ever happened to my family. It was shocking for everyone." |
The New Media section of yesterday's Guardian chose a similar theme, and gave yet another interesting look at the difficulties that are thrown up when high-profile journalists send out their own e-mail newsletters.
| There is just one problem: if you allow presenters to correspond directly with viewers it is almost inevitable that, every so often, one of them is going to say something that embarrasses their employers -- or, at the very least, shows an inappropriate bias. Remember the uproar when Paxman included a blonde joke in one of his electronic dispatches? Blondes, feminists and blonde feminists alike were united in their outrage; Paxo's portrait in TV Centre was vandalised and he was forced to publish an anti-male joke to redress the balance. |
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