mediajunk

A tongue-in-cheek article in The Onion, entitled "Mom Finds Out About Blog," has topped the list of popular sites over the last few days. I guess it's close to the bone.

My own mother is a semi-regular web user and has visited all of my sites. But this did not prepare me for the statement, a couple of weeks ago, from my 80-year-old grandmother that she had been “watching” me on the internet the previous night.

So here’s a “special request” to you, Nana ;)

Yesterday, as accomplished journalist and author John Pilger complained about the contemporary silence of writers on political issues in Znet (originally in The New Statesman), Patrick Weever of anti-spin.com wrote a damning essay for The Observer on newspapers’ dependence on PR.

The articles share a similar theme – the toothlessness and passivity of contemporary writing, in all its forms.

“For the great writers of the 20th century, art could not be separated from politics,” begins Pilger. “Today, there is a disturbing silence on the dark matters that should command our attention.”

“That the menace of great and violent power in our own times is apparently accepted by celebrated writers, and by many of those who guard the gates of literary criticism, is uncontroversial. Not for them the impossibility of writing and promoting literature bereft of politics. Not for them the responsibility to speak out – a responsibility felt by even the unpolitical Ernest Hemingway.”

So where, wonders Pilger, are today’s Hemingways, Orwells and Steinbecks? Similarly, Weever laments the contemporary dearth of investigative journalism.

“Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the Washington Post sleuths who exposed Watergate, are a dying breed,” he says.

Is journalism of all forms is being relegated to a by-product of corporate public relations?

“In the Eighties my old City editor on the Birmingham Post was still joking that the correct relationship between a journalist and a PR man was that of a dog and a lamp-post. But now the journalist is too often the lamppost and PR has taken over the world.”

Weever makes it clear he is not arguing that PR is inherently immoral or without value to the public, just that journalism needs to wean itself off the drug of PR news.

“The concentration of the media in a handful of multi-nationals is eroding journalistic values. Journalism is expensive, investigative journalism ferociously so. PR news is not just cheap, it is free. In the short term it aids the bottom line, in the long term it destroys the brand … [and] it may be expensive for democracy.”

The lack of political anger that Pilger laments in fiction writing, then, is mirrored in the lack of genuine social commentary that Weever identifies in the press, which in its heydey was described as the “fourth estate,” or the “government’s watchdog.”

But neither essay pointed out that there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. The internet has provided us with a new way to produce and disseminate news. It is a medium that cannot, by virtue of its democratic infrastructure, readily be controlled by the corporate forces that now have a stranglehold on so many other broadcast or "one-to-many" media channels.

Already the blogosphere has provided an outlet for alternative voices (like those of the Iraqi warbloggers), while Google News strives to bring us versions of stories from news outlets (often in different countries) that we wouldn’t normally access.

The problem, however, may not lie with the publishing industry – but with the public. Pilger tacitly assumes that there is still an appetite for political writing. I believe the public, in the west at least, rarely hungers for matters that do not involve celebrity; glamour; wealth; the phoney gender war; or "reality" tv.

Maybe we don’t need to wean passive journalists off the drug of PR so much as we need to wean the passive public off the drug of old, conglomerate-controlled media.

I do not believe, as Pilger (in much of his writing) seems to, that we live in an Orwellian world. But we may, as Weever's essay suggests to me, live in a Huxleyian one.

My article on blogs as marketing tools was published on the Jimworld site today.

Jimworld is a web marketing hub and home to an active webmaster community. They also set up a discussion thread on the article.

Here's the opening section:

The practice of keeping Web logs (or "blogging") has become the latest phenomenon to sweep the Internet. An estimated 1.3 million blogs have been created on the Web, roughly two-thirds of which are still active (source: http://www.blogcensus.net/, September 2003).

Blogging started as something of a hobby for Web designers, but it is fast spreading to the business world. Some businesspeople use Web logs as a way of sharing their knowledge, their opinions, and their experiences with a wider audience. These corporate bloggers are people who see value in promoting themselves and in creating new virtual communities.

Business blogging isn't something you should rush into, however. Keeping a Web log involves a serious personal commitment. And just as a good blog enhances your brand, a Web log with poor or irregularly updated content reflects badly on its owner.

Still, if approached correctly, blogging can be an innovative and effective way to market your business and yourself, and to make new and long-term connections with individuals you would otherwise never have met.

Note: You can also read this business blogging article on my internet consulting site >>>

Did you know that George Bush has a blog now?

For obvious reasons, I won’t be adding this to my list of celebrity blogs (see bottom right).

I’ve mentioned more than once recently that the blogosphere seems to enjoy roughly half-and-half participation among males and females.

These results have been confirmed in another survey of weblogs, this one concentrating on hosted blogs only. (A hosted blog is one that resides on a “parent” site, such as blogger.com or livejournal.com. This blog you’re currently reading isn’t hosted, though my diaryland site is.) Females account for 56% of those with hosted blogs, according to this white paper by Perseus.

Among some of the other notable statistics were:

• 66% of hosted blogs have not been updated within the last two months

• Of the 4.12 million blogs created on hosting services, only 106,579 are updated at least once a week, and fewer than 50,000 are updated daily.

• 92.4% of bloggers are under the age of 30.
  

Perhaps then it was wrong to title this article men’s vs. women’s blogs, when most bloggers are, in fact, just lickle boys and girls. Aaaaw.

Not everyone is in favour of corporate blogging. Neil McIntosh of the Guardian has written a piece called Why Blogs Could Be Bad for Business.

He writes: "The notion that more than a few companies might relax their external relations strategies enough to allow weblog communication, willy-nilly, between staff members and the outside world, is absurd, no matter how many consultants insist such communication might actually have a beneficial effect on a company's image."

I think McIntosh makes some good points, but his analysis goes too far. Blogs offer a new and different way for businesspeople to communicate with the outside world; to build networks; promote themselves; and create virtual communities. However, business blogging should not be a "willy-nilly" process. As with anything in business, the practice of keeping a weblog should be undertaken with professionalism.

I will expand on these view in an essay I'm currently working on, entitled "Blogging for Business -- The Basics".

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Another interview with a senior Google exec this week. This one's with Chief Technology Officer Craig Silverstein.

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Personally, I've nothing against genetic engineering or genetic modification in principle. I don't think science, or even technology, is ever evil or stupid; only human behaviour (including human use of science or technology) can fall into those categories.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this poster -- part of a campaign by New Zealand's Mothers against Genetic Engineering -- from an advertising perspective.

One of the most-read entries in this weblog is a post I made some months ago about the blogosphere’s so-called glass ceiling.

I argued that the notion of there being any impediment to the popularity of women’s blogs was clearly nonsense. That such a complaint was even postulated reveals the whining, blaming, conspiracy-theory mentality that underlies much of feminist “ideology”.

From my everyday experience as a blog reader, I suggested there were roughly equal amounts of male and female bloggers. I noted that men’s blogs tended to express opinions about external events, while women were more likely to opt for introspective biographies, and offered this as an explanation for the greater audience share enjoyed by male bloggers (people, I can only presume, are more likely to read weblogs that present or discuss newsworthy subjects).

These hunches have been confirmed by the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education on its blog census site. In an article entitled Equal Numbers, Different Interests, the NITLE “hand-checked a random sample of 776 out of a pool of 490,000 English-language weblogs.”

It was found that “39.8% of bloggers in the sample were men, and 36.3% were women.” (Of the remainder, the blog was either maintained by a group, or the sex of the blogger was not stated or otherwise inferred on the site.)

However, when the researches looked at the category of “personal diary”, which made up about half of all blogs in the sample, “women outnumbered men by about two to one. (56% to 28%).”

Women were less likely to write about other topics. For example, “of the 6.2% of sites in the 'political' category –- sites primarily devoted to politics, current events, foreign policy, and various ongoing wars -- a bare 4% were written by women.”

There's no glass ceiling on the web. But men and women blog differently. Why should this surprise us?

Don Park has given us a glimpse of what he believes blogging will be like in the future.

It's a surprising mix of hi-tech and lo-tech, since it involves moblogging (i.e. taking pictures with a mobile phone or digital camera) and handwritten entries.

Basically, Park reckons, we will write notes, point our cameras at them, and click "send to blog".

I don't honestly believe that blogging will evolve in this way, but it's a cute idea.

In an article entitled Towards A Weblogging Empire, Wired magazine reports on the new ambitions of former Silicon Alley editor Jason Calacanis -- to create a business based on blogging (Weblogsinc).

What I like about the Wired piece is that it challenges Calancanis's assumptions. "Longtime bloggers," Wired points out, are "dubious about whether blogs can be cash cows."

I'm with the longtimers. Blogs aren't about making money; they probably never will be. Blogs are about marketing; creating a narrative; and thus about designing and maintaining an identity, a brand.

I don't believe we live in a world where individuals have become brands. Rather, I believe that individuals have always branded themselves within their own communities (schoolteacher, athlete, scribe, and so on).

These days, moreover, we participate in virtual communities -- in mass communities, mediated by television and other "broadcast" media, and in thin communities, maintained by the "narrowcast" medium of the internet.

Those communities are themed and powered by the common interests of their participants; communities are no longer necessarily based on cultural or geographical associations.

Our world is one of overlapping communities, of mass and minority communities. Blogging is a narrative form that works particularly well for medium- to small-sized communities.

I should have kept my, uh, laptop shut.

A few days ago I said that there were too few celebrity bloggers. Well now there are even fewer, as sci-fi author William Gibson has stopped blogging.

Gibson had warned some time ago that he would stop as soon as he began working on his new novel, believing that the two activities were mutually exclusive.

He found the practice of blogging, however, to be a "low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial".

I must admit that I am surprised that, nine months into 2003, the list of celebrities who keep weblogs is still modest.

The names are still much as they were in January of this year; Moby and William Gibson are still probably the best-known celebrity bloggers. But the list of famous blogs at the end of the right-hand column on this site hasn’t changed much since I started it nine months ago.

So why hasn’t blogging taken off among celebs, in a culture that is increasingly celebrity-focused? It’s certainly not because the blogging phenomenon has come and gone. No, the blogosphere is growing all the time: the phenomenon; has moved into the web’s mainstream, while the internet itself has moved into our culture’s mainstream.

So why aren’t our "idols" blogging? Here are some of my guesses:

The advantages of celebrity blogs haven’t yet become obvious. For those who are already famous, a weblog can serve as a great marketing tool; as a way of interacting directly with fans; as a way of making press releases and statements without the need for an intermediary; etc. These features would be even more relevant to “up-and-coming” celebrities, such as a music artist trying to break it. However, I don’t think these messages have yet filtered through to the marketing departments that manage celebrities’ identities.

Blogging involves a commitment. Few celebs have the time – or the energy – to invest in regularly updating a diary. Again however, an emerging talent might have some more time to invest, so we might see many more celebrity weblogs in the future – when some of today’s blogging drama students etc. become famous.

Bloggers expose themselves on a world stage. You wouldn't imagaine that global exposure would be a problem for celebrities, but I'm referring particularly to the instantaneous nature of blog-publishing, which makes it more likely that your text will have grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. You also run the risk of publishing an angry post, or saying something otherwise embarrassing or regrettable. I’m sure many celebrities, whose interactions with the public are nomrally meticulously coordinated, would be wary of taking such a risk.

Despite these disadvantages, however, I still think that celebrities who make the commitment and take the risk stand to gain much respect, and to greatly increase their fanbases through regularly updating a simple site. Fans would get an insight into their heroes’ (or heroines’) lives, and their minds – one that isn’t intermediated by some trashy “reality” television show.

Conversely, we as surfers and readers should watch out for any celebrity blogs that clearly don’t involve the genuine participation of the stars themselves. I expect that some marketing departments will simply hire individuals to manage post “on behalf of” stars, who may have no authentic interaction with the site or the fans. This practice (which effectively is an attempt to dupe the audience) is already occurring in the US political arena…

Clay Shirky wrote a much-linked-to essay last year about how weblogs were "amateurizing" publishing, a process that was having some fundamental changes on the price – and quality – of the words we read.

Shirky warned bloggers not to expect payment for their posts:

"The search for direct fees is driven by the belief that, since weblogs make publishing easy, they should lower the barriers to becoming a professional writer. This assumption has it backwards, because mass professionalization is an oxymoron; a professional class implies a minority of members. The principal effect of weblogs is instead mass amateurization.

... Weblogs fix the inefficiencies traditional publishers are paid to overcome one book at a time, and in a world where publishing is that efficient, it is no longer an activity worth paying for."

Now UK blogger Tom Coates has extended Shirky's argument, claiming that weblogs are a symptom of a wider phenomenon: "the mass amateurisation of (nearly) everything."

While I think Coates has stretched the idea a little too far, some of his points are worth exploring. He agrees that the internet has amateurised the process of putting words into the public domain (publishing), AND the process of getting the information in the first place (research). Other media tools like camcorders, animation software and music-making equipment are leading to other forms of mass-distributed, amateur-produced content:

"Hard-rocking poorly-animated kittens that once roamed e-mail newsletters (http://www.b3ta.com) are now showing up in adverts and credit-sequences, pop-songs written on home computers are reaching the top of the charts, weblog commentators in Iraq are getting columns in the national and international newspapers, music is being hybridised and spliced in the home for competitions on national radio stations."

Incidentally, I found an error in Tom's post. At first I thought this ironic – a spell-checker would not have registered the mistake (a "their" used instead of "there") but a professional sub-editor would have corrected it. I emailed Tom to let him know about the error – then realised that *I* was performing the sub-editing role.

Perhaps the blogosphere will eventually evolve so that the services traditionally provided by professionals – such as research, sub-editing, editing, etc. – will eventually be provided by the wider blogging community.

I think we are already seeing the beginning of professional qualities *emerging* from the blogosphere, in the way that "more important" content gets linked to more often and subsequently gets viewed more often.

And, in a sense, we are each editing one another’s ideas...

In one of the most offputting blog entries I've yet encountered, Jared Wagner -- an 18 year-old Ikea employee from southern California who describes himself as "girlfriendless" -- posts a photoessay on his consumption of a lot of burgers.

I can't decide which are more disturbing though: the images, or the comments that follow...

In an article entitled Converging Universes, prominent intellectual and technophile James C. Bennet predicts that the growth of the blogosphere will eventually lead to "a single artifact, probably the most complex human artifact ever to emerge."

Bennet suggests that the blogosphere is already having a profound effect on our information universes:

"Separate as the British and American information universes have been until now, a process of convergence has begun that will continue until there is only a single Anglosphere information universe. In this, the differences between right and left (for example) become more important than the distinctions of national origin. This process is already foreshadowed in the leading edge of the information universe, which at this point in time is the blogosphere -- the world of the Web logs, or blogs."

Bennett claims that the current blogosphere is just a foretaste of what's to come:

"The blogosphere is still miniscule compared to the audience for broadcast and print media. (Although reporters are more and more relying on the blogosphere for research and background, and more and more aware that the blogosphere has the power to expose quickly errors that previously could be buried.) However, its denizens are disproportionately young and disproportionately well-educated professionals. They will likely set the tone more and more for the coming generation."

Thus, an enivitable chain of events will occur:

"Full convergence is still some time away, but it is coming, as surely as today's younger blog-readers will move into positions of influence as time passes. The parallel information universes will be tied together with the thread of Internet linkage.The informational Anglosphere, in the sense of the entirety of written and recorded information in the English language, is gradually becoming fully accessible through Internet and Web, and accessible without regard to national boundaries.

At some point linkage will be so fluid and transparent, and indexing and search so effective, that documents will cease to be stand-alone artifacts, and the entire body of information in English (and for that matter, the entire body of information in other languages) will become in effect a single artifact, probably the most complex human artifact ever to emerge."

Food for thought!

It's official: the word "blog" is now part of the English language, with its own entry in the Oxford Dictionary.

I wonder how the guy who (claims to have) invented the term feels about that?

(FREE BONUS TRIVIA: The French equivalent is "joueb" (journal + web), though "blogue" is also popular.)

Just as books have ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers), periodicals and magazines have ISSNs (International Standard Serial Numbers). Both are unique numbers, used by international libraries to identify individual publications, which usually appear above the barcode on the back cover of the publication.

Well, a weblog is a periodical, so is it entitled to an ISSN number?

Yes! says Joe Clark, who cites the Canadian definition (which, he says, applies in other countries) of serials that qualify for ISSNs:

"A 'serial' is a publication, in any medium, issued in successive parts and intended to be continued indefinitely." (My italics.)

Clark says that some weblogs in the US have already received ISSN numbers, while some UK applicants have been turned down (he is unsure why).

Irish weblogs can apply for ISSNs online. I don't know if the Irish authority will accept weblogs – but I've written and asked them, so hopefully I'll find out soon.

"Why would you want an ISSN number?" you ask.

Clark lists a number of reasons, but forgets the main one: because it would be cool, in a geeky way.

When evangelizing about blogging (on a typical Monday evening), I like to slip in a modified version of Andy Warhol's prophecy: In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

Many in our society have experienced fifteen minutes -- or some similarly meager timeslice -- of fame, just as Warhol predicted. (Think of Big Brother or other reality TV shows.)

But another kind of fame is emerging, one where the slice of audience is small, not the time. Blogging has the potential to bestow exactly that kind of fame. The community of readers may not be a "mass" audience, but within that community, the blogger holds an important and respected position.

Community-sized fame is an ancient phenomenon rather than a futuristic one. Everybody’s from somewhere, after all, and we all know some big fishes in our small ponds. Here in Ireland, for example, the priest or schoolmaster was once a “famous” individual within his community (as was the druid, going further back).

Blog fame is novel in other ways: the reader community is virtual and geographically scattered (take a look at my guestmap!), while communication – the “oxygen” on which all fame depends – takes place through computers and network connections.

So I enjoyed the following quotation in an introduction to blogs splash on the BBC’s site:

"If you want to reach millions you book an ad on TV," said Stefan Glanzer, one of the founders of blogging system 20six. "If you want to reach one person you use e-mail or the telephone. "But if you want to reach between 5 and 500 people a blog is the ideal tool to communicate," he said.

Exactly. Of course, keeping those 5-500 people coming back is the hard part, eh readers? Eh? Uh, hello … is there anybody out there?

When I talk about the potential for blogs in a business context, people often scratch their heads. "But blogs are kept by individuals; what do they have to do with businesses?"

I usually say that companies are made up of individuals. Promote the people, and you promote the companies.

But there's also a less obvious way in which blogs can be used by businesses -- as intra-blogs. I'm not trying to coin a phrase here, especially not one as ugly as intrablogging, but I'm hoping to draw parallels with intranets.

Just as an intranet is internal to a company, accessible only by its employees, so too can blogs be created for a select group of users, and locked out to everyone else. This private corporate blog then offers a way to interact regularly to other staff members on a given topic, using a many-to-many communications model.

A blog wouldn't necessarily revolve around an individual, either. It could pertain to a project or team.

Blogging software makes web publishing easy. And commenting on posts is easier still. It's less hassle, certainly, than trying to track a bunch of email threads and replies.

This was the experience of Nicholas Tang, director of operations at NY-based Community Connect:

"For several years Mr. Tang viewed this daily surge of e-mail messages as an unpleasant but necessary part of his job managing a team of eight engineers," explains William O'Shea in an excellent article in today's New York Times. "Then, a few months ago, he began using an alternative to e-mail, a Web log."

Mr. Tang's blog has essentially proved a success -- but the Times article acknowledges that switching from email communication to blogging does run the risk of increasing the information glut, not decreasing it. "Opening a pipeline to comments from employees can produce a torrent of information, essentially defeating the purpose of the tool."

Like everything else in the business world then, if you do start a corporate blog, make sure you manage it well.

A piece of advice I've regularly given to clients and friends who engage in blogging, or any form of internet publishing, is to treat their posts as if they were newspaper articles.

Apart from maintaining quality, my reasoning was that, in most countries, information posted on the internet is subject to the same laws of libel and defamation as those that govern the press industry.

As the concept of blogging catches on in the US, however, legislators there are beginning to realize that it doesn't make sense to equate personal weblogs with commercial publications. Thus, "the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish," according to Wired News.

Freedom of speech activists have welcomed the decision:

"One-way news publications have editors and fact-checkers, and they're not just selling information -- they're selling reliability," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "But on blogs or e-mail lists, people aren't necessarily selling anything, they're just engaging in speech. That freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you were held liable for every piece of information you cut, paste and forward."

Does this mean bloggers are free to slag off and slander whomever or whatever they like? No, of course not. The important point of the ruling is that bloggers can be held non-responsible for information they republish. That is, if a blogger can show that he based a post on information from another "reputable" source, then, under this ruling, he is unlikely to be held responsible for the inaccuracy and/or offending nature of that post.

If, however, a blogger takes information from a commercial news source but then changes it to the extent that it becomes a new piece of expression, he could be held responsible for that expression.

I can imagine some tricky cases where the line between "source material" and "new expression" might be hard to distinguish. For now though, this ruling favours bloggers, in one (hugely influential) part of the world at least.

Corporate blogger Jared Blank of Jupiter Research has written an interesting article entitled "What If You Built a Blog and No One Came?" that deals with the problems of how to generate traffic to a diary site.

"Writing the Weblog is the easy part," says Blank, "the challenge is publicizing it." I couldn't agree more! The piece is interesting because it goes beyond the traditional freebie ways of publicizing -- viral (email) marketing to communities; etc. -- and takes a look at buying ad-words on Google.

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Speaking of which, I was disappointed when I read the article "Is Google God?" that appeared in the NY Times today. The piece actually starts off well, with some interesting stats:

In the past three years, Google has gone from processing 100 million searches per day to over 200 million searches per day. And get this: only one-third come from inside the U.S. The rest are in 88 other languages.

The piece twists, however, into a mildly paranoic interpretation of what this global internet growth holds in store:

While we may be emotionally distancing ourselves from the world, the world is getting more integrated. That means that what people think of us, as Americans, will matter more, not less.

I was not surprised then, when I Googled the author Thomas Friedman, to discover that his current book explores "the world after September 11th".

The FBI could be reading your blog! That's the conclusion you might jump to from the story of how two agents turned up on 17-year old blogger Erin Carter's doortstep. In truth, the Independent Online's article makes you realize that the FBI are highly unlikely to be reading your blog -- unless you're fraudulently making a lot of money from it:

"In cyber crime they're stretched so thin that there has to be a monetary threshold crossed before they can dedicate their resources to investigating it," comments Dan Verton, author of Hacker Diaries. "It's somewhere along the order of five or 10 thousand dollars before they'll even come out and talk to you."

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Here's an interesting concept in website searching/marketing. The Stumbleupon toolbar -- a plugin for your browser, like the Google toolbar -- lets you rate sites as you visit them, and other users get to see the overall ratings. The toolbar also suggests sites that you might like, based on your preferences. Its creators call it the "word-of-mouth" web.

The trouble is, Stumbleupon itself doesn't seem to be getting much word-of-mouth promotion. Too bad, because it's one of those concepts that needs a critical mass before it can take off.

Expect one of the bigger names on the web to introduce a similar concept in the future...

A small complaint in a quiet corner of cyberspace caught my attention today: Morgan Wilson is upset that a couple of her (his?) favourite blogs have recently disappeared.

The phenomenon is not isolated: many people start blogs without realizing how much time and commitment is needed to keep them going. (I've mentioned before that William Gibson -- whose site is currently 4th in the Google search returns for "blog" -- has declared his intention to discontinue the practice after his current book tour.)

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When I wrote, a few months ago, about the creative potential in combining MMS picture-phones with web technology, I didn't expect people to get quite so anal about it!

Bringing closure to the long-running Salam Pax saga, not only has the Baghdad Blogger turned out to be real, but he is now writing a fortnightly column for the Guardian.

The internet's most famous blogger has not, however, revealed his true identity, or even his surname. "Do not assume, not even for a second, that because you read the blog you know who I am or who my parents are," he writes in his blog.

Peter Maass of Slate assures us, however, that Salam is at least a genuine first name. But even Maass didn't know that the young man who was working for him as an interpreter was actually the web's Scarlet Pimpernell. Read the funny account of how Maass found out the truth.

I recently told you about a man who had successfully used his blog to complain about shoddy service from his bank, embarrassing them into apologizing.

It seems like the idea might be catching on: a woman called Marie Griffith has become disgruntled with retail chain Mastercare and has set up a blog in order (so I've read) to launch an onslaught of complaints against the company.

It is tempting to make the argument that blogs are empowering, giving the general public access to a slice of media, however thin. On the other hand, what is to stop disgruntled ex-employees, even competitors, publishing blogs that masquerade as the moans of wronged customers? If there was a proliferation in such hatelogging (hey, I've just coined a term, let's see if it catches on!), could it lead to a boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome, where all such blogs become disregarded?

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The Guardian insists that panic over Google's imminent blog search is unfounded; the search engine will not remove blogs from its main index. Moreover, Neil McIntosh passionately defends the practice of blogging, using as his mantra a rapidly-spreading quote from A-list blogger Dave Winer: "If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the web."

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To follow up the New York Times article that I talked about yesterday, I suggest you take a look at Elaine's Life as a great example of someone who is turning her private life into compelling entertainment. The diary is supposedly that of an 18 year-old girl but, me being the skeptic you know and hate, I'm not convinced.

The writing is excellent and the topics she chooses (losing her virginity, for example) make her diary a page-turner (or should that be a link-clicker?). She certainly gets a lot of readers, judging by her guestbook, but her life has a paperback-romance quality that feels untrue. (I mean, who do you know in real life that loses their virginity on Valentine's day, after following a series of romantic treasure-trail clues to the best restaurant in town, etc. etc.?)

Even assuming (as I know many of you will, sigh!) that it's true, I wouldn't fancy being the boyfriend, even if his name wasn't revealed, though (gasp!) it is.

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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As well as SARSwatch, the blog devoted to tracking news about the virus, blogs offer an insight into the spread of the world's latest scare, and life in some of the "danger regions".

New Zealand's National Business Review magazine has just published the first of a three-part series of articles discussing the blogs of individuals in China who are posting about SARS. Despite its alluring (to me, anyway) title, the article only mentioned one blog -- that of Joycelen, an American living in China, who complains about the atmosphere of panic:

SARS has been a part of my life for weeks...and, frankly, I've had it with SARS. I no longer fear the virus itself. Instead, I abhor the exaggerated panic that, honestly, is way more infectious than SARS. It started out innocent enough. Just wash your hands often, we were told. And be sure to protect your immunity. Eat well, get enough sleep, exercise regularly. Wear masks on public transport...well, we all knew masks weren't 100% effective, but we could wear them for a short period of time at least. But now it's just out of control! After the big announcement from the China communist party, our company asked everyone to wear masks IN THE OFFICE. Ridiculous. They've recommended we avoid going out for lunch...and now I'm one of the few who "dares" to risk her life to eat. Most disconcerting is that HR now demands that we have our temperature taken when we return from the break. Personally, it feels like an invasion of my privacy.

One of the better Chinese blogs that I've found myself is Wangjianshuo's -- which has a nice, neat layout and one section devoted specifically to SARS, who notes today, for example, that:

The building I was working in has lined up a 10 meters long table at the lobby. Three ladies were sitting at the table. Anyone entering the building will be required to wear their employee card with pictures. Others will have their temperature taken at the tables.

The first blogs ever to come to prominence were those of New Yorkers who documented the 9/11 strikes. More recent fascination with Salam Pax's diary suggest a pattern that may continue with blogs from SARS-infected areas: the weblogs that most capture the public's imagination are those with first-hand -- "authentic" -- accounts of what are otherwise heavily mediated events.

An article in The Register has created much consternation about Google's apparent plan to relegate blogs to a seperate tab in its search (like "Groups", the tab you click to search newsgroup content).

The move has not been officially announced by Google, although the CEO Eric Schmidt has stated that the search engine will soon offer a facility to search weblogs. Uh, okay -- but you can already search blogs using Google, just as you can search any other web content. The Register has interpreted the CEO's remarks to mean that blogs will thus be removed from the main Google search engine; users wishing to search blogs would, based on "precedent", have to click on a separate tab.

The Register claims that bloggers "are likely to welcome their very own tab as a legitimization of the publishing format." Really? From what I've read on their sites, bloggers are not keen on the idea, pointing out inherent anomolies, such as:

• Google will have to "decide" (by re-writing its site-crawling and -ranking algorithm) which sites are blogs and which aren't, though the distinction isn't always clear. Some sites are part-blogs, while some non-blogs are powered by blog software such as Movable Type.

• Putting blogs into a separate search could be interpreted as treating their content as less relevant than the content that exists on other sites. Isn't content simply content? Isn't it the user who ultimately decides whether information returned is relevant to his/her query?

• While anyone can publish a blog (thus, runs the argument, blogs tend to be full of inane drivel), anyone can publish a non-blog too. Just because someone has chosen the blog format for his/her site, doesn't necessarily mean that the site isn't informative or entertaining (or vice-versa). Consider bloggers such as Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, or Irish technology journalist Karlin Lillington. Some blogs are devoted to watching a particular social/cultural trend or phenomenon -- such as the Google Blog.

It seems that such a move would serve to lose Google some of its previously hard-earned trust. The following comment, from user Kackle to the Webmaster World forum, would hardly have seemed possible a year ago:

"The question for Google isn't whether blogs are worthwhile or not. It's merely a question of what sort of arrangement will sell more ads.

Anyone who hasn't figured out that Google is an ad agency has not figured out much at all."

I wouldn't go that far, but I do think that removing blogs from regular Google searches would be a bad move. But maybe I'm just biased?

I spoke too soon: Salam's back!

Allegedly...

A friend of mine once claimed, when I had said that blogs would allow the creation of fictional identities, that all identities are, in fact, fictional!

Still, we seem to get excited when certain blogs are exposed as out-and-out fictions (in this sense, having "no connection with any actual persons, living or dead"), and even more excited when we hear of blogs that may or may not be fictions (remember Salam Pax?).

And so, the saga continues: this time it's the blog of Isabella V., purportedly an anonymous heiress on the run from her wealthy family and an arranged marriage. "Many conclude that the site is probably a hoax," says Wired News, "but who cares, it's a good read."

Um, is it?

I recently wrote about RSS Aggregators and how they can be used to show headlines and extracts from recently-updated blogs.

Well, some clever, creative person at brainoff.com has combined such an Aggregator with a map of the gloge to produce a simple but fun real-time "geoblog" -- a real-time, geographical snapshot of international blog-updating.

I'm not explaining this too well, but it will quickly make sense when go see for yourself.

Three different articles about blogging made for good reading today. The first, in the Guardian, tells of how Peter Cox, from Cardiff, managed to get Abbey National bank to resolve a complaint by posting the gripe on his "widely-read" weblog.

Mr. Cox insisted that he resorted to naming-and-shaming the bank only after they had not satisfactorily dealt with his complaint via the phone. The story raises the question of whether blogging offers a way of empowering individual consumers. Conversely, do blogs leave businesses open to being discredited by dishonest and/or anonymous individuals? Perhaps it all depends on whether a blogger is already trusted by his own audience; and the estimated size of that blogger's readership.

Speaking of business, Jimmy Guterman has made some insightful points in his essay for Business 2.0, about where blogs might find rightful roles in corporations, but suggests that blogging might ultimately benefit management (!) -- a way of "eavesdropping on water-cooler discussions".

The Hartford Courant does not, however, see that employee blogs could do anything but damage that newspaper's own identity. In a story that appears in today's Editor&Publisher, we learn how journalist Denis Horgan was given a cease-and-desist order on his personal blog.

Courant editor Brian Toolan explains his decision thus: "Denis Horgan's entire professional profile is a result of his attachment to The Hartford Courant, yet he has unilaterally created for himself a parallel journalistic universe where he'll do commentary on the institutions that the paper has to cover without any editing oversight by the Courant."

It seems the debate about blogging vs. "real" journalism is set to continue...

Many different RSS aggregators are now surfacing, with some free or beta products (such as newzcrawler and blogbrowser) available for download.

"Come again?" I hear you say.

First of all, RSS stands for Rich Site Summary (well, what it stands for is debatable, but that's the version I use). An RSS page can be used for a site that's regularly updated, and it provides a summary of the site's recent entries, or headlines, or whatever.

A lot of news sites have an RSS page, which is a coded summary of that site's headlines, but many blogs use them too -- so, yeah, even mediajunk has an RSS page.

"Okay, I clicked the link, and it takes me to a page of gobbledegook."

The gobbledegook is called XML, and it doesn't matter that neither of us can understand it, so long as aggregator programmes such as newzcrawler can. What aggregators do is take the summaries of various sites, and lump them together to create a new site.

Bloghog is a good example of how a site created by an aggregator looks (although it could use a dab of webpaint!).

In theory, with an aggregator programme, you could add your favourite blogs and create one "all in one" page, that contained the headlines of the latest entries from each.

Call me old-fashioned, but I'm going to stick to adding blogs I like to my "Favourites" folder...

So, Mediajunk isn't the dullest blog in the world. Yet.

Damn.

Last month I told you that presidential candidate Howard Dean had started a blog. Now another candidate, Gary Hart, has launched a blog.

It remains to be seen whether Hart will update his own blog. More likely, it will be be updated by his "entourage". The comments section is moderated by someone called Kevin Thurman, who edits/deletes posts and limits the number of comments. To be fair, however, Mr. Thurman has allowed many negative/critical comments to be remain, such as the following:

Dear Mr. Hart, what makes you so different from all the other rich, old, white men who have the luxury of being big-time politicians?
Posted by Chris at March 28, 2003 09:30 AM

I'm glad to see you back in the game, Mr. Hart. Would you consider a speaking engagement at Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, NH?
Posted by matt at March 28, 2003 09:40 AM

Senator Hart:
Do you know what you're getting yourself into? The Washington press is nothing compared to the avalanche of commentary from every corner of the populace you're going to get once you get Instalanched. Think OJ, only without the subtlety and good manners.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Mr. Senator. I hope this works - despite my snark, I think this is a great way for public figures to communicate with population at large. Maybe you'll start a trend.
Posted by George at March 28, 2003 09:44 AM

These high-profile moves into the blogosphere, whether you regard them as cynical or otherwise, at least indicate the growing recognition of the world's most exciting narrative form to have emerged in a generation.

*****

Speaking of the blog as narrative form: that was the thrust of the proposal I prepared with Gerald Adams for the upcoming BlogTalk conference. Unfortunately (for us), we learned yesterday that our proposal was not one of the lucky ones selected to be developed into a paper for the conference.

Still, I believe that Gerald and I managed to thrash out some good ideas in our proposal (albeit, admittedly, rather unfocused), which we may try to nurture and articulate more succinctly in the future.

Patricia Drey, in yesterday's Minnesota Daily, reported that University of Minnesota graduate student Clancy Ratliff is researching into (alleged) gender inequality in the blogosphere.

Ratliff is examining why the most popular (or "A-list") bloggers tend to be male. Her comment indicates there is a conspiracy theory at play. "Men tend to link to other men more often than they link to women," she claimed.

Of course! Men get together in "virtual locker rooms" and hatch plots to prevent women's blogs from becoming popular, refusing to link to them. Hmmm... but don't women, too, tend to link to women's blogs more often than they link to men's?

Maybe there are just more male bloggers than female bloggers? Apparently not, according to Lisa Guernsey, who explored the male dominance of the A-list in the New York Times a couple of months ago:

Women are, in fact, blogging in big numbers. Mr. Rosenberg, who keeps an eye out for new bloggers and links to them from his Salon.com blog, estimates that the ratio of women to men is something like 40-60, or perhaps 50-50.

So, no equality of access problems. What then? Why are male blogs more popular?

Guernsey asked Virginia Postrel, "one of the few women who is commonly listed among well-known bloggers," who suggested "that the imbalance was probably a holdover from the world of print, where men continue to dominate the opinion pages."

Pardon my ignorance, but what does "a holdover" mean exactly? There are no editors of individual blogs, and bloggers (male and female) are free to promote whatever sites they want. It's not enough to argue that a situation that exists in print journalism is simply "held over".

Guernsey quips that men's sites get "promoted by male journalists". She doesn't offer any analysis to back this up. I would argue that female journalists seem to write as much (if not more) about the phenomenon of blogging than male journalists. Don't believe me? Type "weblogging OR blogging" into Google's News Search, look back through the various articles about blogging that have appeared in newspapers and magazines across the world in recent months (including the two referenced here!). Many, perhaps most, were written by women -- and promote female blogs.

Still, expect feminists to conjure up myriad theories as to why most A-list bloggers are male. The one theory you won't hear -- the implicit theory that they'll bend over backwards to avoid -- is this: that men's blogs are simply better!

For what it's worth, I don't believe that men's blogs are any better (or worse) than women's. But I'm somewhat persuaded by one of Guernsey's arguments, that men and women tend to have different blogging styles:

The Venus-Mars divide has made its way into Blogville. Women want to talk about their personal lives. Men want to talk about anything but.

Guernsey is having a snide swipe at men. But maybe it's women who are fearful -- afraid to talk about worldly issues. Of course, Guernsey wasn't going to embarrass "sisters" by telling us how much the introspective nature of their blogging reveals about female self-obsession.

Let's face it, a site about one's personal life isn't going appeal to as wide an audience as a site about news, current affairs or other topical issues.

Not that all women write personal blogs; I enjoy Karlin Lillington's blog, for its insightful, informative and up-to-date commentary about what's going on in the Irish IT community and beyond. (Shame about the naff design!)

Conversely, not all men avoid personal weblogs: my own web diary is certainly personal and introspective in nature, if not in the direct manner of a pen-and-paper diary (but the web is a different medium, and the audience is more than one).

I find introspective, revealing (non-whining!) sites more engaging than extrospective, informative ones. The latter have a different function, and may attract more visitors ... but is large-scale popularity the holy grail of blogging?

I think not. I'm with Scottish music artist Momus, who proclaimed (correcting Warhol) that "in the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people."

But hey, I'm just a male, Z-list blogger. What do I know?

(Note: See my update to this post, September 2003.)

JB Holston, writing for the Always-On Network, asks the important (well, important to me) question of whether bloggers (and web content-creators in general) can ever expect to be paid for their ouvres.

Holston points out that some better-known bloggers look for "micropayments"; or donations/tips (e.g. using PayPal), or link to Amazon wishlists. He calls this panhandling, since it is not a pay-for-content (subscription) model, but one based entirely on hope.

He also suggests (and here, in my experience, is where the real value for bloggers lies) that site traffic "can lead to more pings for the thing you do to get paid." In other words, blogging is a way of marketing yourself. Holston gives the example of Seth Godin, who uses his blog as a way of publicising his own speaking engagements. I would add that Godin's blog is a means of keeping the conversation with his audience open, as well as continually building up that audience.

*****

Further to the Salam Pax hype, and with a growing number of blogs devoted to the war in Iraq, I've added a list of "War Blog" links on the right hand side.

Most are individuals who claim first-hand experience of the war, but some (the last three or four) are news-type blogs.

As for what's wheat and what's chaff, I'll let you decide...

Yesterday evening, having already posted another entry on Salam Pax's Bagdhad Blog, I read the Guardian's and came to its G2 section -- to discover a front cover and five pages devoted to Salam and his diary!

Contributor Leo Hickman questioned the blogger's identity, pointing out some teasers that I hadn't noticed:

To start with, there is the mystery of his cryptic name. It doesn't take long to realise that "Salam Pax" is a simple play on words meaning "peace" and "peace" in Arabic and Latin respectively. This mirroring motif is reflected in the website's address, www.dear_raed.blogspot.com, with its palindromic "dear" and "Raed". There has also been a lot of chatter about the true identity of the eponymous "Raed" from the website's title, Where is Raed? Is "Raed" a euphemism for a family member in trouble with the Iraqi authorities? Or is he Salam's gay lover?

Hickman insists that what lends Salam's blog authenticity is "the detail of his day-to-day life." (Note, if you're intending to fake a blog: detail = authenticity!) The Guardian sleuth nevertheless makes the mistake I pointed out yesterday (*blush*) of assuming that alleged "old entries" were indeed created in the past:

Why would he [Salam] make it all up, especially for the long period before it even became the internet phenomenon it is today?

Hickman's piece serves to justify the Guardian's subsequent four pages of extracts from Salam's diary. But the previous day, the Independent on Sunday printed an extract from Salam's site and attributed it, without any of the Guardian's agonizing, to a man blogging from Baghdad!

*****

Meanwhile, another war blog has been bubbling into the web limelight. Its author is Bettejo Passalaqua, an Iraqi peace activist. For this reason, Bettejo's identity immediately seems authentic. But let's not get into that again...

No sooner had I found another "war blog", this time by a CNN journalist, but it was shut down. The television news channel has "ordered" Kevin Sites, who is currently in northern Iraq, to "stop filing reports from the front on his personal website."

In my last post (four days ago), I mentioned that Salam Pax's blog feels authentic, but we should be aware -- especially in times of war -- that blogs could be used for propoganda, by any "side". (Not that Salam's blog makes claims that would influence one's political opinion, which reinforces its aura of authenticity.)

Since then, he has posted an entry asking people to stop emailing him asking if he is "real". (Oops.) And another blogger, this time an American (I think) called Diane, has vouched for Salam on her blog. (Eh... but how do we know that Diane is for real? Her website, after all, is *highly* political. Maybe someone will vouch for her too. Etc. ... ad infinitum.)

*****

Further to the blog identity/authenticity debate, Gerald Adams and I touched on this in our proposal for the upcoming Blogtalk conference.

And for readers who aren't familiar with how blogs -- or even websites -- are created, be aware that you back-date entries (i.e. just because an entry says "March 12, 2000" doesn't mean it was created on that date).

Taking this concept a little further, I'm about to launch a photolog which I intend to update over time, as with a normal blog -- but I also intend to backwards-update i.e. I'll gradually scan in and add old photos. So I'll be updating the blog from the middle outwards, temporally speaking.

Confused? You will be...

It had to happen -- as war breaks out, someone was bound to be blogging from Baghdad.

Yet Salam Pax's "Where is Raed?" blog is quirky, touching -- and it feels authentic.

Authenticity is the telling attribute: since blogs are so easy to create, set up and maintain, and so difficult to censor, they are the propagandist's dream.

Could a fake -- i.e. propagandist -- blog create the feeling that it was genuine. Why not? On the internet, aren't all identities "fake"?

SPOOKY POST SCRIPT:
Just a few seconds after I'd written the above, I googled myself (i.e. I typed my name into Google) and found that there's a mirror of my diary site somehwere in Japan.

What does that have to do with internet identity? I'm not sure. Feels spooky though...

A few years ago, I was getting tired of answering the question "What's the internet?" This morning, I realized it's been a long time since I've had to answer that question. Chances are I will never answer it again. (No-one's likely to ask me what television is, either.)

Yet defining what the internet is today is more challenging a task than ever, because the internet has evolved rapidly, and continues to do so. A-list bloggers Doc Searl and Dave Weinberger provide some stimulating answers on their World of Ends site.

These days, I get asked "what's a blog?" (a question that feature-writers the world over are now feverishly answering).

Just as there was (and still is) a resistance to the growth and spread of the internet -- a resistance that includes many understandable concerns about privacy, the effects of pornography, protecting children, etc. -- now the anti-blogging argument is underway too. Mainstream journalists are voicing thier opposition to this all-too-easy and unregulated form of web publishing.

Writing on the BBC website last month, Bill Thompson insisted that blogging is not journalism. Dave Green, in last week's Guardian, didn't go so far, but nevertheless derided the activity as "a form of subjective sub-journalism, a stream of non-sequitur musings."

Such resistance is utlimately positive -- the brakes on the growth of new media. Let us look before we link.

The first thing to point out about US Presidential candidate Howard Dean's blog is that the politician doesn't maintain it himself. To be fair, the folks behind it don't claim that he's personally involved. They say that the blog "is intended as a resource for people who want to learn more about him [Mr. Dern] and his bid for the presidency."

Interesting that they've chosen to keep a blog, and not just a site. This shores up my belief that the blog is becoming the standard web format; that the weblog is a killer app.

Good to see that Macromedia (the company that gave us Flash) is encouraging its senior employees to keep blogs as a way of communicating with customers. Surprisingly, the most impressive so far is that of company President, Kevin Lynch.

It's not just a corporate stunt: Jeremy Allaire, formerly CTO at Macromedia, has recently left the company -- but that hasn't stopped him maintaining his blog!

Last month I mentioned a similar initiative at Jupiter Research, but I prefer this Macromedia effort, as the blogs feel more individual.

The weblog community has been buzzing furiously this weekend at the news of Google's purchase of Blogger. The internet's most trusted brand will bring blogging into the mainstream (where, in any case, the phenomenon was surely headed).

In an insightful analysis, new media journalist Neil McIntosh identifies the positive consequences of the takeover -- real-time searches of blogs; greater recognition for the community -- before tackling the potential downsides:

The main fear among users of software or services other than Blogger (I'm one of those: this site runs on Movable Type, while my personal diary is at Diaryland) is that their sites will not feature as highly in Google's search results. They also worry that thier blogs' contents will not be indexed as regularly as those running on Blogger (which has 1.1 million registered users).

The playing field among bloggers was already unfair, with several A-list" blogs having huge numbers of hits, while the majority fight it out for a much more modest number of visits. Until now, however, such inequality was shown to be a mathematical consequence of the way the web works (ahh, so *that's* why there are little or no comments on this site!).

But Google's entry into the arena could change the "blogosphere". While the world's favourite search engine has won success on the back of its reputation for integrity, there are nevertheless those who disapprove of the closely-guarded code Google uses to "rank" web pages. And, as Lawrence Lessig has long pointed out, on the internet, "code is law".

While some firms may be taking action to stop their employees blogging during work hours, others are embracing blogs as a means of promotion and knowledge sharing.

Internet leading light Jupiter Research has launched the weblogs of several of its top analysists. Since each of the analysts has a special area of reserach (wireless technologies; media and entertainment; etc.), the blogs are thematically differentiated. The company sees value in embracing the internet's spirit of openness. "[Blogging] allows us the opportunity to engage our clients in new ways and to share our insight with the world," Jupiter Research Director Michael Gartenberg told Yahoo News.

*****

In another exmaple of sanctioned blogging, staff at the Oregon Daily Emerald -- the daily student newspaper of the University of Oregon -- are keeping personal diaries on the newspaper's site. 11 staff members launched blogs on January 12. While many professional journalists have their own blogs/sites, one wonders whether any mainstream news publications will adopt a similar policy of "in-house" weblogging?

A US-based blogger claims to have been given the sack for updating his blog while in the office. Frank Sensenbrenner, a co-author of the Iain Murray Online blog, made the following posting on Jan 15: "My employment was terminated this morning, with this blog stated as the reason. I was somewhat surprised by this as my previous boss had been happy for myself and a former colleague to run blogs. They took up little work time, about as much as other employees take up with cigarette breaks, and were useful to get work-related ideas into shape for writing up for wider audiences.

"When my employer expressed his concern, I immediately offered to stop updating the blog forthwith. However, this was not enough and I was fired on the spot. As there is a procedure for disciplinary firings that follows a path of oral and written warnings, I was also surprised that this was not followed. It appears that my employer considered this serious misconduct, on a level with theft and sexual harrassment, thereby justifying an immediate termination."

In August 2002, The Huston Chronicle ordered reporter Stephan Olafson to discontinue his "gonzo journalism" blog, as it contained claims about local politicians. Eventually he was fired. Rival paper The Houston Press subsequently ran the story (with more than a hint of glee)!

Are we seeing the beginning of a trend? Should companies consider introducing 'appropriate use' policies with regard to blogging during office time/using office computers?

The Chinese government have blocked access to tens of thousands of blogs by bannning the blogger.com site.

Earlier this year, China blocked access to Google, though it eventually lifted the ban the Search Engine complained (although it has not, according to Google Weblog, lifted its ban on the Google cache).

The Google ban led to innovative censorship-bypassing sites such as elgooG, though I suspect there will be no such workaround for blog sites. One way Chinese web users could have looked at blogspot pages was by viewing Google's cache! I guess you could call that Cache-22. Ahem.

Maybe Blogspot will find another way. I'm reminded of the words of John Gilmore, founding member of the EFF: "The Net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it."

Blogs are no longer simply personal diaries. The blog is becoming the standard web interface for information sites, on topics ranging from geeky google watching to the research and announcements of a noted facial plastic surgeon. As the weeks and months pass, expect to see many celebrities launch blogs. There are already perhaps over a million blogs online (have a look at weblogs.com to see how many 'pingers' have updated in the last hour). Few blogs, ironically, are maintained by people who are already celebrities -- although some bloggers have become celebrites, at least on the web. Journalists and authors are more likely than other types of celebs to keep blogs, but music artists and movie stars, were they to regularly update with genuinely 'exclusive' content, would attract more hits and grow their fanbases.

From today, I'm going to keep a list of 'celebrity blogs' that I've found (email me if you're aware of any others). I've decided not to include sites that allegedly contain diaries or journals but do not conform to the interface, or where so-called blogs are clearly merely shop-fronts, or where the celebs in question don't appear to be genuinely involved.

MMS picture and audio-clip messaging, currently being heavily promoted by mobile phone companies in Europe, will add another dimension to the blog revolution: the predicted phenomenon has been already been dubbed 'moblogging'.

Picture and audio messaging allows users to send clips directly to thier blogs. One of the first to do so is Emmanuel Frécon from Sweden, who asks a pertinent question about the ethical issues this raises re. pictures of people being published on the internet without thier knowledge or consent.

Meanwhile, Irish company NewBay Software have announced their MMS-Blog software called FoneBlog. They claim it's "the world's first carrier grade blogging system specifically designed for mobile network operators".