September 2008 Archives

• Guido Fawkes posts where his readers come from. If you think blog are only read by fringe freaks, think again...
• ReadWriteWeb dives into the Technorati State of the Blogosphere data with some serious analysis
• The debate over working styles on the national newspapers continues. Wouldn't you love to have Roy Greenslade's inbox?
• Jeff Jarvis is looking for the most commonly-raised objections to fully embracing the web.
• This is what good link journalism looks like.
• And is the whole "Digital Native" idea a massive distraction - or a terrible excuse?
  

• Only about 1.1m blogs are updated in the last week. Now, obviously there's a large hinterland of abandoned blogs in the rest. Frequency seems to be the exception rather than the rule in the whole of the blogsphere these days. 
• The majority of bloggers do NOT live near the largest metropolitan areas - OK, it's a US finding, but I'm pleased to see that blogging is not a purely urban phenomenon.
  
• And I think this graph could be very significant for what I do:

• Browser: Firefox 3.01
• Platform: Windows XP SP3 and Mac OSX 10.5.5
• Extension: coComment Firefox Extension installed

The customary security presence surrounding the buildings of Canary Wharf is also slightly larger than usual. But rather than their usual task of keeping out unwanted outsiders, the staff are primarily occupied today with moving on the credit crunch's most recent victims before they share their troubles with the waiting media.

Nevertheless, a few of those passing out from the high-rise office's glass doors did stop to explain the mood inside the building. Koen Thijsson was the first employee out the door. He was carrying his belongings in a cardboard box and said: "This is it. I think it's going to be all of us".

• Moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.org | BlogWell
  Good, useful guide to moving off wordpress.com
  (tags: wordpress wordpress.com blogplatforms)

As an internet reader, I'm increasingly suspicious of journalists who don't link. Yes, if they quote an official that gives me a sense of the source. But why not link to original source material? It also allows me to dig more deeply into the story if I want without having to turn to Google.

Random links from tabs lingering in my browser at the end of the weekend:

• Wired editors are blogging the creation of a feature as it happens.
• Pete Ashton picks apart some of the terrible reporting around Google's Chrome (and bloggers don't do too well, either)
• Hacking Cough shows up just how bad some of the pictures submitted for print publication really are. A clear case of a little knowledge being dangerous when it comes to photo resolution.
• Is there any news left in today's news stories?
• Is it time for a video journalism camp in London?

The latest of Steve Jackson's blogs, Our Man in Cameroon, is up and going. Steve has been chronicling his life in various different countries for several years now, though Grenada, Hanoi and Newcastle. Steve's volunteering overseas in Cameroon (the clue being in the title there), but his reportage of life in other countries is always worth a look. I'll be subscribing.

And how could I resist his picture of the lizard above, when it echoes Taupy, the lizard in my blog header? :-)

"You have to look at the way people now source information, you can't just stick to the old practices and say 'that will do'. You have to say to yourself 'If I was launching into this market now what would I do? What do they want now and how do I service them?'"

Sarah Hartley's back from some travels:

But as I finished writing up and downloading the pictures of a recent trip to Dublin, I started wondering how aware readers are about how these, often glossy, pieces of journalism come to be in their daily newspapers.
Paid for by the hosting holiday company (cost would obviously make the activity otherwise prohibitive), it could be seen as a semi-commercial activity. In itself perhaps not so much a problem, but do we always make that distinction crystal clear?

A former boss of mine used to describe paid-for trips (alongside assorted other gifts) as "moral hazards", and he discouraged us from taking them in most circumstances.

But, as Sarah points out, in this situation a lot of travel journalism just wouldn't happen, because the costs involved in sending the hack on holiday outweigh the benefit of having the report in the paper. Yet, I'd imagine that the majority of the readers are unaware that these are paid for trips. Of course, there's another layer in here, in that the travel industry works on the back of the familiarisation trip, or "fam trip", whereby agents are sent on the holidays people want them to sell to their clients. Travel Weekly's B2B journalists will be blogging some of these on its new Postcards blog (still under construction at the time of writing).

But what are the ethical issues here? How would readers feel if they knew that all the trips had been paid for by the company running them?

I'd be interested in what my colleagues from Travel Weekly and Travolution think about this...

Macworld:

The UK is a nation of net-addicts, with 76 percent of Brits admitting they can't live without the web.

• Paul links to some research on podcasting that suggests that it's got an affluent audience and that there's some growth to come.
• James shares some lessons learned from using social media at an event - in this case, Greenbelt.
• And, amongst all the posting about Google's new browser, Chrome, I rather like Shane and Alan's take on the issues. They cover much of the same ground, but Shane has more depth and Alan more snark... :-)

If I think it's relevant I'll mention it, but otherwise you'll just have to trust me: I blog about people and brands because what they are doing or saying is of interest to me. That's it.

I was listening to Twit the other day when the contributors were talking about their concern that too many blogs "just" pointed to stuff. I am not so sure that this is a problem and sort of rests on the, mistaken in my view, assumption that blogging has to be like journalism.

It's a shame that the perception of blogging is in a place where these things need to be said. One of the stock ideas I use when training journalists to blog is that the basic currency of the blog is the thought "that's interesting". Everything you post to a blog is something you find interesting and want to share with others, be it a link, an article, a photo or a video.