Archive for the 'Blogs & Things to Explore' Category

Following up on my promise to list some great blogs for you to explore as a disprove the theory that “it’s all rubbish out there”, here are some intelligent blogs that make worthwhile reading:

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Marketing

http://marketing.corante.com/ - a hub for blogs on marketing by A-list marketing professionals.

http://bpr.typepad.com/a_view_from_abroad/ - An intelligent French view on marketing and social media: how much more French can you get than a blog post entitled Social networking causing personal existential crisis?

Business and Economics

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/ - by Stephen J Dubner and Steven D Levitt, the co-authors of the book Freakonomics and part of the New York Times suite of blogs, this blog continues the book’s exploration of “the hidden side of everything”. Well-written (as you’d expect), topical as well as personal.

http://accountancymatters.accountancyage.com/ - Accountancy blog from Damian Wild, Editor-in-Chief of Accountancy Age magazine. I don’t read this one avidly I have to confess but the occasional dip into it reveals a mix of accountancy and business related commentary, personal opinion and newsletter style notices about the magazine.

http://nakedlaw.typepad.com/naked_law/ - UK technology law laid bare by Cambridge lawyers. Informative and clear discussions on topical issues on their area of expertise, including posts on Facebook, Skype and copyright as well as more specialist tech topics.

http://www.businessethics.ca/blog/ - A blog about business ethics. Well-written and intelligent, with blog posts like “Evolutionary Psychology and Corporate Philanthropy” - so much to chew on.

Brain Candy

http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main - the blog from the Encyclopaedia Britannica has the tagline “Where Ideas Matter”. Their mission statement is to be “a place for smart, lively conversations about a broad range of topics.” Their categories include Culture, Science, International Affairs, Movies and Humor. High quality discussion and writing.

http://anthropology.net/ - using blog technology to create “a cohesive online community of individuals interested in anthropology” with great tagline: “Beyond bones and stones”. Fascinating articles at expert level on anthropology including discussions of human genetics, neanderthals and using algorithms to trace human ancestry - all still readable and understandable by a lay person.

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/ - the blog of the British Psychological Society brings news and commentary on latest research in that field, complementing their subscription only magazine.

Pic: thanks to Peter Gene on flickr.com

The world wide web. Social networks. Links. Making connections. Creating communities. The internet.

All these words and phrases evoke images of a spider’s web, a network of connections, chains, groups of people, fishing nets - so many things that bind us all together.

One of the powerful currencies of social media is links - because links help you move up the searchability ranks and also up the rank of authority. It comes from the early origins of the internet which began in the world of academia. Academic texts that are referred to by other academic writers gain the reputation of being authorities on that particular subject. The more a particular text is cited, the greater the authority. So, for example, in the world of psychology, textbooks invariably cite Freud - but they are not so likely to cite an unknown student’s dissertation. Freud is an authority - and is likely to stay one - while that unknown student is not unless he/ she gets their dissertation noticed and cited by other academics. And cited a lot.

So with blogs and websites and other online content: the more other sites link to your blog, the greater your blog is considered an authority. Technorati is a website that calculates your blog’s ranking in the world of blogs so you can see how you compare with the top blogs like Endgadget (No. 1) and Boing Boing (No. 2) - they are the blogs that are linked to the most.

There’s a delightful application called TouchGraph that helps you visualise the network of communities and connections that you are in. Here is a screen shot of the connectivity for my arts and writing blog, Fusion View (No. 69,776* on Technorati).

(Click on the picture for a more detailed view)

To check out how connected you are, go to TouchGraph and type in your blog’s URL and it will generate a swirling, moving net of all the other blogs and websites you are linked with. It’s wonderfully hypnotic, reminding me of the adage that no-one is more than six people away from anyone else (”the six degrees of separation”).

And if you haven’t already done so, sign up at Technorati and “claim your blog”.

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*It seems that breaking through the top 100,000 Technorati ranking barrier is a big deal on the blogosphere, as testified by some of the blog posts that celebrate that breakthrough. So, I guess I need to do something like throw my mouse in the air and douse my computer with champagne or something…!

I’ve been researching the history of the internet and the world wide web as part of an introductory chapter on the relevance of the cyberworld to international public relations and communication. These days, we use the internet everyday to browse websites and communicate with each other that it is almost unremarkable. So, it’s been almost Zen-like to stop a moment and contemplate the amazing revolution that quietly took place in the 1980s and 1990s through the work of scientists and researchers who were then unknown to the wider world, building applications for their own use.

It all begins with defence and the military back in the 1950s and 1960s during the Cold War. The Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957 and the space race began. America saw the need for a nationwide network of communications as part of gaining the technological advantage. Over the next twenty years, computer-based communications networks were developed across university faculties and research facilities, connecting first universities in America and then including those in Europe.

Larry G. Roberts, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf and Radia Perlman are some of the scientists who developed the networks, protocols and algorithms on which development of the internet was founded. They paved the way for the interconnected infrastructure of computers and cables that we now refer to as the internet.

It was only in 1990 that the first website appeared, building on all the technology and research that had gone before. Tim Berners Lee and Robert Cailliau, scientists working at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), developed hypertext in 1989, the links system that allows us to click on text on a webpage and be immediately taken to another webpage - and that we all now take for granted .

Tim Berners Lee is also credited with inventing the HTML mark-up language and the HTTP protocol that are the building blocks of dynamic webpages. At their very simplest:

HTML is the code that gives the instructions for the creation of a page eg. for the layout and functions. For example, to make text bold, you preface it with an instruction in brackets “< bold >” and end it with “< / bold>“. To make a link, you preface the link with “< a href= [insert the site you want to link to]>” and then close it off again with “.

The HTTP protocol gives us the address of the webpage - take a look at the address of this and any webpage and you will see it begins with “http://”.

Taking hypertext, HTML and HTTP together, the world’s first website was put up in 1991 and you can still see it today at http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
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It explains what the WorldWideWeb is - initially the phrase was conceived without spaces and referred to as W3 for short - and in a bold statement set out the founding ethics of the web: “The project is based on the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone”. That core statement still resonates today in many of the debates about how websites, social media, information and creative products are used, shared and accessed online - all of which I will be exploring in more depth later as part of the book.

For now, let’s think back to 1991 and what we were doing back and how we were working while Berners-Lee and Cailliau were creating what seemed to be some fairly unremarkable few pages of text. I remember writing short stories on my Amstrad at home and watching as they installed computers running DOS at work so that the secretaries could learn how to word-process using WordPerfect. For communications, we relied on telephones, post and couriers. Faxes were fairly new-fangled and my friends laughed at me when I bought a fax for personal use. They also shied away from leaving voice messages when I bought an answer-machine with one large sized cassette tape for my outgoing message and another for incoming messages. Businesses sent out print brochures and hard copy mail or bought advertising space on print or broadcast media or billboards.

Within 10 years all our lives would be changed forever.

Photo: of Tim Berners-Lee thanks to hwsw.hu

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This post is part of my research project for the book New Trends in International Public Relations that I am co-authoring with business communications expert, Silvia Cambie. I am focusing on the social media aspects while she is working on the wider public relations issues.

You can find all my posts relating to this book project by clicking on the link in the sidebar New Trends in International PR under ZenGuide Projects.

If you have any comments or thoughts on any of the issues I’ve discussed in my posts, please do add a comment or email me. In particular, if you have any additional information or expertise that could add to the book, I would love to hear from you. Also, if you think that there are errors or inaccuracies in what I’ve said, I’d like to learn from you. I’ll credit you, of course, if your contribution is used directly in the book - you can check out my ongoing list of acknowledgements online. Please note that all contributions in respect of the book are subject to the terms set out in contributors release notice.

From time to time I’ll be posting a selection of articles from all over the web that I’ve found interesting and useful - and hopefully, you will, too.

This reading list is permanently lodged in my sidebar and is updated as I come across new articles but I’ll be highlighting it in a post every so often for those of you who read your blogs in a blog reader (and so don’t often see my sidebar).

Elton John recently ranted against the internet and social media, according to Neowin.net and other news sources. He is quoted as saying:

“The internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff. Instead they sit at home and make their own records, which is sometimes OK but it doesn’t bode well for long-term artistic vision. It’s just a means to an end. We’re talking about things that are going to change the world and change the way people listen to music and that’s not going to happen with people blogging on the internet. I mean, get out there — communicate. Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the internet. Let’s get out in the streets and march and protest instead of sitting at home and blogging. I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span. There’s too much technology available. I’m sure, as far as music goes, it would be much more interesting than it is today.”

It reminded me that there are still many people out there who don’t know much about online social culture and who for some reason don’t want to know about it. I think it’s a shame for them - there is so much creativity and experimentation online in terms of self-expression and artistic expression as well as increased communications between people and cultures.

Here are some examples:

Music

There are a number of virtual recording studios like Net Studio where musicians can collaborate with other musicians anywhere in the world, not just those who are in the same town as they are.

Podsafe music is music that can be used for podcasting without paying a royalty. Podsafe networks allow musicians to distribute their music globally over the internet and there are internet stations like Accident Hash that specialise in playing podsafe music. And a lot of it is really good stuff, too.

Individuals doing funky things with music for themselves and their friends and in the process becoming music legends online - like this young Korean guy playing Pachelbel’s Cannon like you’ve never heard it before.

Books and Blogging

Bhagdad Burning was a blog by a young Iraqi girl which was subsequently turned into a prize-winning book of the same name.

Blood, Sweat and Tea is a book that was compiled by the blog of a London Ambulance driver, Random Acts of Reality

The Blooker Prize is an annual prize for the best blog, modelled on the Booker Prize for books.

Photography

Andrew Losowksy started a collection of photographs of doorbells in Florence, Italy on Flickr, the photo-sharing site. He would write stories to accompany the pictures. He gained a huge following online for his stories and the photos and stories have now been transformed into a book The Doorbells of Florence that has won the Blooker prize.

There’s a whole genre of photography around the theme of a daily photo from your city eg City Daily Photo Blog, Santiago de Chile Daily Photo Blog, Brighton Daily Photo etc

There is a group on Flickr that creates short stories using a series of five photos.

Art

I love this web installation by filmmaker and artist Miranda July - it’s filmic, witty and a commentary on websites all at the same time: http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com/

Rhizome is a site that posts news about new media art and the intersection of technology and art, with great links to a vast range of different art websites and blogs.

Social Networks

As for making connections, blogging and social networks like Facebook help people connect so much more easily than in the days of snail mail. I’ve personally made some great new friends in Malaysia through the litbloggers network there and I enjoy using the online telephony service Skype to connect with my family. Facebook and Twitter has enabled me to keep in contact with a range of friends in the UK and Malaysia that I might otherwise not keep in contact with. In many ways, I feel I have a much richer social life through both offline connections with my regular local friends and online connections with those who are further away or in another country.

In my view, the things that are going to “change the world and change the way people listen to music” - and for that matter, change how we relate, connect and create - are already happening online with great energy and creativity. With or without the likes of Elton John.

Continuing my Beginner’s Guide to blogs and blogging - for those of you who’d like to explore blogs but are not sure where to start, blog portals or directories are a good way in. I am fond of the London Bloggers directory that lists blogs around London by the tube line their authors are on or their nearest suburban station. You can check out whose blogging along the Victoria Line, for example.

I found the blog of a usability expert who is a colleague of my cousin’s near my suburban station - yup, it’s a small world. And there are blogs by local people in my area discussing the neighbourhood restaurants and local politics - all very useful info about where I live.

If you know of any other interesting or quirky blog directories or listings, please do share them by adding a comment or emailing me via the Contact form.

The British Library is building a collection of blogs. This collection will form part of the UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC) initiative to archive websites of research interest. The archiving of blogs is part of a wider project to archive UK websites for future generations. The UKWAC website explains:

For many, the web has become the information source of first resort. From keeping abreast of latest news and accessing online journals and datasets, through to finding information about travel and sport, the web has become the information tool of choice.

However, despite our apparent dependence on this medium very little attention has been paid to the long-term preservation of websites. Indeed, with the life of an average website estimated to be around 44 days (about the same lifespan as a housefly) there is a danger that invaluable scholarly, cultural and scientific resources will be lost to future generations.

To address this problem, a consortium of six leading UK institutions is working collaboratively on a project to develop a test-bed for selective archiving of UK websites.

The six institutions are The British Library as lead partner, The National Archives, The National Library of Wales, JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), The Wellcome Trust and The National Library of Scotland. The project began in June 2004 - a news report from ZDNet at the time wrote: “Each member of the consortium will choose content relevant to its subject. All types of Web content will be included, from government documents to blogs.”

To me, this is a clear indicator that blogs are now moving into their prime. From the public perception of their being the personal journals of misfit geeks or kids a few years ago, blogs have come a long way in a very short period of time. They have evolved into business communications used by an increasing number of top notch businesses as well as by solo professionals and small enterprises - including GlaxoSmithKline (Alliconnect blog), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ BTW blog) and Avis (We Try Harder blog). And now, they are being taken seriously by researchers, academics, scientists and the guardians of the UK’s intellectual heritage.

I wonder if it’s only a question of time now before blogs and other social media are studied at university level as art forms in their own right? After all, these days you can take degrees in English Literature, Film Studies, Photography, Visual Arts, Design etc - considered by previous generations as not sufficiently serious to be subjects of study. When the first novel appeared two hundred years ago, it was greeted with derision and even horror by the intellectuals of the day who viewed poetry - and in particular classical poetry - as the greatest form of literature. Look at things now, with the novelists now the literary heavyweights and poets, sadly, much less high-profile. So, who knows, we may soon be able to apply to study an MA in Blogging…?

Disclosure: I am also delighted to say that I was recently invited to submit my writing and culture blog Fusion View for archiving as part of this project. The email from the British Library’s Web Archivist said: “We would like to invite you to have your site included in this important collection for Internet research. We will be selecting some 150 key sites to form the basis of the blog’s collection until August 2007 but archiving will continue into the future.”

Photo: of the British Library Reading Room thanks to imagesonline.bl.uk

Here is a great example of really useful user-generated content. Hotspotr is a directory of WiFi Cafes and Hotspots around the world. All it does is provide an interactive map - it’s up to the likes of you and me to create the directory.

There’s no sign up or login. You just click on Add a Cafe and follow the simple steps to add the name and location of the cafe that has WiFi. There’s also additonal information you can include eg if it’s free, what kind of food is served and any other remarks. You can rate the cafe and indicate whether it’s a good place for working or just surfing.

Typically, US cities predominate but there are a range of international locations. You can navigate via the map but for some reason the map does not show ALL the cities in the listings - for international locations, it’s better to go via the link See All Cities and then click on International Cities.

The people adding locations to Hotspotr aren’t getting paid for what they do. The reward is in taking part and helping to build a useful knowledge base. I added a hotspot in London in that spirit and it only took a couple of minutes. This site is like a wiki (an online encyclopaedia whose content is created and added to by its users) but really easy to use and has the added dimension of the visual map. When my entry was processed, the map zoomed into its exact location, showing the street it was on and local landmarks. It was cool!

How might you add user participation to your website by tapping into the knowledge and community spirit of your stakeholders in a similar way? User-generated content based on participants making videos and the like run the risk of pooling a lot of inappropriate material, some of which may be damaging to your brand. But a knowledge or data focused project that is easy and fun to take part in like a directory of some kind could bring a more satisfying result.

Photo: thanks to nextnature.net

NOTE: ZenGuide is updated Mondays and Thursdays

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=>> California is sold for $53,000

=>> The White House is going for £10m.

=>> At the time of writing, England is up for grabs.

=>> There’s an auction section as well just to crank things up to a fever pitch…

If you do go and buy anything at Weblo, do come back and let me know and I’ll feature your property on ZenGuide.

I’ve been checking out business and political blogs in the UK to see which business and political leaders blog. I’ll be bringing you various of these blogs on ZenGuide from time to time. My overall impression is that not many business people or political figures in the UK have blogs at this point and the ones that are around range from those that are informative, articulate and all about transparent communication to those that are, well, hardly blogs at all and more like static press releases with the word “blog” stuck on the title. I’ll be focusing on the great blogs rather than the not so great ones as I think it’s more rewarding to learn from good examples than have a laugh at bad ones.

So, here is one that I think is a sterling example of a great blog, which will hopefully inspire you. Joe Duckworth is the Chief Executive of the Isle of Wight Council and he has a blog on their website called “Joe Blogs”, a clever take on the name that we use in the UK when referring to your typical average everyman “Joe Bloggs”.

It looks like he started the blog in November 2006 as that seems to be the oldest entry on the page and there isn’t an “Archive” section you would normally find on a blog to indicate that there are older posts. He has blogged on average about twice a month since then.

His tone is informal and direct, as if he is having a chat with you or dropping you a line by email. It’s easy reading and it’s very easy to get to like the guy very quickly. For me, his informal tone does not undermine his authority as the Chief Executive but rather makes him an approachable leader. In particular - and this is the key to why I think he has a great blog - he does not shy away from the tough stuff. In his first post in November last year, he says (my emphasis) “We are only two star which is not very good. But did you know 40 percent of our services are in the best 25 per cent in the Country. The average for other councils like us is half of that. So, don’t shy away of things which are unacceptable, but more recognition about where we are flaming good.” He acknowledges the negative, which is something that many leaders can find difficult to do. When he balances it with a positive, the effect on the reader is “OK, fair enough. That is a good point he’s made about the Council” - ie. his credibility in stating the good thing is strengthened by the fact that he is prepared to acknowledge the bad point, it’s not just spin to tell us how great the Council is.

Later in January 2007, he blogs (my emphasis again) “For example this week I got my first glimpse of the staff survey results. They are still interim results as the consultants complete analysing the data. I have to admit that it made uncomfortable reading. Staff clearly are not happy with certain aspects of working for the council. As I have said before we are going to take these results very seriously and act on them. Furthermore we are going to publish the results - warts and all. The council I want to be chief exec of is open and honest and we are prepared to take the knocks because we know that we are going to deal with them and ensure that issues are dealt with properly.” Again, to make those admissions about unhappy staff and his personal response of discomfort about the results - that takes a strength of character. His openness to publish the results is consistent with this straight-talking. So when he says “the council I want to be chief exec of is open and honest “, you believe that he means it. Organisation and nations are a reflection of the people who lead them and we can see that Joe is open and honest from his blog and we can trust that he will lead the Council by example.

I was also particularly impressed when I emailed the Isle of Wight Council via their contact form to say that I couldn’t subscribe to his blog using Google Reader as there did not seem to be a feed. I got a reply back from Matthew Pattinson, the Council’s analyst and web developer within a couple of hours. He created an RSS feed there and then for me and has put it up onto the blog for other people to subscribe as well. To me, that immediate response and the tone of Joe’s blog together gave me a sense that the Isle of Wight Council is all about getting the job done and is focused on providing service to its constituents and stakeholders.

In contrast, I also found a couple of other UK councils that purported to have Chief Executive blogs but these were all statice brochure type pages that read like press releases. One of them labelled each post “Blog No. 1″ , “Blog No. 2″ etc - hmmm, a blog is the thing itself like a magazine is a thing and each article in it is a post. That simple mislabelling plus the press release style text gave the sense that this organisation didn’t have a clue about what a blog is meant to be. They also did not have feeds and I emailed them in the same way as I emailed the Isle of Wight Council via their contact form, asking about the feed. To date, over a month later, I am still waiting for their reply.

Going back to Joe’s Blog, I’d like to offer a couple of suggestions for making the most of the blog, if I may:

• Add an Archive and a also a Category section for easy searchability in the future as Joe fills the blog with a body of work

• Make it easier to find the blog from the Council’s main page - I had to really search for it to find it. I think it’s one of the strengths of the site and of the Council’s conversation with its stakeholders.

Joe also writes frankly about his family’s personal experience of crime in his post on 03 April. What a horrendous experience and my sympathies go out to them. He moves on to discuss local policing and tackling not just crime but fear of crime. This mix of personal and professional discussion in his blog is the sort of thing that will make the readers keep coming back and keep having trust in this straight-talking leader.