Category: Weblogs

PARDON ME, DO YOU THINK THE WEB CAN CHANGE THE WORLD?

NtenI began my day at the plenary session of one of my favorite conferences –NTEN — The Nonprofit Technology Network. It’s a gathering of mostly non-profit activists who use the web to enhance their work. They are sharp, committed and fun.

Nten_weissbergThe main session this morning was off the charts: David Weinberger, from Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society.   He nay be the best speaker I ever heard – certainly one of the best.  Of course he’s funny and sometimes outraged – both very good things — but he also offers really thrilling analysis of our lives online and the role of each of us in making the Web what it is, and what it will be.  Read more about him from another admirer, at the conference blog. 

I also popped in at "Using Technology to Support Your Mission." Very cool but it turned out to be techier than I wanted, so wandered around running into people.  This community is so vibrant and purposeful that it’s a wonderful place to hang around.  These are people who don’t think the web can change the world, they know it has.

By the way, beyond what I’m learning in sessions, I can tell you what’s hot by the sessions I couldn’t even get into:  The Age of YouTube: Using Video Online to Reach the Masses and Leveraging the Power of Participatory Media.  Fortunately the YouTube one, at least, was videoed and will appear on the NTEN website where we can attend without sitting in a corner on the floor and sweating from the major body heat surrounding each of us.

Even so, in all it was a great day; sorry this report is so brief.  More tomorrow.

DON’T LET THEM! ACT ON MARCH 30

Weeping_sketch_3 When you first hear the term "cyberstalking" you think it’s a joke.  Well guess what.  It’s not.  Read this.  It’s the post of a prominent blogger who has canceled speaking engagements and remains frightened and close to agoraphobic because of vicious  and threatening online attacks, both verbal and visual.  I started to post one of the photos, but just couldn’t do it.  So instead you see how I felt upon reading Kathy Siera’s post. 

Death threats, violently edited photos of bloggers as well as violent, vicious prose, are a grave threat not only to women blogers (it appears that women are particularly targeted) but to the wonder that is the blog universe.  Those who oppose such behavior have to take a stand – we’re the activist types anyway or we wouldn’t be writing so publicly.  SO. Andy_carvin_3

Here, from the wonderful, generous Andy Carvin (left) and other sites, are some things we can do:

Join Stop Cyberbullying, a site created by the aforementioned Andy Carvin.

Post on our own blogs and/or post comments on participating blogs – which Andy will include in "Stop Cyberbullying" site

Visit and share existing resources like Cyberbully.org or this parent brochure

Learn more from other sites like this one.

Check out BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone’s Hating Hate Speech, in which she discusses this issue and offers the BlogHer community guidelines.

Think of something else, do it and post the idea on Stop Cyberbullying.  OH  and remember to tag anything you write about this with the stopcyberbullying tag so it will show up in searches.  Let’s not be silent in the face of this threat to our community.  Thanks, Andy, for giving us a tool to make noise!

MORE BLOGGER ETHICS THOUGHTS

Women_and_workjpg THIS IS FROM MORRA’S  VERY FINE AND ALWAYS THOUGHTFUL WOMEN AND WORK BLOG, IN A POST ENTITLED:  "With all due respect Cindy."  Comments are closed on this post so I’m quoting her post here and then posting a response. 

MORRA:  "First off, I don’t have a Typekey account, so I am going to do a trackback instead.
Cindy Samuels, who is brilliant, is wrong on this post:"
“One of my favorite bloggers sent me a note asking my opinion about a service that pays bloggers to  write about client products.  It’s not secret, the writers disclose their contracts.  Even so, I told her that as an old newsie, I thought that, unless she was desperate for money, she shouldn’t go near the idea.  WHY?”
AFTER THE QUOTE, SHE ADDED"Journalists do endorsements, why can’t I? Not that anyone’s asking, of course."

Morra, who unlike me really IS brilliant, asks a fair question.  But I don’t think reputable journalists endorse products.  They don’t do commercials and use their own language to sell products.  If they are busy selling in the context of their coverage – or we are, in the context of our blogs, then why should anyone believe us about anything?  How do they know which things are paid for and which are not?  When is a blog a blog and when does it become solely a marketing tool? 

I may be showing my age, since I was trained as a reporter long ago, but I shudder to think of the consequences of putting PAID ad copy into a post.  Let’s keep this conversation going – I respect Morra too much to do anything but think harder about this…..

USE BASIC NEWS ETHICS AND HELP SAVE BLOGGING

Dollars_2 One of my favorite bloggers sent me a note asking my opinion about a service that pays bloggers to  write about client products.  It's not secret, the writers disclose their contracts.  Even so, I told her that as an old newsie, I thought that, unless she was desperate for money, she shouldn't go near the idea.  WHY?

Understand, this is NOT selling ads on your blog or being part of a syndicate like BlogHer, my favorite entity on the planet, or Federated Media, founded by the amazing John Battelle.  That's an advertiser paying for a separate, discrete place on the page.

This entity, and others far more insidious, including sub-rosa corporate and political efforts, threaten the credibility of the writer and, even more important, of the medium.  I was reminded of this after reading a speech on the dangers faced by legitimate blogs and bloggers, given by the early Internet pioneer Jason Calacanis.  In it he reminds us what happened to e-mail because of spammers and urges bloggers to fight such developments in our thrilling new medium.  Here's what he says about what spammers did to e-mail "Many of you built this city — this trusted medium — with hard work and good intentions.  Then, along come the spammers, and they piss in the well, ruining it for all of us."

Yeah I know it's a real guy image but the fact remains, there's a thin line between talking about or reviewing material and taking money to sell it.  Usually, by the way, not what it would cost to reach the same people some other way.  And almost inevitably, taking blogging closer to the diminished credibility so much a part of my former world of "mainstream journalism.  

You’re It!

SO my friend Liza tagged me with the following: 

Find the nearest book.
Name the author & title.
Turn to page 123.
Post sentences 6-8.
Tag three more people.

Here’s what turned up: 

Naked_conversations Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations. "He advises those who will listen: "If a blogger has enough passion, the blog becomes the central place on the Internet for that topic.  Companies understand the importance of Google but they don’t yet get how blogging fits in.  If the corporation doesn’t do this for themselves, then someone else will." 

I’m reading the book because a client suggested it; I’m usually more fiction/politics but I have to admit it’s pretty interesting.  Scoble is a big friend of BlogHer.  He was at last year’s convention.

And I tag Liz, Ronnie and Cooper.  Post here or on your own blog.

MY BAD

Nablopomo_yoda_120x90 All you NABLOPOMO visitors — my deepest apologies.  I blithely signed up for NABLOPOMO and promptly ended up in the hospital for two days (just a scare – I’m fine) which right away made me fail my pledge.  But I also forgot – or didn’t think about — the fact that I can’t use a computer on Shabbat.  Saturdays are no writing, no typing, no computers, TV, radio, telephone days (I know, it sounds weird if you’re not into it and before I started doing it I thought it totally bizarre.  It turns out to be a real pleasure – but I digress.)  Anyway I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to bait and switch.  I just didn’t think.

Oh – and I promise to post AT LEAST 30 posts this month -just not on Saturdays. — And to stay out of the hospital — at least this month.

WHOSE LIFE IS IT, ANYWAY?

At BlogHer there was a great debate among the “mommy bloggers” about how much to reveal about one’s children.  Much of what was best in my career (as well as, of course, my private life) came from my kids – literally.  They’re why I finally wrote a book [for kids.] They’re why I got interested in kids’ books and began writing book reviews for the New York Times and Washington Post and eventually served as early children’s book editor at Amazon.  They’re the reason I did some of my best TV pieces – about kids learning to ski, learning disabilities, etc.  You get the idea.  BUT

Once they were over 7 or so I always asked before I mentioned them in anything I wrote.  I kind of felt that it was my gig and they had their own lives.  Now this is a problem.  Michael Chabon says:

“Telling the truth, when the truth matters most, is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.

He’s right I think – I can feel myself hanging back when those “other people’s secrets” begin to emerge — and if affects my writing.  It’s true even of the most innocent things: something really lovely was said to me this week by one of my kids but it would expose HIM and I can’t do it.
Granted, most moms who blog have far younger kids than my adult sons but it’s an interesting question.  Any thoughts?

Whatever we think about this though it gave me an excuse to share one of my favorite Michael Chabon quotes. (of very very many…)

1.0 – Redux

REPOSTING FROM VOX

I’ve been promising to do this for a long time; this is the first post and a bit unnerving. I’m thinking lots of things at once. That I read today that 2/3rds of DC residents on welfare read only at the 5th grade level at best. Earlier I’d read that six in 10 adults in DC can’t read beyond a 4th grade level. What are we DOING???

At the same time, reports tell us sexy music might make kids have more sex (surprised, anyone?),and that fact gets geometrically more attention that this reading and education crisis. I don’t understand why no one cares — we are losing our international leadership position because those emerging from our schools don’t measure up to our economic competitors. Never mind the politicization of science and the exodus of scientific researchers to more enlightened countries.

OK so I sound cranky. And I didn’t really begin this blog to talk about the state of American education – even though it does obsess me. But it’s just so sad! I grew up in a milltown and went to a “culturally deprived” high school. We had all kinds of enrichment, we had plenty of AP classes and amazing teachers. As far as I can tell lots of that has stopped. This country can provide excellent education, it just isn’t doing so. I went to Russia in 1991 to produce a tv show and the advanced kids there were reading Jane Austen in THE TENTH GRADE!! IN ENGLISH!!! Holy cow.