Blogs are useful, even for teaching

11 advantages of using a blog for teaching

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The secret to using all this new media at our fingertips is to choose the tool for your purpose. The much-maligned blog is good for many things, and even has advocates among teachers. It's certainly a good way to get the class involved and prepare them for the real world.

I even learned a new word: Unsatisfaction

How PR firms work - and why readers trust bloggers more

A extract from "essayist, programmer, and programming language designer" Paul Graham's excellent synopsis of the PR industry:

PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.

If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them.

A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.

This is how his company went about playing the system:

Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one. We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.

This was roughly true. We really did have the biggest share of the online store market, and 5000 was our best guess at its size. But the way the story appeared in the press sounded a lot more definite.

And how newspapers are threatened by the humble blog:

Online, the answer tends to be a lot simpler. Most people who publish online write what they write for the simple reason that they want to. You can't see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, as you can in so many print publications-- which is one of the reasons, though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trust bloggers more than Business Week.

I was talking recently to a friend who works for a big newspaper. He thought the print media were in serious trouble, and that they were still mostly in denial about it. "They think the decline is cyclic," he said. "Actually it's structural."

In other words, the readers are leaving, and they're not coming back.

Why? I think the main reason is that the writing online is more honest.

All very interesting.

The World's First Blog: The Economist

I have often wondered about the success of the The Economist, which is apparently doing very well in the recession thanks to its large number of subscribers and the upswing in interest in the murky water of economics.

What I think it comes down to is The Economist's reporting style. Take a look at their editorial philosophy here.

An excerpt:

The Economist is different from other publications because it has no by-lines. It is written anonymously because it is a paper whose collective voice and personality matter more than the identities of individual journalists. This ensures a continuity of tradition and consistency of view which few other publications can match.

It is, essentially, a blog in print - short articles that combine "radical opinion with a reverence for facts". In other words, it commits itself to an opinion on every issue, sometimes rightly and often wrongly - just see the letters page. All of which makes it more like a blog than any other publication. Way ahead of its time.

Primary children will be taught how to blog, tweet

But they won't have to study World War II.

A proposed new curriculm, commissioned by the Government, would replace the current 13 subjects with just six, while children will no longer have to study the Second World War or Queen Victoria, but instead learn about Twitter and blogging under radical plans to overhaul primary school teaching.

Daily Mail, Wednesday March 25th 2009, Tamara Cohen

The Guardian, Wednesday 25th March 2009, Polly Curtis

Crank: High Voltage offends rather than entertains?

Well, this article on the latest Jason Statham film is interesting in that it tries to make a social comment, but the comments on the post are more interesting still. It just goes to show that anyone is/can be a critic.

Offense, entertainment and humour were always bedfellows.

Internal memo: No one wants to read about your pets

Not all blogs are about your family and pets, just as not all books are about (or by) Barack Obama, or anything else. On the Internet, there are no rules, and the cost and environmental impact of maintaining a blog are negligible. So it is always strange to hear people say "what is the point of keeping a blog". There are a million reasons to keep a blog, and here are some of ours:

• We think it will be fun
• A blog a good way of sharing and keeping track of our thoughts - and those of others
• This is the perfect place to record our observations from the world around us
• We hope to cost-effectively maintain contact with clients current and future
• We hope it will introduce us to new ideas through the comments
• We want to look hip (do people still use the word hip?)

So, what can you expect to find on this blog?

• Signs of the shifting dynamic of public opinion
• Observations from the world of marketing, media and design all around us
• Examples of (simple) technologies that can and will change the world
• Unbridled optimism

We are still in the very early stages, please consider this as much as a leaked  internal memo as anything else. All will, hopefully, become clear as the posts go by.

Do I not like DOSHDOSH

Hands up if you want our blog to be like this? Not me. And not because it is obviously about making money. The headlines just don't make me want to read the articles, which are actually quite interesting and on the kind of topics we want to write about. Actually, it was the first other blog we linked to, so who are we to criticise. Any thoughts?