 |
9. October 2008 – 10:02 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
|
A few days ago I wrote and article about the State of Blogging today and claimed that blogging was not dead but maturing. The launch of Change.org´s social action blog network supports this point. Blogging has developed into one online tool among other to achieve distinct goals.
The change.org project mission statement is both clear and ambitious: “Change.org is an online hub and media network for social issues and collective action”. The whole project is organized along the lines of causes – meaning topic relevant to the general public. On each causes site, as for example on Global Warming, knowledgeable authors write articles and users can decide to support the cause and donate money to tackle the problem. Beyond these functions one central idea is to call users to action. For this purpose a set of possible action in which users can join is display next to the cause. User can also start actions themselves. The site seems to have found their own approach to blogging and tackling social issues on the net.
Change.org already has developed a considerable reach (Alexa.com) and I assume it will growth steady especially with the US elections ahead. The example of change.org shows that the term blog is not even necessary to actually describe what the project is doing but the action and topic itself is the focus.
Posted in Tools | No Comments »
|
|
26. September 2008 – 11:31 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
|
Blogging has been around for several years now and even with major advocates and early adopters, as for example Jason Calacanis, supposedly giving it up it still growing strong. With the rise of blogging a few years ago the Technorati “State of the Blogosphere Report” was established. In these more or less yearly reports Technorati rakes through all of the data they accumulated about the Blogosphere by offering their weblog registration and search engine service.
The importance of blogging and its integrated forms in social networks, like Facebook, and microblogging, like Twitter, for the fields of eDemocracy and eParticipation has been discussed many times and is well documented. In summary blogging and the related forms of communication do allow almost anybody to build up their own channel to take part in the political and social discourse in a way which in much easier than in the offline world. Therefore it makes sense to keep an eye on the general development of blogging.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Trends | 2 Comments »
 |
16. September 2008 – 16:12 by Dan Jellinek
|
I’ve never been a big fan of blogs.
Partly it was the word – there is a type of geek-techie who just loves to use a new word that no-one has ever heard of, just as everyone gets used to the old word – intranet, blog, web 2.0, whatever – as a way of singling themselves out as knowledgeable insiders. In the early days, that’s what blog seemed to be – something to talk about – to say ‘you need a blog’ to people and sit back knowing full well they wouldn’t have the faintest idea what you were talking about.
After that, the word became fairly common, but I was still unsure… after all, blogs barely exist. What is a blog? A content management system, essentially, and these already existed. It’s not necessarily an online diary – you don’t need to use it like that. It is a tool which allows you to post content onto a website, and let people post comments – if you enable that functionality. And that’s it.
Then there were the window-dressing ‘blogs’ – ministerial blogs that weren’t written by the minister but by lackeys, or BBC journalist blogs that were essentially just online columns with a few comments from people with whom I usually violently disagreed.
I also objected to the type of blog that was supposed to be the news that the mainstream media did not dare to print – in my experience, this was simply ranting from non-journalists that the mainstream media would certainly not print, but just because it was not good enough to print.
But now blogs are commonplace, and everybody with a pulse has one, I think there are some interesting uses emerging, and one is for local politicians. In the UK Mary Reid, former Mayor of Kingston, and many others have pioneered their use as a tool to connect with and keep in touch with their local constituents in a way that makes much more sense than with national politicians. They can go to local meetings, and give out their blog addresses: this gives people a follow-up, to look at photographs of the meeting they were act, and to join in a real dialogue with their local politicians and other local citizens. This is valuable for the politician, and valuable for the citizen. And it works.
So why am I blogging about blogs?
Because there is an interesting new project encouraging and helping civic leaders to blog: ‘Civic Surf’ Its driving force Shane McCracken of Gallomanor wrote an article on the project in this week’s E-Government Bulletin (email me if you want to see a copy, add ‘dan’ to ‘@headstar.com’), and the website is worth a look. It is at:
http://www.civicsurf.org.uk
There is a pack you can obtain too, with a DVD – find out more also by emailing me.
Posted in members, News | 3 Comments »
