Global Voices

The Berkman Center's Global Voices project is an incredibly well-done aggregation of the global blogging community:

"A growing number of bloggers around the world are emerging as “bridge bloggers:” people who are talking about their country or region to a global audience. Global Voices is your guide to the most interesting conversations, information, and ideas appearing around the world on various forms of participatory media such as blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, and videoblogs."

"Our global team of regional blogger-editors is working to find, aggregate and track these conversations. Each day they link to 5-10 of the most interesting blog posts from their regions in the “daily roundups” section. A larger group of contributing bloggers is posting daily features in in the left-hand Weblog section, shedding light on what blogging communities in their countries have been talking about recently."

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BlogSafer

Blog Safer: The Anoniblogging Wiki has downloadable (and editable - it's a wiki afterall) guides for blogging anonymously around the world.

More at HTDAW, via IP

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Sensationalism and Link-Baiting

Two complementary articles came up in my feed reader today. Russell Beattie criticizes a trend he’s seeing in the blog posts he reads:

I know how once in a while throwing a juicy post up on your server with some name calling, extreme opinions and a swear word or two can drive serious linkage and hits. You write stuff online every day for a few years, and its bound to get boring just following the same old routine, right? Might as well take a stick and poke at the bee-hive once in a while and see what happens. … Now it’s at the point where people have to write almost nothing but sensationalistic posts on their blog to get any attention. The more extreme, the more likely you’ll be to get links.

Meanwhile, Performancing writes their own tips on “link baiting,” the practice of writing posts so they’ll get attention from other bloggers. The “attack hook” that so annoys Beattie is there, but they also recommend the “news hook,” the “contrary hook,” the “resource hook,” and the “humor hook.”

Me, I prefer the “cute hook.” I mean, seriously. No one can resist linking to the pandog.

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Another Blog Book Deal

This time, it's Riverbend:

"Earlier this year, Baghdad Burning the blog was turned into "Baghdad Burning" - the book. Feminist Press published the whole first year of blogs in book form and it was a huge honor. The book is available at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The British version was published by Marion Boyars Publishers .

As if having the blog published as a book wasn't enough- the book itself won the third prize of the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage in October... An amazing honor.

Also- Baghdad Burning in Japanese... and Baghdad Burning in Spanish. Many, many thanks to the people taking so much time to translate the blog!"

More on her blog.

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2006 Blooker Prize

"The Lulu Blooker Prize is the world's first literary prize devoted to 'blooks': books based on blogs or websites."

Three categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction and Comics

Prizes total $4,000:

• $2,000 to an overall winner
• $1,000 to the other category winners

More details here: http://www.lulublookerprize.com/

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Kids and Blogging

Parents whose children are into blogging should definitely check out BlogSafety - it's got a number of articles and tips, including some good guidelines for teens and a section for parents.

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MarsEdit 1.1

MarsEdit 1.1 for Mac is out, and Blogger post titles are finally supported. (as well as lots of other stuff)

Mac users can snag it here.

Thanks Brent and crew!

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Rich Editing in BlogThis!

Did you know that you can easily post to your blog from any page on the web with our (newly improved) BlogThis! bookmarklet? We’ve just added the most popular buttons from our regular post editor without sacrificing the small size that makes BlogThis! so convenient.


If you’re using BlogThis! now, you should see the bold, italic, font color, link, and blockquote buttons already. If you’re not using BlogThis!, you can get it by following the instructions in our help article, or by enabling it on the Google Toolbar. (Click “Options,” go to the “More” tab, then click on the “BlogThis!” checkbox.)

BlogThis! is great for writing a quick post about a page that you’re looking at, without the (comparative) hassle of opening Blogger.com in a new window, picking a blog to post on, copying over the URL to make a link, then copying over more text that you want to quote, accidentally kicking the power cord out of your computer when you get up to feed the cat, needing to call the plumber to pump out the flood in your attic, forgetting where you were on your computer when it starts up again, realizing that you can click Recover Post to get back the work that you had lost, discovering that the kitten ate all the big cat’s food and you have to feed them both again because the kitten’s on a special diet of castor oil and pencil shavings because it pukes normal kitten food all over the power outlets, which are now smoking because of the combined electrical draw of the attic pump, the computer, and the rock tumbler that you’ve tossed an effigy of the kitten in because that’s how you have to control your rage, when all you really wanted to do was make a little post to tell your friends about that new blog with pictures of cute kittens and other things on it, but now you think that you don’t even want friends any more if this is the kind of situation they’ll put you in.

See? BlogThis! eliminates all of that.

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