Blogbase is a new wiki I have started to put together resources on blogging, for beginners right through to seasoned bloggers.

Feel free to check it out, and please sign up to help build up the wiki!

Cross posted from MediaZilla

Tags: blogbase, change2

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Evan Davis, BBC News’ economics guy, has a pretty good blog called Evanomics (nice). Yesterday he posted on the hot topic of the moment, private equity. And as a blog post, for me it is pretty close to perfect.

For those that do not feel they know what private equity is all about, let me offer a few arguments on both sides.

First an explanation. Private equity is quite simple. Investors borrow money (from banks); they usually add a little of their own and use the cash to buy companies. Often the companies they buy were publicly-owned – in the sense that a large number of relatively anonymous shareholders buy and sell shares in them on the stock market – and once bought, they become privately-owned, in that their shares are no longer traded.

Davis provides explanation and opinion, facts and commentary. Despite reading articles every day in the papers about private equity, I never understood as fully as I do know after reading this post.

It’s a great template for new bloggers in terms of style and content.

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Iain Dale points to something which I thought would be very interesting:

If you want to know why the NHS is in an administrative mess read THIS post on the 2020health.org site. It is a live ‘waiting room’ blog.

Although, it’s not quite that, rather a what appears to be a static news article at 2020health.org.

It certainly brings home the utter hopelessness of hanging around, waiting in hospitals:

It seems that in order not to breach the waiting time target, clinics like these are quadruple booked. 200 patients were booked in this afternoon with no increase in the four doctors usually on duty as when there are 50 patients. I’ve been handed a copy of the complaint form to fill in – they have a ready supply. Yet most people around me declined the form, preferring to moan rather than write.

Now here’s a thought, though. Rather than feedback or complaint forms, what if hospitals, and other public sector service deliverers, provided a platform for views to be provided, whether through a blog or some other medium, allowing for instant airing of views but also the opportunity for others to respond in real time?

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Movable Type is the blogging engine used by TypePad blogs, and is available for download and installation on your own server. Think of the relationship between the two being like WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

Movable Type and TypePad (as well as LiveJournal and Vox) are owned by Six Apart, which was a pioneer in blogging platforms – TypePad was for a long time the ‘serious’ bloggers’ choice of system. That was until Six Apart introduced a licensing agreement which turned many bloggers off (check out some of the comments to this post) – and helped WordPress become the major player it is now.

Anyhow, Six Apart have now backtracked a little bit on this, and are opening up the Movable Type platform for version 4 of the software, launching a new site in the process. Their claim is that the position of the other Six Apart products means that this is now a viable proposition:

It will still be possible to buy Movable Type – a professionally supported version can be purchased.

MT4 has some extremely interesting features, including social networking elements, as discussed at TechCrunch:

MT4 as social media platform allows users to turn their readers into communities through Movable Type’s new community management features, with the ability to give users the right to post, add and share rich text and media posts with photos, videos, and audio. MT4 also includes a new ratings framework that enables a variety of recommendation features.

These are interesting times, and while I have never been tempted by MT (it runs on PERL, which I don’t understand) it opens up the possibilities for either individual bloggers, or those wanting to create blog communities.

Tags: movable+type

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There has been a mini-storm this weekend in the UK public sector blogosphere about whether or not it’s actually possible for people working for the government can actually blog in any meaningful way without fear of reprisals, whether from their employer or in the press.

The issue in question is about a post written by one Owen Barder, a Whitehall civil servant who wrote a post that has been picked up by the Mail on Sunday in, one might say, typically hysterical fashion. You can read some views on the debate here, here and here.

My personal view is that Barder’s post, which compared George Bush to Hitler, was ill-advised for a number of reasons. One is that comparing anyone to Hitler outside a 6th form debating society is pretty daft; another that when one is blogging about an issue close to one’s day job, it’s important to be careful with the way one words things. This links into the eighth blogging tip I wrote about here:

Don’t blog about things you shouldn’t. Don’t leave yourself or (even worse) others open to personal criticism because of what you post. If you don’t fully understand an issue, don’t blog on it – yet. Read more, take in other people’s views. Don’t make yourself look an idiot. Don’t flame people. What’s the point? You can disagree with others while remaining polite. It isn’t hard. Don’t deliberately take an extreme stance to provoke reactions. The most likely effect this will have is that people will ignore you.

It’s important that people working within the public sector have the opportunity to share their knowledge and experience through blogging, if they choose to. But, just as with any employee, they have to ensure that what they blog about, and the tone in which they do it, won’t impact negatively on their employer.

There’s possibly an issue here about whether public sector blogs work better behind a password, like those on IDeA’s CoPs. Of course, this means the general public misses out.

I’m planning a local government blogging platform, and in it blogs can be set to be private or public on a post by post basis. But at the end of the day, the best method of ensuring that blog posts don’t cause an unwanted publicity storm is simple common sense.

Update: A couple of comments have revealed the truth of what was in Owen’s post – which I haven’t had the chance to see because his blog is down. It turns out that all he did was quote a Guardian article, where the offending comparison was made. Given this turn of events, it’s clear that the Mail had a particular axe to grind with this particular blogger.

Would such a blatent and inaccurate smear have been made against someone writing within the mainstream media? I guess not. The question in my post is still valid – but takes a different tone, I think. Is it possible for public sector workers to blog when their words are twisted in such a fashion by those who have an interest in discrediting them?

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There’s a new version of WordPress out for those who host their own blogs. The main change seems to be the incorporation of the widgets plugin as a part of the base code. Dougal Campbell lists the main changes:

• Atom feeds updated to Atom 1.0
• Preliminary support for Atom Publishing Protocol
• Widgets are now supported in core
• Protection against activating broken plugins
• “Deactivate All Plugins” button. Sadly, my “Reactivate All Plugins” patch didn’t make it into this release. Hopefully you’ll see it in WP 2.3.
• Improvements to comment management
• Code optimizations and speedups
• Future WYSIWYG support for the Safari browser
• Post Preview moved into a popup window, rather than an iframe on the Write page
• WordPress-specific XML-RPC API
• JQuery support

This is a great advance for WordPress, as drag and rop layout editing is a feature of other blogging systems. Am nervous about upgrading though – as I already use the widgts plugin – will this just override everything I have already set up?

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Thought it might be worth a quick plug of another little blog I write, called Free as in Beer.

All I do is post a link and a quick description of a zero-cost bit of software. Why not have a look – you might find something useful there!

Tags: free+as+in+beer

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The Daily Telegraph have put together a great social element to their website – hosting user blogs at my.telegraph.co.uk. I have signed up and the interface is very nice and clean. There’s a social element too, where you can add other My Telegraph blogs to your blogroll and keep a track of comments and whatnot.

Also, on the posting window, some nice quick tips on writing blog posts are presented:

I’ve registered my blog there, but am not sure what I’m going to do with it. Just one thing has occurred to me: will each blog pick up the considerable google juice attached to the telegraph.co.uk domain?

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Tim O’Reilly has posted a draft of a bloggers’ code of conduct. Let’s have a look at it.

We celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces frank and open conversation. But frankness does not have to mean lack of civility. We present this Blogger Code of Conduct in hopes that it helps create a culture that encourages both personal expression and constructive conversation.

1. We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.

We are committed to the “Civility Enforced” standard: we will not post unacceptable content, and we’ll delete comments that contain it.

We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that:
- is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
- is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,
- infringes upon a copyright or trademark
- violates an obligation of confidentiality
- violates the privacy of others

We define and determine what is “unacceptable content” on a case-by-case basis, and our definitions are not limited to this list. If we delete a comment or link, we will say so and explain why. [We reserve the right to change these standards at any time with no notice.]

2. We won’t say anything online that we wouldn’t say in person.

3. We connect privately before we respond publicly.

When we encounter conflicts and misrepresentation in the blogosphere, we make every effort to talk privately and directly to the person(s) involved–or find an intermediary who can do so–before we publish any posts or comments about the issue.

4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.

When someone who is publishing comments or blog postings that are offensive, we’ll tell them so (privately, if possible–see above) and ask them to publicly make amends.
If those published comments could be construed as a threat, and the perpetrator doesn’t withdraw them and apologize, we will cooperate with law enforcement to protect the target of the threat.

5. We do not allow anonymous comments.

We require commenters to supply a valid email address before they can post, though we allow commenters to identify themselves with an alias, rather than their real name.

6. We ignore the trolls.

We prefer not to respond to nasty comments about us or our blog, as long as they don’t veer into abuse or libel. We believe that feeding the trolls only encourages them–”Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it.” Ignoring public attacks is often the best way to contain them.

This seems like a nice policy, and one which could be adapted by local government for use on their blogs to make it clear to users what is acceptable and what isn’t.

O’Reilly also links to the Blogging Wikia, which looks like it could become a useful resource.

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Thanks to David Wilcox for pointing me in the direction of nfp 2.0, Steve Bridger’s blog about ‘How not-for-profits can benefit from blogs and social media’.

A great addition to my blogroll.

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