Dave

Bloggers will rescue the right

Iain Duncan Smith thinks blogging can help the Tories win the election!

For decades the national conversation in most western countries has been directed by a few talking heads. Newspapers play important roles but all the evidence suggests that broadcasters have possessed the greatest potential to frame public debate. British politicians have known that communicating their message depends upon getting the nod from a small number of powerful figures in the broadcast media.

The editor of BBC1’s six o’clock news bulletin can make a minister’s day by putting his department’s latest announcement at the front of the bulletin. Hearing Huw Edwards say something positive about that afternoon’s policy launch will even put a smile on Alastair Campbell’s face.

But all of this looks set to change because of the blogosphere. Blogging is a geeky expression for how people use online logs, or diaries, to share their opinions. If a weblog is interesting and informed enough it can reach millions of people at zero cost. Karl Rove, the man George Bush described as the architect of his re-election, recently said that the dominance of America’s mainstream media is coming to an end. And Rove credits the Davids of the blogosphere for the humbling of the old media Goliaths. After decades of centralisation, Rove believes that the national conversation is being democratised.

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Bloggers will rescue the right

Principles of Good Blogging

From the Common Craft blog:

1. Write what you know. Everyone is an expert in a small number of things.
2. Listen. The mythology of blogging is about putting things into the world, but the other part of that is hearing the world- listening. Listen, then write. If you run out to the world with your message without listening, you have a good chance of being wrong.
3. Link often. You owe it to your readers to link to others. Doing lots of linking is likely the single best way to get readers.
4. Post often. Like many things, the way to get good is to practice, plus more posts means more readers.
5. Correct yourself. Bloggers are different when we’re wrong, we can undo the damage when we publish. We can react in a way that makes it better.
6. Generalize. Almost everything starts more general and moves to specific.
7. Flame judiciously. One of the things that gives conversation flavor is anger. He sees no reason not to share your feelings. Reasonable people never change the world.
8. Spell-check. The quality matters, though Marc Canter disagrees, so does Jeremy Wright.
9. Look good.
10. Balance hubris and humility- arrogance smells- it stinks and drives readers away.
11. Be Brief. It’s hard to write a short entry
12. Be intense. A cool, dispassionate narrow tone, almost never works.
13. Don’t tell secrets. The blogosphere is not a million writers, it’s a million listeners. If you post something secretive, people will know, like high school- except the web never forgets.
14. Don’t ruin your life. There are a lot of ways you can get in trouble. The question is, why is the media writing about people getting fired for blogging? Think they are worried?
15. Don’t blog on command. People shouldn’t be pushed to blog. The people that should blog will blog.
16. Late add: Be sincere
17. Late add: Never Lie
18. Late add: Write for pleasure

Interview with Ishiguro

Continuing the coverage of his new novel, Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro is interviewed in today’s Observer.

From his semi-detached house in suburban Golders Green, in north London, Kazuo Ishiguro has made himself an architect of singular, self-enclosed worlds. His writing traps us inside strange skulls. He spends, he says, around five years on each of his books and the first couple of these years, each time, involves little circumnavigations of the imaginative space of his novel, marking boundaries, testing structures, making himself at home. All of his quietly unsettling, intimate vantages have foundations in the voices that narrate them and he spends a good deal of time, too, ‘auditioning’ these voices, listening to different possibilities, before he settles on one.

cover of 'never let me go'

John Self reviews Never Let Me Go on Palimpsest here.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel Never Let Me Go comes weighted and freighted with anticipation, particularly for me. As you know from the above I don’t believe any of his books would rate less than four-and-a-half out of five on some notional scale nicked from Amazon. Never Let Me Go continues that tradition, though I found in the end it was closer to the four side of four-and-a-half than some of the others…

Email as database?

BBC has an article along similar lines to those I mentioned here.

“If a friend is excited about a concert and that gives me an idea for a birthday gift, I will store the info on e-mail,” says Georges Harik, the man in charge of search-engine Google’s Gmail service.

Stuart Anderson, Microsoft’s Hotmail business manager in the UK, keeps online shopping receipts in his mailbox in case he has to query anything later.

“People are keeping a lot more information in their e-mail accounts for retrieval at a later date,” says Yahoo!

Web-based e-mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL Mail on the Web are becoming databases by default as a growing number of people use them, to store data and photos so they can retrieve them from anywhere.

Big interview with Frank Rijkaard

From the Guardian today:

“I try to stay in the moment,” Frank Rijkaard says quietly as he studies the thick cloud of smoke hanging over his head. “Whether the moment is one of joy or difficulty or just sitting here right now, in my office, talking to you, I always think it’s best to stay in the moment. You know what I mean?”

Rijkaard takes a big drag, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs, staring quizzically at me through narrowed eyes. He exudes the kind of cool nonchalance that makes you wonder if he’s making a profound existential point or simply relishing his latest fag in the long chain he lights in his dingy office in the bowels of Camp Nou. He’s smart enough to do both.

Guardian Unlimited Football | News | Big interview with Frank Rijkaard

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