Written on April 30, 2008 – 3:28 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
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A blogger from Wales has just learned the difference between ‘Freedom of Speech’ and ‘grossly offensive and menacing messages’. After being arrested and charged with over 19 theft offenses 24 year old Gavin Brent used his personal blog to ‘let of steam’. He wrote that he was being mistreated by the officers who arrested him.
Apparently one of the officers had later told him why one of the arresting officers wasn’t present when Brent was charged: he was at home with his new-born baby. The blogger decided to end his post with a dramatic message:
“P.S. - D.C. Lloyd, God help your new-born baby”
Mr Brent explained to the courts that he simply meant that he hoped that the police officer would treat his new-born baby better than he had treated mr Brent. Detective constable Steve Lloyd, and his wife, read it differently and accused the blogger of threatening them and their child.
Brent claimed “You can write on websites because it’s freedom of speech.” The court disagreed and convicted the blogger for his ‘menacing’ rant and fined him £150 with £364 costs. The original blog entry has been removed but Brent is still blogging about his adventures so far.
It sometimes seems like bloggers can say anything they want on their blogs. The ‘Publish’ button is just one click away and mistakes are easily fixed. Besides, most blogs aren’t read by anyone except he blogger (and his mother?) so who cares what you write? Reality is that your words are out there for anyone to read and often forever. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you can insult, slander or misrepresent subjects. Voicing an opinion and threatening are two very different things.
The fact that you can say and write anything on your blog doesn’t mean you should.
Written on March 18, 2008 – 9:58 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A few weeks ago I wrote that Wordpress isn’t going to be the next social network, as some bloggers like Anne Zelenka claimed. I based this statement on several experiences with co-writers. Sometimes I work with people who are passionate about what they do and want to share their knowledge about a certain matter with the world. Rightfully so, they start blogging. And I’m there to help them out with the first steps of Wordpress.
Most of the times I tell them it’s not that hard to grasp since writing posts is the only thing they are planning to do. Yet when they have a first look at the Dashboard they generally say it doesn’t look simple at all. I get why they say that, since the overabundance of options on the ‘Write’ page can be overwhelming.
Luckily Matt Mullenweg’s team is smart enough to interview Wordpress users and you can tell by looking at the first sneak peek screenshots of the new Wordpress, version 2.5:
The new write screen (..) displays the most common fields in a way that makes posting incredibly easy. Additional options are hidden away until you need them. The new Write screen anticipates the natural flow of the way you write, and is smart enough to remember the way you left it so that your preferred writing environment is always quickly available. The new visual editor even has a handy full-screen mode to help block out distractions while composing your newest post.
They’ve not just gave the Write screen a visual update, it’s the whole Dashboard that looks better. When those new users I was talking about open the Dashboard of the new Wordpress, they just see four tabs:
So Mullenweg might catch up and actually have a Dashboard that might be understandable for people who hardly get Microsoft Office. If he can do that, I’ll change my mind about Wordpress as the next social network. immediately. After a few days of feedback, Mullenweg will set a final release date. Just like him, I can’t wait!
Written on February 19, 2008 – 3:21 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yesterday, Reuters published an article that provides another interesting view on the advantages of blogging. Editors Andrew Dobbie and Sara Ledwith have interviewed several gay Africans and Arabs about how blogs allow them to discuss and describe what they have to hide in daily life. As homosexual acts are illegal in most countries in Africa and the Middle East. Some leaders, like President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even deny the existence of gays.
“If you haven’t heard or seen any gays in Sudan then allow me to tell you ‘You Don’t live In The Real World then,’” Sudanese blogger Ali wrote in a message to other Sudanese bloggers on his blog Black Gay Arab. The blogging scene have become one of the safes ways for suppressed men like Ali to meet. Gug, writer behind the blog GayUganda, told Reuters that he ‘looked around for others until I found others’. Gug: “Oh yes, I do love the Internet, and I guess it is a tool that has made us gay Ugandans and Africans get out of our villages and realize that the parish priest’s homophobia is not universal opinion. Surprise, surprise!”
This blog was created to allow access to the psyche of me, who represents the thousands of us who are unrepresented
Next to supportive comments, the gay bloggers also receive hostile messages. Yet they keep up their diaries and news blogs, proving to their fellow citizens that African and Arab gays do exist. As a Kenyan man says on Ali’s blog: “The Kenyan gay man is a myth and you may never meet one in your lifetime. However, I and many others like me do exist; just not openly. This blog was created to allow access to the psyche of me, who represents the thousands of us who are unrepresented.”
Written on February 6, 2008 – 6:42 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Technorati currently tracks 112.8 million blogs, an incredible number but also rather abstract. A great many blogs are dead and most are written in a language, most of us don’t understand. Korean, Chinese, Japanese - to name a few. Fact is though that there’s overwhelming amount of blogposts to read. What we see more and more though is a filtering and professionalizing process in the blogosphere. An increasing number of people seems to be joining blog collectives and we’re all getting more serious about this new style of writing.
This has advantages: quality is increasing, people check their facts more often and the journalistic approach (interviews, analysis) is getting more common. Just giving your opinion isn’t good enough anymore. Readers want arguments and a (wo)man with a vision.
A big disadvantage that comes with this development is that the blogosphere might get a bit boring. We think about what we post for a long time. Recently, problogger Darren Rowse summed up 13 questions you have to answer before you post an article. Of course, this increases the quality of post yet thinking processes like this might lead to over-considered articles, in which the spontaneity and guts are gone. I mean, where are the rebels in professional blogging? Don’t we all read Arrington for his no-mercy approach?
Good news for everybody who feels the same way like I do, Utterz is about to bring the excitement back in blogging. It’s a service that allows you to instantly blog your experiences, thoughts and ideas with your mobile. Sort of like an extended Twitter, with more media-types. Utterz mashes the voice, video, pictures and text you call or send in together and creates an ‘Utter’ that can immediately update your existing web pages on sites like Blogger, WordPress, Facebook, LiveJournal and MySpace. Next Web Tipr from the UK David Petherick recommended this service to me, check out his profile at Utterz.
Although Wordpress (amongst others) already allows you to send in messages via email, there wasn’t yet a service who made impulsive blogging this easy. Utterz lowers the barrier for bloggers to send in material, which might lead to more raw and interesting material. When you don’t have time for all the regular considerations, something beautiful or exciting might slip through that normally wouldn’t. That will for sure make the problogosphere more edgy and diverse.
[WebTipr: David Petherick, United Kingdom]
Written on December 24, 2007 – 6:13 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
At last years Le Web conference in Paris a large part of the audience was not amused about the sudden appearance of first one, then two and finally three politicians on stage. Worse, they were French politicians. My main memory is one of them saying ‘Le Web est très importante’ which translates to ‘The Web is very important’. I remember thinking ‘I didn’t travel to Paris, and paid good money, to hear a politician telling ME that the web is important!’. And it seemed that more people felt this way judging from the hundreds of blogpost following that conference.
One big concern that was voiced was that these politicians were mainly interesting (if at all) to French people. For an organisation that aims to have a worldwide audience it is kind of strange to focus on local politics. Of-course the French consider France the center of the world so that explains that.
Now Techcrunch has moved into politics too. They want to ‘provide a voice for digital policy and technology issues’ which is a noble effort. They are obviously doing a very good job at it and have gained a lot of mainstream press too.
But just as at LeWeb in Paris, as an international citizen, I feel awkwardly left out. Sure, in the end, the US elections will influence my life too. But as a non US citizen I don’t don’t find it an interestingly enough subject for an international technology blog, or conference. In a way TechCrunch appears to say ‘We focus on American readers’ and this message is not very welcoming to people not from America.
It isn’t that I blame Techcrunch about their interest in the elections. They do have a large and influential following and can have an effect. And politics is a rich subject that can generate a lot of content fast. As Will Rogers said “There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you”. Exchange ‘humorist’ for ‘blogger’ and you get the point.
Coincidentally Techcrunch is getting mixed up in a whole different sort of politics: copyright politics. It seems that Micah L. Sifry is not amused by Techcrunch choice of words when they picked ‘Tech President Primaries’ as a subtitle for their primaries. Sifry is Executive Editor and co-Founder of Personal Democracy Forum, a website that writes about the changing democracy in America, and he claims they started the ‘TechPresident Primaries‘ before Techcrunch came up with the idea. In a (now published) letter to Michael Arrington he insists Techcrunch rename the ‘Techcrunch Tech President Primaries’ and ‘acknowledge techPresident.com and the work we’ve been doing to get the presidential campaigns to be more internet-savvy’.
Sounds like a serious issue?
Not really.
As often happens in politics Sifry retracted his words the next day and claimed he had no choice but to ‘make our concerns public’ and ‘meant the phrase as a metaphor, not a formal legal accusation’.
I wouldn’t mind if the old saying ‘In Polite Company People Never Talk about Religion, Politics, Sex, or Money’ could be aplied a bit more to technology blogs and conferences.
Except for the Money & Sex part.
No, forget the Sex part too because as Ronald Reagan said:
“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”
I’m sure that the day after Reagan said this he also said ‘ I just wanted to make our concerns public and meant the phrase as a metaphor’.
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