Mark your diaries as many gurus from different corners of the world will be sharing their stories at Blogtalk Downunder Conference which will be held in Sydney, Australia from May 19th-22. The conference will be hosted by the UTS Centre for Language and Literacy. Also note that Conference organizers are accepting submissions of abstracts until the end of next week and papers by 28 February Among the drawcards are Mark Bernstein whose essay is the biggest hit at the moment Writing for the Living Web. Another speaker was named in UK as one of the Web's "Hot Faces" (right between Beck and Bowie), and Sweden's Internet World ranked her as one of the world's Top Ten Bloggers. She was once Goth Babe of the Week. Rebecca Blood draws karma and cool crowds. The superblogger status goes to Thomas N. Burg, the founder of Blogtalk. Thomas, who swims and lectures at the Danube University Krems, had to issue a press release stating that the Conference was not held in Austria but in Australia. Krems is a delightful city a shortish drive (by Australian standards 80 km) from Vienna or Morava River.
The Blog, The Press, The Media: A Question of Detail and Trust
Richard Lambert discusses the state of journalism in Britain. His general drift is that media businesses should operate with to the same sort of standards for corporate responsibility that are set for other institutions
Although most media groups are happy to make high-minded statements about their commitment to their viewers and readers, only a very few take their corporate responsibilities seriously enough to spell them out in detail, and to disclose the standards against which their editorial decisions should be judged.
Even fewer then report back on how well they have met their key performance indicators. The oil and the chemical industries have not been able to get away with behaviour like this. Why should the media be different?
The media is owned. The blogosphere isn't. We together are building it. The media have to try to get us interested in what they do, but the blogosphere is constructed out of our interests. It's ours not (just) in the sense of ownership but in the sense of what we care about and what we are.
• Guardian Media No Strings Attached [Credits: Onora O'Neill challenges current approaches to accountability, investigates sources of deception in our society and re-examines questions of press freedom. ; The Encyclopedia Britannica is a $350M operation, but Wikipedia is kicking its butt without having a single employee ]
• · Newspapers that charge for their sites
• · · My very great mate Verne Kopytoff of Chronicle fame writes: Before the southern Asian tsunami hit, the PunditGuy blog was an Internet unknown. But after its owner posted video clips of waves turning buildings into splinters, the Web site's modest traffic leaped 500-fold. Bill Nienhuis: Web logs come of age as source of news ; Bloggies 2005
• · · · Photos from Iraq via bloggers
• · · · · Blogging continues its march on the mainstream. It's considered essential to consume a steady diet of weblogs to keep up with what's hot on the Web. Blogger at Work ; [Buzz Index ]
• · · · · · Google revolutionised the internet. Now it is hoping to do the same with our phones. Clearest and sweetest sound on earth coming near you soon Google gears up for a free-phone challenge to BT ; [Google greatly advances its web search by raising the word limit to 32 words. It almost accommodates every letter in the Slavic Alphabet ]