The Russian entrepreneur Alexander Mamut has bought the US blogging website LiveJournal. Its many Russian users are worried that the Kremlin loyalist will use his ownership to censor the blog. Helen Womack and Will Stewart report Russian oligarch invades the blogosphere
Can we change the heart of literature? It is the power that won't corrupt: Authors experiment with online
Musicians are experimenting with downloadable tracks and “pay what you want” business models, so why not authors? At least one popular writer, Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, says that pirated versions of his books have caused sales of physical copies to soar, and several authors are experimenting with offering chapters or even entire books online.
The latest is author Neil Gaiman, whose books include Coraline and Sandman. According to Boing Boing co-founder Cory Doctorow, Gaiman's publisher has given him the green light to offer a freely downloadable version of one of his books, and now he’s trying to decide which one to offer. He’s asked readers and fans to vote for the book they want released on his blog.
• Neil Gaiman ; [The old journalistic standards still apply," Miller says. "Don't make bad decisions and you won't end up on the cover of the New York Times. Today, if a manager is a jerk, somebody will write about it on a blog. In the end, it could breed better management." [ at Dooce.com ; ]
• · When you think of blogs, you might envision musings about sports, politics, and the evening news. Taxes, assessment meetings, or local development probably seem a lot less suited to the blogosphereCity manager gets his word out on a blog; An uninhabitable world for women: the new era of mass pornography consumption.The digital age becomes a dark age for women
• · Tax Lady Roni Deutch is hoping to help taxpayers reduce their tax liabilities by blogging on five tax-free Valentine Day gifts. Ms. Deutch is also helping taxpayers stay informed on the tax difference between being single and married as thousands across the country are likely get engaged in the next few days. Tax Lady Roni Deutch Blogs ; The battle of the books has been lost; the revolution has already happened. Now we must teach teachers how to deal with the consequences. Playing catch-up with digital realities
• · · Well, we may not have the runaway double-digit inflation of the 1970s BUT … Blog Roll — If It Isn’t Stagflation, What Is It? ; Why is culture important? Is it because the cement of social cohesion, like friendship, is the bond of common experiences? Australia: a nation at risk
• · · · · It is ironic that the growth of one of the most powerful means of publication of human thought had largely remained unhyped untill "Salam Pax" appeared on the scene during the build up to the Iraq war in 2004. Salam Pax was an anonymous person who provided rather descriptive though journalistically imperfect and unconventional narratives about life on the streets of Baghdad. He published these Web logs (blog) on a rather non-descript website. Soon enough, the site hosting these blogs crashed under the stress of tremendous traffic. Then again, when the tsunamis struck in South Asia last year, a handful of blogs became rallying points for information collection, distribution and interaction. Within hours, people from around the world converged on the few blogs that were highlighted by major new channels, looking for information and providing updates to the community at large. Robert Scoble points to Fortune's article on corporate blogging -- "Why There's No Escaping the Blog." It's a pretty long piece and pretty well done, too. Some nice info on how Scoble's honesty is helping to improve Microsoft's reputation: Fortune magazine ran an article three years ago when Robert and Israel gave Cold River lots of oxygen, "Why there's no Escaping the Blog," calling out how freewheeling bloggers can boost a company's product, or destroy it. The article cites the blog search-engine and measurement firm Technorati as estimating 23,000 new blogs are created each day! The author has cited numerous cases where large corporations have been influenced or impacted by the sheer force of public opinion expressed through blogs on public domain.
Why there's no Escaping the Blog ; So, if blogs can garner attention in theaters of war, natural disasters and public opinion, they can be put to use in the world of parliament Why Congress doesn’t blog
• · · · · · Metcalf’s Law posits that value of a network grows exponentially with the addition of connections. Left unfettered, network nodes reproduce like rabbits on espresso. Think, for example, of the hyper growth of the internet, the web, MySpace, YouTube, and FaceBook. Once business networks take hold, expect them to grow like topsy, too. Moreover, the denser a network, the faster its cycle time. More connections make it quicker to get from one node to another. Blogging Teams Together: Creating Interaction Vortexes; The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes, Stephen Colbert, the Manchester Guardian, Learning Circuits, and other leading voices can’t stop talking about Web 2.0. You’ve read the stories; the web is now the read/write web. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of 9.1 million articles in 253 languages, written entirely by volunteers. Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr are growing faster than the web in its meteoric growth phase. There are 70 million logs online, and 120,000 new logs are created every day (that’s about 1.4 new blogs per second). These phenomena are global; only 35 percent of all blogs are in English. Media Dragons on Google