3 ways of maintaining privacy

silhouettesHer Majesty The Queen of England serves as an inspirational role model in terms of personal privacy. Despite being in the public eye for 60 years, she has managed to keep her personal opinions to herself. Almost nobody knows, for example, what her favourite tea is (although Smokey Earl Grey has been hinted at). Yet there are many people who seem to announce to the world each time they blow their nose!

The balance between public and private is, of course, a personal choice, and one made more difficult by other people openly talking about one’s activities or tagging one’s photos, and much standard business advice. But if you do want to be fairly private while maintaining a strong online presence, here are some suggestions. You may like to share and discuss these with students, who are also striving to get this balance correct.

Read More

If this, then that

Here’s a web application that’s potentially very useful. IFTTT lets you create your own automated actions using a range of social networking tools. I’ve been messing around with it only for about an hour, so I haven’t thoroughly explored all it has to offer, but already I can see it will prove to have been an excellent investment in time.

The logic of the way it works is as follows:

Read More

Review of The Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers

The aim of this book, written by Darren Rowse and Glenn Murray, is to help you write better blog posts. However, “better” in this context refers to generating more visitors to your blog rather than “just” improving your writing skills. The idea is a simple one: why not identify the key elements of successful blogging, and then provide a tool by which to measure how a particular blog post has done? That’s exactly what the book aims to do.
Read More

The Transparency Initiative

I recently attended a Westminster eForum seminar about PR and journalism, where I met Dr Martin Moore, of the Media Standards Trust. In his 4 minute talk, Martin mentioned the Trust’s involvement in something called The Transparency Initiative. The Trust has teamed up with the Web Science Research Initiative for this grant-funded work. I caught up with Martin a few days ago and we discussed it. Here’s the situation which, as either a citizen, a teacher or a blogger you will understand only too well. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between commercial and, for want of a better word, factual, content in the news.
Read More

The power of blogs and the perils of email

I originally wrote this article on 13th April 2009. Although the story that inspired it is no longer news (although the problem it relates to, about losing data, hasn’t gone away), I think that the interplay and rivalry between “mainstream media” and blogging is still interesting. This has been brought into sharp focus by the withdrawing from blogging by two political bloggers.I think when investigative journalism is done well, such as Watergate, the Expenses Scandal, it is second to none. But increasingly I find myself frustrated by “flimsy” reporting in the press.

Read More

Found on the web: 02/17/2011 (a.m.)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.