FoxLand » Blogging

Twitter and The Prince

Andrew Fox — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:03:22 +0000

Our friends at The Prince’s Charities have just started tweeting. Take a look at http://twitter.com/powcharities. Follow them and start asking questions!

Taming trolls

Andrew Fox — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:45:31 +0000

Troll: someone who is deliberately aggressive or disruptive in a discussion.

When the new whitehouse.gov went live many people questioned why it wasn’t open to comments and discussion. We have worked on a few projects where this is a very sensitive issue. We’d have loved the comments to have been more open, but issues of the appropriate use of language on sensitive websites could have opened them up to various problems (a subject for a much longer journal entry). That said there have been some intriguing innovations in how to handle commenting on blogs, discussed in this article on Wired.

Blogging and shining shoes

Andrew Fox — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:58:11 +0000

There has been some debate recently about how plausible it is to make money as an independent writer on the web using advertising. Daniel Lyons who used to famously be ‘Fake Steve Jobs’ wrote an article about how becoming rich as a blogger is nigh-on impossible. Two people who do make a living from blogging, Jason Kottke and Andrew Sullivan, have some interesting responses: Kottke has a nice metaphor; while Andrew Sullivan says “I wrote this blog for years as a labor of love. If you expect nothing, especially at the start, you’re doing it for the right reason.”

Memes

Andrew Fox — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:03:16 +0000

Nice couple of articles on The Guardian and The Moderate Voice about one of my favourite websites, Memeorandum. The website scours the web for the most ‘live’ news stories of the moment. These articles are partly interested in how Memeorandum is completely driven by a clever computer-driven algorithm, but intriguingly the company has just decided to start using people to help discover news as they feel it didn’t quite work well enough without them. (Found via Andrew Sullivan)

Sexism and blogging

Andrew Fox — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 12:33:12 +0000

“Women get dismissed in ways that men don’t” – is there a ‘glass ceiling’ to be overcome for women bloggers? More at the New York Times on the BlogHer conference.

Outsourcing your organisation

Andrew Fox — Thu, 01 May 2008 08:29:02 +0000

Jeffrey Zeldman talks about the demise of the personal website:

In the past 5 years or so we have witnessed a change in how people manage their personal websites. 10 years ago people tried hard to show-off with self-consciously cool websites, or odd little pages with hard to read text about their cat on garish backgrounds. Then came blogging were people wrote about their cats every day, but it was still on ‘their site’. Now we’re seeing people feel much less importance in the ownership of their space. MySpace was possibly the start of this trend, but now with Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, YouTube, etc., keeping your own personal space online just seems like too much hassle now.

What Zeldman does not discuss is that this is happening increasingly with companies and organisations too. Whether they have a Facebook page, a corporate Twitter account, video on YouTube, an eBay account for ecommerce, Amazon S3 for storage or tools like Basecamp, Salesforce and Google Documents for their intranets, the de-centralisation of organisations is happening, and we regularly recommend this for clients.

Jakob Neilsen: Prove that you’re an expert…

Andrew Fox — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 07:03:13 +0000

Jakob Neilsen argues that for certain organisations or people, it is better to avoid quickly written blog entries (like this!), and concentrate on longer more in-depth articles. It’s an interesting article, but not for everyone. Various good discussions have been started on the topic, and are worth scanning at The Guardian and Robert Scoble’s blog, who takes it almost personally. We primarily write short posts on subjects that we find relevant to our business and our clients. We would at times like to write longer posts, but find that not only do we not have the time, we also want to be as succinct as possible.