Blog Challenge: Write a Political Post

This week’s blog challenge is: Write a political blog post. Studs Terkel recently referred to the United States as having “National Alzheimer’s Disease”, forgetting their past so they can not only repeat their mistakes, but regressing back to the childhood stages, losing all the benefits of its amazing “growth”, both as a society and government. […]

Blogs and Conspiracy Theories

Ian of Letters from Home asked me about my article series on the Blog Herald about conspiracy theories and blogs, wondering why I was doing such a series: …what’s the point of this series on conspiracy theories? Why encourage people to muddy the waters further? Is it all in the name of generating hits, traffic […]

WordCamp Israel October 25 with Lorelle

WordCamp Israel is October 25, 2007, in Tel Aviv, and I am the keynote speaker! I will be doing two sessions, one covering Blogging Tips and the other on WordPress Tips. Space is limited and registration is filling up fast, so get signed up for this free day long conference now! Information on WordCamp Israel […]

What Have You Done Lately? Much?

In recently honoring 100,000 Edublogs, I took a new look at what James Farmer has done with WordPressMU. His educational free blog services now host more than 100,000 bloggers, educators and students. James started with Edublogs.org and in two years, has expanded it to include learnerblogs for school students, uniblogs.org for university and college students, […]

Blogging and Social Networking as a Teenager

By Douglas Bell Today is the end of Lorelle’s first month of celebrating two years of WordPress.com and Lorelle on WordPress, and I really want to say congratulations to her. However, while this past month has had many articles on blog writing, SEO, web design, blogging personally and for profit, and of course, a number […]

Can The DMCA Be Used Against You If Someone Doesn’t Like What You Blog?

According to the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) Contract Watch, public features are misusing the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which is designed to protect copyrights on the web. The announcement references a recent Electronic Frontier Foundation press release about a suit brought against a defendant which used the DMCA to request […]

Are You Blogging Your Passion or Blogging to Blog?

Watching a recent episode of Battlestar Galactica called “Dirty Hands”, I was struck by the wonderful portrayal of a class society, one ruled by hierarchy and tradition rather than by freedom and passion. I have many friends raised within countries which still play by these rules, where you are and do what your father or […]

Silence is a Memoriam, Not a Reason to Stop Blogging

Regarding my public announcement of the One Day of Blog Silence Event, I want to share a personal story. A few days before Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) in Israel, I was warned that when I heard the air raid sirens I wasn’t to be afraid. I was to stop whatever I was doing and […]

Blog Building: Who Controls Your Blog? You? Your Host?

Do You Own Your Website? by Healthy Web Design takes a good look at the hidden pain and suffering and control that comes from choosing a cheap web host for your blog compared to making a conscious business decision on how to host your blog. It’s true, companies such as Yahoo!, SiteBuilder, and Homestead offer […]

Aboutus.org: A Wiki Directory With Every Website Listed

TechCrunch discussed “AboutUs: A Wiki About Every Website” recently. Portland, Oregon based AboutUs announced this week that it has closed a Series A round of funding and raised $1 million. The site is a wiki directory of web sites, mostly populated automatically but with a healthy amount of traffic and a growing number of edits […]

Searching for Blogs and Blogging Resources on DMOZ-Google Open Directory

While I wasn’t looking, it appears DMOZ, the “largest human-edited directory on the web” is now in the hands of Google. Still, it’s a fascinating place to explore and search for all kinds of information and resources in a directory catalog form rather than just searching. Like a phone book, your search begins by categorized […]

Editing Your Blog Comments

I’ve written a lot about comments, how to handle them, respond to them, and some guidelines for posting comments. One aspect of comments rarely covered indepth is the issue of editing your comments. Not “your” comments left on other blogs, but the comments you receive on your blog. As a general rule, you can judge […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Blogging About Bloggers

I’ve had fun over the past year blogging about bloggers. The first batch of bloggers I blogged about were the first bloggers on WordPress.com, followed by bloggers blogging about Hurricane Katrina, which was of special interest to me since I was in its direct path. A fun article on bloggers blogging about unusual topics was […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Blogger’s Rights and the Risks of Blogging

The issues of protection for bloggers, bloggers rights, and copyright protection for web content is still an evolving issue. As more people find freedom of expression in blogging, other people seem to find more excuses to stop or control not just what they say but how they say it. There is even a guidebook for […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Blog Writing

Writing up the one year anniversary review of articles I’ve written about searching and search engines, I ran across this interesting bit I wrote in “How Google Ranks Websites”: Spelling is still important. Not that Google’s patented page ranking process includes a spell checker – words that are not recognized get dumped. If misspelled keywords […]