Blogging from Iraq, a US soldier

One of the great things about blogging is that you get to see things from different perspectives. If you rely solely on the media for your news, you're getting the usual bias. The blogs by Iraqis are interesting. Some usually make our Top Ten list each week. Here is an interesting blog by a U.S. serviceman in Iraq. Unfortunately, some of his most recent blogs have been from the hospital.

"One of the reasons that I continued writing in this journal for so long, was to let people know what it was really like for alot of the soldiers in Baghdad. I tried to give a perspective beyond what we hear about in the media. In these days where you can buy an ANARCHY T-shirt or a Che-Guevara watch at the mall, it's so easy to gt swept up in hte image of a government run by fat old men trying to line their coffers with gold, greasing their oil pumps with blood. It's easy to think that Iraq is just a piece of land that a Jingoistic Presidential Prince wants to hold onto regardless of the human costs.

I hated the way this war started. It took me along time to come to terms with my role as a soldier in Iraq, but with time, I came to realize that although the method was flawed, the result was freedom for the poeple of Iraq for the first time in 30 years. It's been slow going but we've made great strides in getting the country back on it's feet and no one can deny that the Iraqi people will be better off now than they were under Saddam."

Wisdom from a blog

Here's a nice bit of wisdom that is really appropriate for the Christmas season. It comes to us from the Islam 4 Real blog:

"Look to what you don't have and you'll never be happy, but look towards what could be taken away, and you'll be satisfied"

Library blogs

There are an amazing number of library blogs around the world. The fact that two library-related blogs are in our Top Ten list goes to show how active librarians are in the blogging world and how popular library blogs can be (they often have very high Google rankings).

If you're interested in library blogs, Library Weblogs is a listing of library blogs around the world with RSS feeds.

Put a song in your blog

Here's something fun. A site that takes your printed words and converts them to a song made up of "cuts" from famous singers for each word. You can then email the song or place it in a blog. Hard to explain, so try it yourself here.

Blogging defamation

On the downside of blogging, there is always the possibility of being sued. It is easy to tell a friend something like "I think Joe Smith has links to terrorist money laundering." Now, if you put that same thought in a blog and push the "Publish" button, you now have what is literally called in the legal world "publishing" which is a necessary element of defamation.

There is an interesting article in Tech Central Station about the subject of blogging and the potential for liability in the blogging world. In a further twist on the exposure bloggers may have for what they say, how about this: getting sued for what someone says on your blog in a comment? In other words, you didn't say anything at all, but are being sued regardless because of a comment posted by a third party on your blog. This is exactly what happened to Justene Adamec. She has been threatened with suit by the company Infotel based on comments made about the company by commenters on her blog.

A blog for Christmas?

This article in Slashdot about a Christmas gift for grandparents got me thinking. Someone was asking about how you might create a really simple Web site for grandparents where they could post family information and pictures and then make the site a Christmas present. Does it get any easier than Blogger?

Suppose you set up a blog with Blogger, install the perfect template, add several blogs and upload some family pictures. In other words, go ahead and do the small amount of work it takes to get things going. Maybe even put it on a good host or go ahead and pay for BlogSpot Plus (to take care of the picture uploads). Then, on Christmas, you show them the blog site, show them how to post, and then turn over the site password to them. A done deal and something that would probably tickle the heck out of Grandma and Grandpa.

Blogging and Muggles

So, what do the two words have in common? They were both added to the newest CD edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

In case you didn't know, a Muggle is someone who has no magic powers (think "Harry Potter"). The other word you probably already know.

Will Google be the next company you love to hate?

There is an interesting article in the Boston Globe about how companies go from admired to hated at some point in the climb to success. With Google, it seems that perhaps the acquistion of Blogger may be the beginning of that point.

But as Google expands beyond mere search services, it sometimes alienates tech-smart users who were once devotees of the company. Consider Google's acquisition of Blogger, one of the companies that launched the personal weblog craze. It's got Dave Winer climbing the walls. Winer, a Berkman Fellow at the Harvard Law School, founded UserLand Software Inc., maker of the blogging program Radio Userland. Winer says that Google may crush rival blogging systems like Radio Userland.

News coming for Blogger users

There has been quite a bit of concern among Blogger users about the direction Google is taking Blogger. Since the buyout, there has pretty much been a total lack of communication from Blogger. Have you tried emailing Blogger with a question? Forget it. They don't respond.

Things may be changing for the better. Google hired Biz Stone a few weeks ago and apparently plans to set him loose to do what he does best within the Blogger division of Google. Biz was involved early on in the blogging community with Xanga and is the author of one of the only good books out there about blogging.

In response to our complaints about Blogger, Biz had this to say:

I am actually working with the Blogger team here at Google and I agree with you. Getting more information out to our users about what we're working on, how things are going here at Google, and that sort of thing is very important to me. I'm going to send out a Blogger Buzz newsletter with a bunch of info at the end of the month (you can sign up for that at Blogger.com) and I'm looking to add more content to our site on a regular basis.

So, there you have it. A commitment to at least let us know what is going on in the Bloogle world by the end of this month. That means that Biz will have to take some time out from writing his new book on blogging to put together a newsletter for us. We'll be looking forward to it and will let you know what's up as soon as it comes out.

Earthlink to offer blogging

Earthlink has announced that it now will provide blogging as part of its ISP services:

"Additionally, the high-speed PSP features a link to EarthLink's new 'blogging' tool. Web logs (or 'blogs') are personal journals that users post online, covering a variety of topics. Along with 10MB of free Web space and access to Trellix, a free, easy-to-use Web page publishing tool, EarthLink subscribers can get tips on building, publishing and promoting their own blogs."