Tag: blogging

Bob Piper back Online

With Bob Piper back on line I can now return to barely noticing his thoughts as they drift past on my feedreader. Chicken Yoghurt has the best summary of what has transpired with a list of 190+ bloggers who got aeriated about lawyers silencing bloggers who’d said nothing about their clients. Ministry of Truth is thoughtful and thorough about what this might mean for the UK, blogging and libel laws:

Hosting blogs in United States is a useful workaround but one that is far from being the ideal solution. What would be better would be for Britain’s framework of libel and defamation laws to be brought out much more into line with those of United States of America – and a proper constitutional law guaranteeing freedom of speech would be even better still.

We need to change the law, it’s as simple as that. But the $64,000 question is how?

There is a simple change that could easily be made that would improve things almost immediately by freeing UK-based web hosts from the threat of litigation as nominal publishers of third-party content hosted on their server…

Read the whole post for suggestions on how bloggers might nullify juries in libel cases.The Bondian villain is captured in the cartoon from Ralf Zeigermann.

Upyourend – getting your blogpost on a map of Brum or GEOTAGGING 2

Jon Bounds mentioned his new thingy upyourend on facebook which led me to ask the question how do you geotag a blog post? Jon’s given us this answer.

So decided to get started by geotagging my recent podcast on Clean Medina – the Jihad on Litter in Small Heath. Indeed geotagging is a potentially a powerful tool for neighbourhood news and local blogging. It should also help public bodies keep track on who is sayng what about which neighbourhoods.

I added Geo as a plugin for WordPress (this blog still runs on 1.5 – something Jon and I will probably change soon) which asks for the Longitude and Latitude – and then adds though to your RSS feed. Now how do you find this. It turns out that lat and Long on UK postcodes are protected as the intellectual property of the post office. Jon suggests using something called an API key (which made my head implode). I found that if you tag a location on a google map and then look for directions to that location the latitude and longitude turn up – see the top left hand side of this image of the location for my blog post.

In this case I’ve tagged the post upyerbrum – which should feed through onto upyerend, but if that wasn’t the case upyerend would need to look to your feed – so you need to email Jon and tell him where your bimringham based geotagged feed is.
So there you go. I presume this will soon appear on upyourend. Oh and er will the site allow us to filter by most recent? Yes i know – it’s just something you knocked up at 2am and can I back off with the questions and requests please. Thanks Jon.

Alicia Silverstone, nakedness and Peta – the dream online/offline charity campaign?

alicia-silverstone-peta

I’m agog at how effectively the US/UK non-profit People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is at using online media combined with conventional marketing techniques.

They have produced a gorgeous looking advert (which is only available through their site and yes it is right by a donate button and some very slick lifestyle advice to encourage you to become vegetarian) showing a naked Alicia Silverstone (I’d never heard of her before – but then I was barely aware of Peta!).

The ad also has that other critical element a simple, concrete, surprising and compelling story: Stop eating animals and you too could look like this!

All that should be compelling enough, but what has made this such a wonderful campaign though is that the nudity has led to a TV station in houston banning the ad, as they explain on their blog:

We had picked Houston because it consistently ranks in the top ten least healthy cities in the country, so we figured they could use some good diet advice (honestly, who in their right mind would turn down friendly diet advice from the beautiful Alicia Silverstone?), but Houstonians need not despair. As PETA President Ingrid Newkirk puts it,

“Houston viewers can still go to PETA.org and get an eyeful, not only of the stunning Ms. Silverstone, but also of our free Vegetarian Starter Kit—chock full of delicious recipes—that will make them drool for an entirely different reason.”

It’s not the first time Peta has used nudity – they also pull a wonderful stunt each year just before the Pamplona Bull run by staging the Running of the Nudes (thanks catnip for the post which set me off on this) and other people have disrobed for them. If it all sound too frivolous then why not look at the stories they tell with video on petatv an their youth campaign in the uk called peta2 which uses the tagline “question authority”.

I do though have to add two qualifiers. I couldn’t get the embed video on your blog code to work for me and is it possible that I’m only really enthusing about this because I’m a bloke? That aside I’d love to see some figures about how far this effort helps fund raising and changes some behaviour, but I expect this substantial investment will pay off.