Brett Hutley's Blog » blogging

Blogging as Gardening

brett — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 17:11:21 +0000

You know; blogging is a lot like gardening. Some peoples' blogs have been completely neglected - untended and overgrown with weeds. Mine has become a lot like that. An out-of-date WordPress environment, stale posts overcome with comment spam weeds.

I want to start treating my blog as though I was a gardner tending his garden. Regularly adding new posts. Replying quickly to any comments. Upgrading and improving my blogging environment as I can. I would like to minister to a site that will encourage people to stroll around and smell the flowers.

Blogging and SEO talk by Matt Cutts

Citizen Journalism, social networking and reputation

brett — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:07:22 +0000

Bill Thompson has posted a thoughtful article over at the BBC about the changes that social networking is making to our standards of social interaction. He discusses his own tweeting and live-blogging at conferences, and then talks about the news updates that were tweeted by Tearah Moore during the Fort Hood incident.

Obviously these are two examples that illustrate both the good and bad sides of citizen journalism. The good being closer interaction with the audience, potentially closer exposure to events as they are unfolding and the speed at which events are reported. The bad being that there is no controls over the quality of the information being reported - it may be true, it may not. Also, citizen journalists may unwittingly or deliberately trample over the rights of the people being reported on.

I think that reputation is the panacea for the problems described above. Journalists have a reputation to consider when they are reporting. This keeps them focused on reporting the facts and ethically constrained (obviously something has gone horribly wrong at Fox News). As online reputation becomes more of a consideration for Joe or Jill Plumber, hopefully it will mean they too will be more concerned with "getting it right", as far as their tweets, blog posts, and Facebook updates go.

Blogging and SEO talk by Matt Cutts

brett — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:03:14 +0000

Matt Cutts gave an extremely interesting and dynamic talk at WordCamp about blogging and Search Engine Optimization. Not only was it extremely entertaining, but it contained lots of interesting tidbits about how to increase the PageRank of your site.