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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (106873)	7/21/2003 11:32:52 AM
From: Rascal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

How did you feel about what Tony Blair said about the Kyoto Treaty and the UN? Rascal

To: LindyBill who wrote (106873)	7/21/2003 12:51:28 PM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Just musing over things, if you are going to make a career limiting move, a straightforward blunder is probably the least damaging. It's not as if Tony Blair is the first politician ever to tell fibs to the public. It's just when lots of lives are on the line, the expectation is a good professional standard by our politicians. Getting caught lifting 10 yr old reports off the web, doctoring them, then passing them off as recent intelligence is simply not on -lol- I agree the BBC lost this round, and I'm not exactly unhappy about that -g-. btw I noticed when the BBC missed a real story on the ME, it was usually the whole British Press too, so it is a widespread problem here. Looks as if Tony Blair has many friends in the USA, very few showing here though. He is going to have to pull something out of the hat to get over the Kelly case. Meanwhile... the drum beat of the bloggers is taking over -g- news.bbc.co.uk You know a web trend has reached a high pitch of popularity when AOL starts including it in its basic software. But can blogs be truly mainstream? Last week the net giant, which has 34 million customers, announced that it would be including web logging, or blogging, tools in AOL 9, the next version of the software people use to log on to their AOL account. Instead of calling them blogs, however, it will call them AOL Journals, partly because a survey revealed that many users found the word "blog" confusing. AOL users are not alone in being confused about blogs, what they are for and the impact they might have. Big news At its simplest a blog is a web-based, regularly updated journal. They also typically have lots of web links to other blogs they like or share their world view. Some are updated many times a day, some less frequently and some only when their owner feels they have something to say. Some are about a blogger's life, others focus on a particular subject, and the writers of some simply note or comment on the events they find interesting or irritating. It has been said that blogs will become an unofficial watchdog for the media and stop journalists getting away with sloppy research and writing. Certainly blogs are starting to become an unofficial source of eye-witness news. Last week an accident at the Los Angeles farmers' market which left nine dead was covered by LA bloggers. One blog in particular, waxy.org, detailed the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. Many other events have had a blogger or two in attendance who have provided constant coverage. Some predict that blogs will replace media comment sections entirely because many bloggers are far more knowledgeable about a subject than many of the paid pundits writing columns. Earlier this month, several British bloggers went to Parliament to convince politicians that they should take up their blogging tools to forge closer links with their electorate. Popular tool But some feel that the real power of blogs is what they can do for everyday web users rather than those with a particular political, moral or social agenda. "If you want to reach millions you book an ad on TV," said Stefan Glanzer, one of the founders of blogging system 20six. "If you want to reach one person you use e-mail or the telephone. "But if you want to reach between 5 and 500 people a blog is the ideal tool to communicate," he said. Blogs are acting as alternative news feeds He said that blogs were an ideal way to foster links among like-minded people and provided an easy way to get feedback and comment that was missing from many other ways of communicating. "It's all about personal publishing," said Howard Yates, managing director of Port 41 which makes the Tongue Way blogging software. He said that the early blogs tended to talk all about blogging but now it is broadening out into a much more inclusive phenomenon. "Many of the people blogging are not necessarily looking for an audience," he said. He said that a lot of the blogs created with Tongue Wag were being done by people who were part of small communities, such as football teams, or friends who were spread around the world who wanted a common space they could use to keep in touch. He said one of the more popular uses of the blog was by people travelling round the world who used a blog to let family and friends follow their progress. Mr Yates said part of the popularity of blogs was because the software used to create and maintain them was much easier to use than other webpage making tools. "To get yourself set up with a website and put interesting content on it there's a lot of hurdles to go through," he said. "Blogs are the democratisation of publishing," he said.