Holtz Communications + Technology

If the blog-journalism war is over (or was stupid to begin with), nobody told Nick Coleman. The columnist from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has launched an outright war against bloggers, warning other journalists that nothing good can come from blogging and that they need to be aware of blogs and prepared to fire back at blog posts.

Coleman’s comments—and the story of how he came to…

Neville just made a point he and I have discussed before. He frequently publishes items to his blog so he can recall the information later. It’s a kind of personal institutional memory. In employee communications circles, blogs are being touted for (among other things) the record that’s created around projects. There’s no reason the same idea can’t apply to an individual. I find I often search…

I’m sitting in Neville Hobson’s “Blogging 101” session at the New Communications Forum in Napa, California. The question arose (as it so often does): What distinguishes a blog from a message board? Much has been written about the distinction, and you identify many different characteristics (including the friendly web interface). But from where I sit, the key difference is control. On a message board,…

Organized labor has always been Net-savvy, taking early advantage of e-mail and the World Wide Web. I recall around 1995 when Charles Pizzo, who specializes in labor-oriented communications, presented a session at a conference in which he displayed some online tactics that revealed a level of sophistication that outpaced the businesses for which their members worked.

It’s a matter of perspective when…

The rising profile of blogging ethics has followed a predictable path:

1. Some bloggers engage in questionable ethical behavior
2. Bloggers discuss the question of ethics among themselves
3. The public profile of blogs is raised during the 2004 US presidential election
4. The discussion picks up steam. Some solutions are presented
5. More stories of ethical misbehavior are reported
6. The tsunami raises blogs’ profile even more
7. More stories of ethical misbehavior are…

While many continue to tout the benefits of the “nofollow” tag, designed to foil comment spammers, a parody site has appeared that lists scheme’s drawbacks. “Link Condom” is just a single page (so far, at least) that offers eight “features” of the rel tag under the slogan, “Stop the spread of viral link popularity today!!”