#1 of 10 ways to become a better blogger
by Deb Shinder
Takeaway:
If nobody bothers to read your blog posts, you might as well just scribble your thoughts on a cocktail napkin. But if you truly want to share your ideas and opinions, check out these pointers for crafting an engaging blog and building a loyal following.
#1: Define your purpose
The first step in creating a better blog is to ask yourself why you’re blogging. What’s the purpose of your blog? Is it to be a public version of the personal diary, recounting your experiences, thoughts, and emotions? Is it more of a journal, where you preserve ideas and outline projects? Is it a social site, for interacting with friends, sharing links, getting to know people? Is it an editorial page, for commentary on politics, social trends, and current events? Is it a professional or hobbyist site, for sharing conceptual and how-to information about some field of study or work (e.g., aviation, computer programming, or photography)?
Sure, you can have “just a blog” that combines elements of all of these, but you may find that readers prefer you to specialize. If you want to write about your field of expertise sometimes and your favorite political party at other times, it might be beneficial to maintain two separate blogs to avoid alienating or boring your readers half the time.
Speaking of readers, an important element in defining your purpose is to know your audience. That will help you determine the voice and writing style that’s appropriate for those you’re addressing. You probably wouldn’t use the same style when writing to stock car race fans that you’d use if your audience were made up primarily of stock market brokers.
In keeping with your blog’s purpose, you should have a defined theme. For example, if the purpose of your blog is to express political opinions, the theme might be to promote a low-tax, nonintrusive government.
Complete article at:
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10881_11-6120257.html?tag=nl.e138
This article is also available as a PDF download.
http://downloads.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=260220 (registration required)
==========
WAL-MART’S RAPIDLY SHRINKING BENEFITS
By Cindy Zeldin, TomPaine.com
The mega-store is sinking to a new low by further limiting health insurance options for its lowest-paid employees.
==========
Iraqi Fatalities: Truth and Consequences
Last week at a news conference, President Bush said that a new study on deaths in Iraq is “not credible.” The White House and Pentagon have cited much lower figures without clear documentation.
LES ROBERTS, tmparson@jhsph.edu
Co-author of the study “Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey” published last week in The Lancet, Roberts was with Johns Hopkins University when he
co-authored the study but has just taken a post at Columbia University.
A PDF of the study, which gives a breakdown of its methodology, is at:
http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf .
Roberts said today: “We estimate that there have been 655,000 excess deaths since the invasion of Iraq, and we’re 95 percent sure it’s between about 400,000 and 950,000. We estimate that 600,000 were violent deaths. We found violence from coalition forces continuing to increase but is becoming a smaller share of the cause of death. Our method was to sample 47 random clusters in 16 governorates, with every cluster consisting of 40 households. Information on deaths before the invasion from these households was gathered so we could establish a baseline. … In terms of the reaction from our governmental and military leaders: at a moment when we as a society should be showing contrition, downplaying the death toll seems particularly imprudent.”
From: Institute for Public Accuracy
==========
Surprise, another corrupt republican, Missouri governor Matt Blunt son of Missouri congressman Roy Blunt:
At the behest of two of his largest campaign contibutors, he tried to do a backdoor sale of Missouri student loan assets. When one of the board members blew the whistle, he went backdoor again to get the board member fired. Now this newspaper has sworn depositions that prove their claim.
At:
http://www.showmenews.com/2006/Oct/20061015News001.asp
From: Poacnewsletter
==========
Suggesting that both Clinton and Bush buckled on NK nuke program, Russert ignored halt of plutonium production under Clinton
NBC host Tim Russert suggested that both the Bush and Clinton administrations “talk[ed] tough with North Korea” but allowed its nuclear program “to go forward.” But Russert ignored the fact that North Korea did not produce any plutonium, nor build or test any nuclear bombs, during Clinton’s eight years in office.
Read more
http://mediamatters.org/items/dailyemail/200610150002?src=other
==========
ACCURACY OF REPORT ON VIDEO NEWS RELEASES AFFIRMED: CMD ISSUES FULL REBUTTAL OF RTNDA CLAIMS
by Diane Farsetta
October 9, 2006 ? The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released today a full rebuttal of claims made against its April 2006 report, “Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed.” The report tracked television stations’ use of video news releases (VNRs), narrated pre-packaged segments produced by public relations firms for their clients. The report documented 77 television stations airing VNRs or related materials; not once did stations disclose the client behind the segment. The report led the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch an investigation of the 77 stations named, in August 2006.
Last week, the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA), through the law and lobby firm Wiley Rein & Fielding, urged the FCC to drop its investigation. RTNDA alleged that the investigation has had “a chilling effect” on TV newsrooms. RTNDA also issued a critique of CMD?s report that misrepresented and distorted the substance of the report.
CMD’s full, point-by-point rebuttal of the RTNDA critique is available online at:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/5282
For the rest of this story, visit:
==========
Bush’s Useful Idiots
Tony Judt on the Strange Death of Liberal America
Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?
It wasn’t always so. On 26 October 1988, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement for liberalism. Headed ‘A Reaffirmation of Principle’, it openly rebuked Ronald Reagan for deriding ‘the dreaded L-word’ and treating ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’ as terms of opprobrium. Liberal principles, the text affirmed, are ‘timeless. Extremists of the right and of the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.’
The advertisement was signed by 63 prominent intellectuals, writers and businessmen: among them Daniel Bell, J.K. Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Irving Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style themselves ‘liberal intellectuals’ are otherwise engaged. As befits the new Gilded Age, in which the pay ratio of an American CEO to that of a skilled worker is 412:1 and a corrupted Congress is awash in lobbies and favours, the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
…
Complete article at:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n18/judt01_.html
Tony Judt directs the Remarque Institute at New York University. He is the author of The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French 20th Century and, most recently, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945.
==========
Nobel Winning Economists: Minimum Wage Boost Will Help Economy
by James Parks, Oct 11, 2006
To hear employers and congressional Republicans tell it, raising the federal minimum wage from a paltry $5.15 an hour to $7.25 will cost jobs and drive the economy down. But 650 economists, including several Nobel Laureates, today said that’s just not true. In fact, raising the minimum wage will have little effect on jobs and will help lift some low-wage workers out of poverty.
Republican leaders in Congress succeeded in preventing an increase in the nation’s minimum wage this year, but the AFL-CIO and working families plan to keep pushing for a new law in the next Congress and to make it an issue in the Nov. 7 elections. Ten years after Congress approved the last raise, the federal minimum buys less than it did in 1951—fewer groceries, far fewer gallons of gasoline, less medicine and less for rent.
The economists, assembled by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and including such heavy-hitters as Nobel winners Kenneth Arrow, Clive Granger, Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz, issued a statement that lays out the case for increasing the federal minimum wage:
We believe that a modest increase in the minimum wage would improve the well-being of low-wage workers and would not have the adverse effects that critics have claimed.
While controversy about the precise employment effects of the minimum wage continues, research has shown that most of the beneficiaries are adults, most are female, and the vast majority are members of low-income working families.
As economists who are concerned about the problems facing low-wage workers, we believe the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2005’s proposed phased-in increase in the federal minimum wage to $7.25 falls well within the range of options where the benefits to the labor market, workers, and the overall economy would be positive.
…
Complete article at:
http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/10/11/nobel-winning-economists-minimum-wage-boost-will-help-economy/
==========
Bush keeps revising war justification
By TOM RAUM | Associated Press
October 16, 2006
WASHINGTON – President Bush keeps revising his explanation for why the U.S. is in Iraq, moving from narrow military objectives at first to history-of-civilization stakes now.
Initially, the rationale was specific: to stop Saddam Hussein from using what Bush claimed were the Iraqi leader’s weapons of mass destruction or from selling them to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.
But 3 1/2 years later, with no weapons found, still no end in sight and the war a liability for nearly all Republicans on the ballot Nov. 7, the justification has become far broader and now includes the expansive “struggle between good and evil.”
Republicans seized on North Korea’s reported nuclear test last week as further evidence that the need for strong U.S. leadership extends beyond Iraq.
Bush’s changing rhetoric reflects increasing administration efforts to tie the war, increasingly unpopular at home, with the global fight against terrorism, still the president’s strongest suit politically.
“We can’t tolerate a new terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East, with large oil reserves that could be used to fund its radical ambitions, or used to inflict economic damage on the West,” Bush said in a news conference last week in the Rose Garden.
When no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, Bush shifted his war justification to one of liberating Iraqis from a brutal ruler.
After Saddam’s capture in December 2003, the rationale became helping to spread democracy through the Middle East. Then it was confronting terrorists in Iraq “so we do not have to face them here at home,” and “making America safer,” themes Bush pounds today.
“We’re in the ideological struggle of the 21st century,” he told a California audience this month. “It’s a struggle between good and evil.”
…
Complete article at:
http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/50715.html
==========
three to see
This Modern World: What liberals say / what conservatives hear
http://www.workingforchange.com/webgraphics/WFC/TMW10-18-06.jpg
Steve Benson: chinese enforcement of un resolution
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/benson/pics/1017benson.jpg
Sandy Huffaker: laura and barney have cut and run