Lisa Williams points to a friend who was fired from DeVry University in Westminster, Colorado, for what she had written in her blog. They didn’t warn her, nor did they tell her what they found so offensive. That sucks. [Tags: blogs dooce]

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Jesus was God’s blog. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Hmm, then I suppose the Talmud would be God’s blog for the Jews.

Anyway, I know I’m off base and off track here. Nevertheless: A Merry Christmas to you and your families. [Tags: blogging christianity judaism]

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The new structured blogging initiative is interesting and could be important. It establishes simple data standards for some typical types of things blogger blog about: Reviews, events, media, etc.

These types of metadata effort have the same basic dynamics: If they were widely adopted, there would be tremendous system-wide benefits — e.g., computers would be able to find, aggregate and normalize reviews of local restaurants because the phone number fields and ratings fields would be identifiable, etc. But, people don’t adopt metadata standards all that readily, despite the potential benefits. So, the success of structured blogging depends on how easy it is for bloggers and how appealing the benefits are.

Right now, the plug-ins are in beta Do not attempt installing them unless you are unalarmed by instructions such as “mkdir -m 777 ../sbimages” and “You will also want to edit your RSS 2.0 Index and change the<$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1"$> .” It’s pretty straightforward but, at this point (in beta), definitely for early adopters.

The success of structured blogging depends on the blogging software providers making it one-click easy to use the structures. Then we’ll see what happens… [Tags: StructuredBlogging metadata EverythingIsMiscellaneous blogging]

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The Boston Globe reports on local citizen journalism, including Lisa Williams‘ H20Town. Says Lisa: “I have two small kids — you have to put off youthful fantasies of taking off for India. H2otown let me travel deeper rather than farther.”

The Boston Phoenix reports on video blogging. Steve Garfield says: “There are stories to be told. And there are a lot of stories out there.”

[Tags: blogging media LisaWilliams SteveGarfield]

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Nip and Tuck’s serial rapist has his own blog at MySpace. This is not the first time fictitious characters have been given their own blogs, but this one seems to be extraordinarily popular. Grant McCracken points out that “the narrative signal is less predictable, less scrutable, and less controllable. This, in turn, may increase the character’s, and the show’s, powers of engagement.”

It’d be very cool if the character blog survived the show. [Tags: blogs NipAndTuck]

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After Hoder’s blog was held against him by American Immigration, Canadian Brent Ashley holds it against him in a “Canada: Blog it or leave it!” sort of way.

Michael O’Connor Clarke blogs a paper by Howard Levitt on how Canadian employment law applies to blogging. For example:

Whereas internet use and email use from a personal email account which is done after work hours on a personal computer may not form the basis of a harassment claim because of the reasonable expectation of privacy that exists, because a blog is in the public domain, harassing blog entries made on a person computer, outside of company time, and not using company resources, may still have the potential to result in disciplinary action because they have the potential to create a hostile work environment as there is greater potential that co-workers and management will encounter the harassing material.

Howard isn’t necessarily recommending this; he’s trying to anticipate how court decisions might go. His recommended (and generally quite reasonable) corporate policy on blogging, however, seems to apply also to blogs created or viewed at home, on one’s own time, and includes a prohibition on viewing blogs that contain “inappropriate or offensive material.” Does he really think that that’s a reasonable or enforceable proposal? Or am I misunderstanding him? [Tags: hoder canada MichaelOConnorClarke BrentAshley]

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A Marquette University student has been suspended for what he wrote in his blog. Apparently the offending posts criticized a professor (once, and without naming him/her) and detailed some nights of drinking. Some discussion here.

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Paul Gillin is putting together a panel for the Massachusetts Software Council. The topic is “corporate blogging” and he’s looking for “prominent business people in the Boston area who maintain blogs.” If you are one or know one, leave him a comment or send email to paulgillin.com

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Jean-Paul Borda is back from Iraq and has put together a mega-aggregation (megraggation?) of milblogs for your browsing and sorting pleasure. (Welcome back, Jean-Paul. Thank you for your service.)

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Schools censoring blogs

The Wall Street Journal has a good article by Vauhini Vara about schools cracking down on students who say stuff in their blogs. On the unreasonable side:

Others have taken a more aggressive approach. Last month, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Paterson, N.J., banned the students at its 58 elementary schools and five high schools from maintaining personal Web pages on sites like MySpace and Xanga, a blogging service. Marianna Thompson, director of communications for the diocese, said the goal of the ban is to protect students from online predators, as well as to prevent students from harassing or bullying each other. “An unsupervised blog is an inappropriate use of their time,” she said.

Yikes. [Tags: blogs DigitalRights]

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