Here’s another one for that book I’m working on – I’m trying to think: what have been the most significant events in the history of journalism blogging?

Here’s what I have so far (thanks Mark Jones and Nigel Barlow):

• 1998: The Drudge Report breaks the Monica Lewinsky story. While Drudge denies the site is a blog, it demonstrated how the nimbleness of an online operation could scoop the mainstream media.
• 2001: September 11 attacks: while news websites collapse under the global demand, a network of blogs pass on news and lists of survivors
• 2002: Trent Lott forced to resign after apparently pro-segregationist statements made at an event and initially ignored by mainstream media, were picked up and fleshed out by bloggers
• 2003: Invasion of Iraq: Salam Pax, the ‘Baghdad Blogger’, posts updates from the city as it is bombed, providing a particular contrast to war reporters ‘embedded’ with the armed forces and demonstrating the importance of non-journalist bloggers
• 2003: Christopher Allbritton raises $15,000 through his blog Back-to-Iraq 3.0, to send him to report independently from the war, demonstrating the ability of blogs to financially support independent journalism (called the ‘tip-jar model’).
• 2004: Rathergate/Memogate: CBS’ 60 Minutes broadcast a story about George W. Bush’s National Guard service, and within minutes a section of the blogosphere mobilises to discredit the documents on which it is based. Dan Rather eventually resigns as a result.
• 2004: Asian Tsunami: more blogs mobilise around a disaster, of particular significance for video blogging
• 2005: July 7 Bombings, London: mobile phone image of passengers walking along Tube tunnel posted on MoBlog (although was first sent to The Sun), and goes global from there. A significant moment in moblogging.
• 2006: The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service cites the blog run by the New Orleans Times Picayune during Hurricane Katrina. The flexibility of blogs during a disaster which stopped printing presses and delivery trucks was driven home (h/t Bob Stepno).
• 2007: Talking Points Memo blog breaks story of US attorneys being fired across the country, demonstrating the power of involving readers in an investigation, and carrying it out in public (h/t Albert in the comments).
• 2007: Dave Winer wins his $2,000 bet (made in 2002) that blogs will rank higher than the New York Times for the top 5 news stories of 2007 (h/t Bob Stepno), demonstrating the importance of blogging in news distribution.
• 2007: Myanmar protests: the clampdown that followed democratic protests in the country was seen around the world thanks to blogging, moblogging, and social networking sites. Journalists were not allowed in the country. Even after the government cut off the internet, bloggers located outside the country continued to post material. (h/t Sandra Fish in comments)
• 2008: Peter Hain resigns over donations revealed by UK political blogger Guido Fawkes, who in 2006 broke a story on an affair by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott which he claimed lobby correspondents were sitting on
• 2008: Chinese Earthquake: a key moment for microblogging, as news of the earthquake spreads on Twitter (and Chinese IM service QQ) quicker than any official channels.
• 2008: Collapse of Northern Rock: BBC correspondent Robert Peston breaks one of the biggest stories of the year – not on TV, but on his blog.

What have I missed? This is a horribly Anglo-American list, too, so I’d particularly welcome similar moments from other countries.

PHP Freelancer

Assuming you want them to, how do you get people to blog? It’s a challenge facing most community editors, particularly as they seek to encourage a conversation with readers for whom WordPress or Blogger are still too fiddly.

Enter Posterous, a fantastically intuitive, quick and easy blogging platform. Scrapping the need for registration, or even the need to go onto the web, this has the potential to be a mass blogging tool – as well as a great tool for blogging on the move.

To start a blog all a user has to do is send an email to post@posterous.com.

That’s it.

A blog is created for them with their email as the first post (the subject line is the title).

It gets better: if you email photos, video or audio it is automatically embedded in a Flash player. Link to a YouTube, Google Video, Justin.TV, Vimeo or Omnisio video and it’s automatically embedded as well. Send more than one image and a gallery is created. PDFs, PowerPoint and Word documents are also embedded using previous SFTW Scribd.

As for the conversation? You can have comments emailed to you, and can reply by simply responding back to the email. And the site has social networking functions, with user profiles and the ability to follow other users if you register.

TechCrunch also reports that “new features will be launched over the summer, says co-founder Sachin Agarwal, including customized CSS and the ability to cross post to other blogging platforms.” This last piece may well persuade me to move off WordPress. It’s that good.

As for its business model: ReadWriteWeb says the site was founded with “about $15,000 in seed capital. Posterous is currently free and plans to start selling premium features in the future.”

The one downside is a potential vulnerability to fake posting by people using masked email addresses, although they would have to know what the address was first (I’m using a bespoke email address for mine).

Here are just some implications that spring to mind:

• if you meet someone you think would be a great blogger, just ask them to send an email to that address, and forward the reply (which tells you what your blog address is).
• If they have a document you’d like to put online, do the same (in other words, easy webpage creation rather than blog creation)
• There is massive potential for blogging on the move – particularly the ability to email replies to comments.
• This also makes group blogging much easier, as you simply have to register all contributors’ email addresses.
• For example: record a phonecall interview on your N95, then email it to the blog.
• You could set up an email feed from another blog using Feedburner or xFruits to cross-post into Posterous
• Or simply forward emails, e.g. press releases, email interviews, that you want your readers to see verbatim.

And I’m sure there are plenty of other possibilities – let me know your ideas.

Read more ‘Something for the weekend’ posts

UPDATE: Jon Hickman has been putting it through its paces and has a list of pros and cons:

1. It doesn’t create a hyperlink in my bio where I have placed a URL

2. It doesn’t pull in feeds or sets from flickr intelligently, and create a gallery

3. Creating a gallery via email is difficult because it will be limited by how many pictures you can fit through your mail server in one go

4. Why doesn’t it even pull in individual flickr images when I post it a URL (it does this with YouTube after all).  The only way to do it is to get a link that resolves .jpg, ie click onto the image page and extract the link from the options at the bottom

5. once I have made a gallery I can’t change the pictures

6. where’s the themes????

good things;

1. easy

2. multiple email addresses support

3. rss feed – so might be useful to aggregate content that is emailable and pull into other things (like the project I’m doing with Jezz…)

PHP Freelancer