Nice piece from the BBC about how the growing trend of people being sacked for their blogs has spurned a new word to describe the phenomenon: being ‘dooced’. UrbanDictionary.com defines”dooced” as “losing your job for something you wrote in your online blog, journal, website, etc.” So how much do I get for that in Scrabble?

UPDATE (12 Jan 05): Waterstones employee joins the list of sacked bloggers, thanks to this blog. Note to Waterstones: you’ve probably increased traffic to his site a hundredfold.

UPDATE 2 (14 Feb 05): This article from CNET gives more examples, on the back of a Google employee losing his job following conflict over his blog postings.

UPDATE 3 (21 Feb 05): Now there’s a bill of rights for bloggers, asserting their right not to get sacked (sorry, dooced). I was amused by the phrase ‘blogophobic’, though.

Having already won ‘word of the year’, bloggers continue to receive superlatives as ABC News names them People of the Year (ooh, there’s a video there too), and the BBC give a general overview of the medium’s development in the past year. Now while this backslapping is all very positive for the medium, can we move on now?

Thanks again to Simon Waldman for pointing me in the direction of two great sites for storing and exchanging useful links: del.icio.us and Furl. The former describes itself as a “social bookmarks manager”. Er, yes, of course we know what you mean by that. Thankfully, Waldman’s explanation is a little clearer, highlighting the way that you “can RSS everything: the most popular, a specific tag, or another person’s bookmarks.” In the latter case, you can find other people who are linking to similar things, and so begin creating useful contacts.

The site introduces me to a lovely neologism: ‘folksonomy’, a paper on which is ironically the most popular link. You can also read more about ‘social software’ here.

Boing Boing has this posting about amateur video footage of the disaster to add to my previously posted link about blogging coverage. Also very much worth looking at is Simon Waldman’s list of Tsunami coverage links – and the more critical posting on blogsperiment. Frequently cited is Wikipedia’s entry on the disaster (look at the discussion tab), but dig deeper and their page on multimedia is especially impressive, with a good critical overview of multimedia reporting, as well as some collaborative fact checking (such as highlighting fake pictures).

Looks like bloggers are slowly getting credit for their coverage of events, as reported in The Times of India (thanks to journalismonline@yahoogroups.com for that one), whose list of blogs includes Worldchanging.com, sumankumar.com, and command-post.org.

The Indo-Asian News Service reports ‘Web users lend virtual hand to tsunami victims’. It’s also interesting to see that Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) are now saying on their site that they’ve received sufficient funds for South Asia and asking that potential donors instead contribute to their general Emergency Relief Fund.

According to the Online Publishers Association.

Looking for an image that no one else will think of using? Perhaps Indian newspaper The Hindu’s new image library might be one option…

Save yourself time on researching media: MetaFilter brings Metacritic Books to my attention. “Metacritic has been covering reviews for movies, music, and games for years, but now has started aggregating books reviews, with about 150 books so far.”

Another good blog that Findory threw up for me today is rexblog: “the weblog of Rex Hammock and typically is about magazines, the magazine industry and custom publishing. Often, however, rexblog.com links to totally random stuff.”



In particular, this posting about blog coverage of the Tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia has some very interesting links.

It does take the BBC a while to catch up with these things, but now they have, their article is one of the most readable and accessible introductions to the trend, including some useful links to How to Podcast, Podcast.net and Podcast Alley. Oh, and you’ll need an ipodder.

Bloggers could better protect themselves if they took a few pages out of the reporter’s notebook, says Steve Outing, as a follow-up to What journalists can learn from bloggers. While I’m at it I should mention his article on Alpha Bloggers, too.