Yearly Archives 2005

Harkening back to an age when there was no time for salesmanship, Britt Blaser says the tone of a corporate blog should be the tone of a campfire talk. I like that. "Blogs are so constant and frequent and informal," he says, "that we're being forced at last to drop the stridency and expert tone and false eloquence that orators, and their progeny, corporate communicators, have felt obliged to use." There's an idealism to this plea - that something about the format "forces" you to do anything. But it's a good idealism. (As opposed to the idealism of say, Paul Wolfowitz, for instance. ...) The format doesn't force you to do anything, and I think we've all seen how blogs can become nothing but memos and brochures, to quote Dave Weinberger in his link to Britt. Corporate web sites have had the same problem since the beginning, by the way,…

With NYC now doing random bag checks on rapid transit and commuter lines, my friend writes in with this upsetting tale about her commute. Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 08:25:58 -0400 Subject: ARGH!!! Jed, I'm so freaking angry! I was stopped today and searched!!! I was ticked off at the policy to begin with, now I'm ANGRY!!! I was getting on the train 86th and Lex, dressed nicely, with my sunglasses and backpack. I took off my glasses when I saw them...I KNEW they were going to stop me. Sure enough, "M'am, could you step over there, we need to search your bag." He knew I was angry when I turned around and asked him where. He pointed to a table and I dropped the backpack on top of it. They made me unzip it, flashed a light down in two (of the four) compartments, then let me go. It's…

We've set up a blog for our work to fix the flaws in the Patriot Act. The need to spread the word about the scary problems with this scary law has never been greater. Legislation is racing through several committees and votes could come as early as Wednesday on proposals to expand the government powers, further remove any judicial oversight on domestic spying and make permanent nearly all the act's "Sunset" provisions, which Congress wisely put in place when they frantically passed the act in the dark of night just days after the 9/11 attacks. Check out the blog, do your own blogging with the help of our cool tools, and get the word out everywhere that there's still time to

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