Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Author: Geoff

Blogging Handbooks – From newbies onwards

Two really excellent books on what is involved with blogging, both free, and very readable.

Seth Godwin’s is really good (a 26page pdf download for the paper junkies). Interestingly he has given up publishing ‘real’ books due to the inordinate time delays from writing to it getting on the shelves.

Also a great book (slightly more technical) from Reporters without borders called Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents which is slightly more technical but still very good. This is the organisation that Julien Payne works for. Julien is appearing on Radio5 live this Sunday at 10.30 with Suw Charman, Saira Khan and myself!

1-in-10 Consumers Read Blogs

Article on the growth of blogging RSS feeds and social software (yep – all the stuff I’m interested in) I like this quote “Technology has given consumers an option to tune businesses out, and tune each other in, said Forrester research director Chris Charron in a statement. On the flip side, technology has given businesses an opportunity to gain greater customer insights at a lower cost.” So it really is a win win situation

Journalists and Blogging

An interesting article that shows reading blogs is more popular with journalists than the public “Interestingly it is the journalists—not their readers—that are turning to blogs in record numbers. While the Euro RSCG Magnet study shows that more than half (51%) of journalists use Weblogs regularly—with 28% relying on them for day-to-day reporting, a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project Survey showed that just 11% of the U.S. population reads blogs”. I like this ” the majority of journalists are using blogs to do their work, despite the fact that only 1% believe blogs are credible” I guess before they read blogs their stories were simply made up!

Article discovered by www.Fark.com from http://pocketplanetradio.typepad.com/pocket_planet_radio/2005/09/53_journalists_.html

Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies

A first look at the rate of religiosity in a country and its crime rate, those bible thumpers are not going to like this at all.

“the United States is the only prosperous first world nation to retain rates of religiosity otherwise limited to the second and third worlds” and “the U.S. is the only prosperous democracy that retains high homicide rates,”

Also “A few hundred years ago rates of homicide were astronomical in Christian Europe and the American colonies. In all secular developing democracies a centuries long-term trend has seen homicide rates drop to historical lows”

And on the sex front “The two main curable STDs have been nearly eliminated in strongly secular Scandinavia” wheras in USA “rates of adolescent gonorrhea infection remain six to three hundred times higher”

First saw article mentioned here http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1798944,00.html