Life is Healthy

The Berkman Center's Global Voices project is an incredibly well-done aggregation of the global blogging community:

"A growing number of bloggers around the world are emerging as “bridge bloggers:” people who are talking about their country or region to a global audience. Global Voices is your guide to the most interesting conversations, information, and ideas appearing around the world on various forms of participatory media such as blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, and videoblogs."

"Our global team of regional blogger-editors is working to find, aggregate and track these conversations. Each day they link to 5-10 of the most interesting blog posts from their regions in the “daily roundups” section. A larger group of contributing bloggers is posting daily features in in the left-hand Weblog section, shedding light on what blogging communities in their countries have been talking about recently."

Blog Safer: The Anoniblogging Wiki has downloadable (and editable - it's a wiki afterall) guides for blogging anonymously around the world.

More at HTDAW, via IP

Two complementary articles came up in my feed reader today. Russell Beattie criticizes a trend he’s seeing in the blog posts he reads:

I know how once in a while throwing a juicy post up on your server with some name calling, extreme opinions and a swear word or two can drive serious linkage and hits. You write stuff online every day for a few years, and its bound to get boring just following the same old routine, right? Might as well take a stick and poke at the bee-hive once in a while and see what happens. … Now it’s at the point where people have to write almost nothing but sensationalistic posts on their blog to get any attention. The more extreme, the more likely you’ll be to get links.

This time, it's Riverbend:

"Earlier this year, Baghdad Burning the blog was turned into "Baghdad Burning" - the book. Feminist Press published the whole first year of blogs in book form and it was a huge honor. The book is available at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The British version was published by Marion Boyars Publishers .

As if having the blog published as a book wasn't enough- the book itself won the third prize of the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage in October... An amazing honor.

Also- Baghdad Burning in Japanese... and Baghdad Burning in Spanish. Many, many thanks to the people taking so much time to translate the blog!"

"The Lulu Blooker Prize is the world's first literary prize devoted to 'blooks': books based on blogs or websites."

Three categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction and Comics

Prizes total $4,000:

• $2,000 to an overall winner
• $1,000 to the other category winners

श्रोत्रं श्रृतेनैव न कुन्डलेन दानेन पाणिर्न तु कंकणेन

विभाति काय: करुणापराणां परोपकारैर्न तु चन्दनेन

English Translation of Sanskrit Quote:

Of kind hearted people, (their) ear glows by (the knowledge) heard (by the ear) & not by the ear ring (worn on ear), (their) hand glows by the donation (given) by the hand & not by bracelet (worn on wrist), their body glows by the selfless deeds done (by them to others) & not by (anointment with) sandalwood (oil).

Commentary on Sanskrit Quote:

This is a Sanskrit quote which emphasizes the “real” ornaments of the human body. The author has described the various virtues verses physical embellishments. It gives us a message to cultivate these virtues within ourselves. Generally, the physical ornaments that we wear to adorn the body wear out with time. As opposed to this, with advancing age the mind matures. A matured mind cultivates more virtues. Hence, with time these virtuous ornaments do not wear out unlike the physical ornaments. To develop these virtues one has to develop his mind & elevate one’s conscious to a higher level. Only an elevated soul can realize the omnipresent power of the god, the creative energy of this universe. With this comes the realization that all living creatures are merely the reflections of a unique source of energy that we call god & hence all are one & same. Hence when an elevated soul does service to somebody else he is taking himself to the higher goal of self realization. Try & “see through” the meaning of this quote. “De-attach” yourself from this mundane world of physical beings & elevate yourself to a world of eternal bliss & happiness.

Parents whose children are into blogging should definitely check out BlogSafety - it's got a number of articles and tips, including some good guidelines for teens and a section for parents.

MarsEdit 1.1 for Mac is out, and Blogger post titles are finally supported. (as well as lots of other stuff)

Mac users can snag it here.

Thanks Brent and crew!

Did you know that you can easily post to your blog from any page on the web with our (newly improved) BlogThis! bookmarklet? We’ve just added the most popular buttons from our regular post editor without sacrificing the small size that makes BlogThis! so convenient.


If you’re using BlogThis! now, you should see the bold, italic, font color, link, and blockquote buttons already. If you’re not using BlogThis!, you can get it by following the instructions in our help article, or by enabling it on the Google Toolbar. (Click “Options,” go to the “More” tab, then click on the “BlogThis!” checkbox.)

BlogThis! is great for writing a quick post about a page that you’re looking at, without the (comparative) hassle of opening Blogger.com in a new window, picking a blog to post on, copying over the URL to make a link, then copying over more text that you want to quote, accidentally kicking the power cord out of your computer when you get up to feed the cat, needing to call the plumber to pump out the flood in your attic, forgetting where you were on your computer when it starts up again, realizing that you can click Recover Post to get back the work that you had lost, discovering that the kitten ate all the big cat’s food and you have to feed them both again because the kitten’s on a special diet of castor oil and pencil shavings because it pukes normal kitten food all over the power outlets, which are now smoking because of the combined electrical draw of the attic pump, the computer, and the rock tumbler that you’ve tossed an effigy of the kitten in because that’s how you have to control your rage, when all you really wanted to do was make a little post to tell your friends about that new blog with pictures of cute kittens and other things on it, but now you think that you don’t even want friends any more if this is the kind of situation they’ll put you in.

See? BlogThis! eliminates all of that.