The rich, diverse, free web that I loved - and spent years in an Iranian jail for - is dying.Why is nobody stopping it?... The hyperlink was my currency six years ago... represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web ... a way to abandon centralization ... and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes an…

While it most obviously appears to carry on in the tradition of blogs, it always seemed to me as something more nostalgic ...  an attempt to modernize early internet communities ... It is trickier to form a community like that on Medium now. Interface elements do not encourage discovery... We will know Medium is on to something when there ar…

"The Influencer Identification Worksheet is a blogger outreach brainstorming tool [to] build a list of bloggers." - A 4-Step Blogger Outreach Tool for Identifying Influencers | Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy

A thoughtful addition to the neverending "is blogging dead?" debate: "According to the definition, blogging is "regularly adding or updating a blog". But that definition was created in 1997 and no one has bothered to change it. I propose the following: "Blogging is the act of sharing ones ideas, likes, opinions, and/or experiences, via pro…

LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rates compared to Facebook and Twitter, where leads were almost three times higher to convert than Facebook or Twitter. To perform this analysis, we collected one of the largest datasets of top performing long-form content across the LinkedIn Pulse network. This is what we found.... .…

"Bloggers aren’t journalists or employees – they’re independent souls who have built a following by keeping their readers interested, amused and engaged. They don’t like to be controlled or deceived, and they definitely don’t like you to waste their time. Forgetting this will get you into trouble" - 6 Do's And Don'ts Of Blogger Outreach

B2B once meant 'Business to Business'. After the first online bubble popped, it became 'Back to Banking' (alongside its close cousin 'Back to Consulting'), as legions beat a retreat to the safety of corporate life. And now, perhaps, it means Back to Blogging, and apparently not just for me.

"3 main talking points of why your B2C clients should want to work with bloggers."

Thoughtful longread on the past (and future?) of longreads - i.e., blogging. Plus a hint that Vox's Chorus CMS may be getting wider use in the future... "Today everyone in the media world is launching email newsletters... Great. But what I miss from emails is the sense of community, the shared experience... Obviously Twitter replaced parts of t…

LinkedIn lost my last post, so I expect that this will be my last post there. Apart from announcing that, the post also sets out some of the other problems I’ve discovered with LinkedIn’s attempt to become a blogging platform.I’m not predicting their failure - as my first post pointed out, the concept has huge inbuilt advantages. But any system wh…

"On Monday, at almost the exact same moment as tens of thousands of people — including dozens of professional journalists — were checking the SCOTUSblog site to see whether new decisions by the country’s top court had been posted, the site itself was being denied a press pass" - Senate press gallery ignores the evolution of journalism, denies SCO…

"Getting the bloggers to review and publish content about you is not going to be a walk in the park. It is not about you, it is about them. So you need to offer something of value to them." - 3 Social Media Tools to Identify Influential Bloggers - Jeffbullas's Blog

My second post as an accredited LinkedIn blogger covers how to apply to the Platform, and provides a look at the blogging interface

LinkedIn posts are open to the public, even those not in your LinkedIn network, so you end up with a public blog page, over which you have no control.

"She was presenting on Blogger Relations – Why and How to Get Started. A perfect topic for her since she knows the issue from both sides. I asked her what was an important takeaway from her talk. Here is what she shared." - from the @Steveology blog

One of the reasons I created this Tumblr was to use it as a 'first draft’ of a Content Hub (see post), an idea which crystallised after reading Sloan’s original content strategy piece on Stock and Flow.The Hub is basically my way of saying that there’s more to life than the Stream. Unsurprisingly, Alexis Madrigal’s piece in the Atlantic caugh…

When I came to Brussels in 1991 it was as a science writer. It remained my profession for many years, so when scienceblogs.com was launched in 2006 I checked it out ... but never really had the time to follow it. Now via another (ex?)science writer, I hear news of scienceblog's sudden implosion following a tragic loss of ethical compass.

The lack of specialists in EU-oriented blogs is impeding the development of the European online public space.

I lead the team that created Blogactiv.eu, the first blogging platform focused on EU policies