Prior to establishing Spy I had worked for New
Jersey Senator Bill Bradley on his 1984 re-election campaign before
studying Law at the London School of Economics. I began working in
electronic publishing in the US when I got a summer job working on
a small newsletter in Georgetown, Washington DC. I had gone there to
intern on Capitol Hill.
The piece anaylses the Guardian’s attempt to build an engaging group blog, suggests how the community might be more successfully designed, and considers the broader social trends driving online forums. Article on Online Journalism Review site.
Thanks for feedback on the piece from Lee Bryant, Ann Light and Mike Butcher. Final responsibility for opinions and facts rest with me.
Related articles
I am also working on a broader piece about a new model for online commentary, also for the OJR.
'Publishing by Design: Time to Make Human Factors a Concern' Nico Macdonald, Online Journalism Review, 20 May 2004
'The future of Weblogging' Nico Macdonald, The Register, 18 April 2004. There is much to celebrate in the development of Weblogging, but the discussion of the phenomenon is often uncritical and un-ambitious. If Weblogging is the answer, what was the question? No one admits it, but it is in part a product of our confessional culture. The dynamics behind Weblogging are not as contemporary as the phenomenon itself, and its rise is partly the result of other products re-defining themselves as Weblogging tools. Talk of democratising publishing is belied by an elitist tendency at the centre of the blogosphere. We need to encourage more people to be journalists, and go beyond the temporal model that is core to Weblogging. And we need to find more subtle, more visual, and more contextualised ways of presenting Weblog postings. It may also be possible to use the characteristics of Weblogging to create discussion in the context of online publications.
