Blogging is good for your health

That's why I have been feeling so great lately! Two doctors found out that blogging is good for your health, as they write in their blog. Among other reasons:
- Blogs can promote critical and analytical thinking.
- Blogging can be a powerful promoter of creative, intuitive, and associational thinking.
- Blogging combines the best of solitary reflection and social interaction.

Democratizing the media

MediaChannel.org is exploring a citizens' journalism model and says all the media should as well. The site hopes to "activate public involvement in promoting media accountability and responsibility. We are interested not just in what's wrong about our media system but how to make it right." "Popular dissatisfaction with the media - estimated at 70% in some surveys that find similar disaffection inside the media - suggests that its time to go in another direction," writes Danny Schechter. The solution, is to "democratize the media by allowing citizens to be more than media consumers.... Rather than think of audiences as passive consumers, activate them as participants. Replace an elite top-down model with a more populist bottom-up approach."

Blogging Planet launched

Interesting!
A new consultancy dedicated to training organizations how to build new organizational communication networks has been lauched. Blogging Planet, an alliance of internationally-recognized practitioners in participatory communications, will provide counsel and training to organizations in Europe and the United States on how to effectively adopt new communications tools such as business blogging, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasts, and more for a wide variety of corporate functions - including corporate communications, marketing, public relations, employee communications and investor relations.

Contextual ads for blogs on the way

Rumours circulate that Yahoo! may be about to launch an Adsense style contextual advertising service similar to Google’s Adsense program, that will be open to bloggers.