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Jakob Nielsen reckons that it's ok to use the passive voice when writing headlines for the web. In fact he thinks in some cases it actually improves the chances of you getting your message across.

Simple sentence structure, active voice, and positive statements have been key Web-writing guidelines for more than a decade. I don't want you to abandon these good ideas. They do improve content usability in most cases, particularly for body text.
However, recent findings from our eyetracking research emphasized the overwhelming importance of getting the first 2 words right, since that's often all users see when they scan Web pages. Given this, we have to bend the writing guidelines a bit, especially for elements that users fixate on when they scan — that is, headlines, subheads, summaries, captions, hypertext links, and bulleted lists.

That's what I love about the web. Bending the 'rules' (which are only really conventions anway). Complexity. Context.

A while ago Michael Wesch produced a fantastic explanation of Web 2.0 on YouTube. Now he's done another, prompted by David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous (go and read if you have not already).

From Higher Ed Marketing via Seth Meranda: Colgate are using blog software to run their news website.

A simple idea that really should be used more often. For those who still maintain 'news' is not 'blogging', this doesn't mean that the news website suddenly becomes a blog, it just means you can have an off-the-shelf product (in this case Movable Type) that can deliver a whole lot of things that are useful for news websites that happen to be parts of blogs. So you can easily categorise/tag, you have a CMS of sorts, feeds, all the plugins that are developed for blog software etc etc. My only concern would be allowing comments and that's simply because I know the work that goes on behond the scenes to monitor comments. People are becoming more and more used to commenting on news stories on major news sites but I am yet to see a highly intelligent, well-mannered comment thread on one of those sites that matches some of the things I've seen on large blogs. Sometimes refereeing such discussions is a step too far if you've already got a full-time job somewhere else.

Overall though, the thought of using MT or Wordpress or similar to handle other web content seems so obvious and ripe for exploitation, especially the culture of feeds that blogs have. The RSS feeds can be used not only to serve content to readers but to other applications etc. We already use RSS to feed news to other sites but using blog software to house the content in the first place would make it a lot easier.

Howard Rheingold was the guest at 'A vision for the future', Education.au's latest installment of their seminar series.

Howard Rheingold was the keynote speaker for education.au's final seminar for 2007. Howard is an internationally renowned critic and writer on cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media. He is the author of numerous books including The Virtual Community, Tools for Thought: the History and Future of Mind-expanding Technology and Smart Mobs.

Smart Mobs examines how the convergence of mobile communications and computing is driving the next social revolution - transforming the ways in which people meet, work, buy, sell and create.

As with the danah boyd appearances, you can download podcasts and presentations from the education.au site.

HighEdWebDev has started in Rochester, N.Y., and as usual, Karine at collegewebeditor has done a sterling job getting some guest bloggers together. It would have been fantastic to make it there but Rochester IS a long way from Sydney so these guest bloggers will hopefully make the rest of us feel like we're there. If you use Facebook you may also want to check out the HighEdWebDev group.

Heaps of unis are using YouTube (hell, even WE do), but UC Berkeley has become the first one to post full lectures to YouTube for public consumption, including this one of Sergey Brin from Google talking about "Search, Google and Life".

More at UC Berkeley and CNet