How the bloggers brought down Dan Rather

In this lesson I had the task of finding out who Dan Rather is, and how blogs affected him.

Firstly I searched Wikipedia, to find out who Dan Rather is. I found out that he used to work for CBS news. He was an upstanding, well respected reporter who worked at CBS for 44 years.

Rather made a very controversial documentary about George W Bush's Military career. This is where the bloggers come in. Many right wing bloggers who sided with President Bush investigated the documents used in the documentary and managed to prove they were forgeries. This, consequently lowered peoples respect of Dan Rather, and shortly after he resigned from CBS.

Silver Surfers - Research

Here is a collection of sources which could be used for putting together an article about Elderly people using the internet.


The best piece I found was an article from The Telegraph which used survey results from
the Insurence company AXA. This company could be contacted for more infortmation. The results gave the percentage of elderly people who name Internet usage as their faveourite past time. It also found that the online activities enjoyed by elderly internet users include Email, talking to friends and family online, booking holidays and shopping.

I searched Myspace for any users who may be over the age of 65. I found several but most of them had not been updated for some time. The most recently updated was Old Man John, who is 79 and from Bradford. He could be someone to interview about how he uses the internet.

I also researched Online dating for older people. I wasn't really surprised to discover several dating websites specifically for people over 50. These websites could be contacted for infortmation. Also people who have successfully found a partner online could be contacted for their story.

Critical Evaluation of Review Tube

In this evaluation I am going to discuss what we did on our blog, which worked well, and also what we struggled with or could have done better.

The name we chose for the blog ‘Review Tube’ works really well. It sounds good and leaves the blog needing no description as it does exactly what it says in the name. The layout looks good. At the top Fogg made a title banner and we chose colours, which match so it all looks organized and professional. There are features down the right side of the screen, like links and categories, these look really good as they fill up where a lot of white space would be if they were not there, although we thought there were possibly two many categories and it looked a little unorganised. This is something we tidied up a bit. We initially decided to have the video at the top of each post above its review. This has worked well and everyone stuck to this plan.

The style of the writing in each post works well and compliments each writer’s posts. I think we all need to be a bit more careful with typos and grammar, it s important to read through each post several times before publishing. We all used a similar type of humour within our writing, which has worked well and reads easily.

Individually, I need to remember to link within my posts. I tended to link bands to their Myspace page, as this would be familiar for our target group of students and people our own age. I think I could have linked to more relevant videos on you Tube within my posts. I also need to be careful not to repeat myself.

One thing we all struggled with was sourcing videos. There are hundreds of thousands of videos to choose from on You Tube and it’s hard to know where to start looking. Hayley said she found it difficult finding videos she actually found funny and that she could write about. Personally I found it difficult to write about a music video I didn’t like. I did however, make sure all the videos were new, but when searching in the music categories on You Tube none of the popular videos were by artists I felt I could write about. In future I need to be a little more open-minded and not just write about all my favourite bands.