Blogger video problem

The following 'Blogger Status' announcement appeared late last night (UK time).

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Users are experiencing problems playing videos in Blogger blogs. We are investigating and will send an update when fixed.

Posted by Siobhan at 22:50

Visitors can check the current situation by clicking on the Blogger Status link above.

Meanwhile, I'm sorry that no one will be able to see any of the videos (other than the embedded ones) until Google/Blogger get their act together, and hope that you'll return once the problem has been resolved - which I'll post on Twitter in due course.

And, if you're thinking about starting a blog and can't decide between Blogger and Wordpress, this depressing news is yet another reason why you should chose the latter, and why some of us are planning to migrate there from Blogger.

Martin Luther King Day - and a reminder of how to use rhetoric to convey passion

Today is Martin Luther King Day in the USA.

But regardless of where we happen to live, it's a good excuse for spending a few minutes (and it only lasts 11 minutes) watching his 'I have a dream' speech.

When talking about the use of contrasts and three-part lists, I'm often asked whether the use of such rhetorical techniques will somehow diminish the sincerity and passion of a speaker using them to get his or her point across.

The most vivid way to answer to the question is to play a clip of Martin Luther King using them (as he did with great frequency) and to ask people to reflect on whether, now they can see what he's doing, it makes him sound any less sincere or passionate?

One such example is the last few lines of his 'I have a dream' speech, which concludes with two three-part lists, the first made up of three contrasts and a second one of three repeated phrases - in both of which, the third item is longer than each of the first two:

We will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children,

black men and white men

Jews and gentiles

Protestants and Catholics

will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual

"free at last,

"free at last,

"thank God Almighty, we're free at last"

For more on rhetorical techniques, see HERE or type 'rhetoric', 'contrast', 'three-part list', etc. into the search box at the top of the page.

Date and Scrabble dictionaries as inspirational aids to speechwriters

While editing some video clips for a forthcoming presentation, I was reminded of how useful dictionaries can sometimes be when writing speeches or preparing presentations.

Dictionaries of dates

All too often, looking to see if anything significant might have happened on the same date as a speech is being made yields no more than a list of births and deaths of people you've never heard of.

But occasionally a quick search can yield a fantastic dividend. When the Challenger shuttle disaster prompted Ronald Reagan to scrap his 1986 state of the union address in favour of a televised speech to the nation, speechwriter Peggy Noonan must have been surprised and delighted to discover that it was exactly 390 years since Sir Francis Drake died at sea - which provided for an apt and powerful contrast between the two events:

Word-game dictionaries

A year later, and on a much more modest stage, I was working on a speech with Paddy Ashdown, who was the education spokesman for the Liberal-SDP Alliance in the 1987 general election and was scheduled to speak at the launch rally at the Barbican in London.

We'd got as far as a promising puzzle that projected a 3-parted alliterative solution, but got stuck for a third word beginning with the letter 'R'.

The answer quickly came from a Scrabble dictionary. As with other word-game dictionaries, the advantage is that no space is wasted describing meanings of words, so anyone in search of alliterative inspiration can scan through the lists at high speed.