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Category: Blog
Social networking and OHS
Less than two days ago, someone established a Facebook page in order to seek justice for Brodie Panlock. At the time of writing the page has over 2,800 supporters, mostly young. The page is being moderated very closely so that any inflammatory comments are jumped on very quickly. The site has a maturity that is showing the best elements of social networking sites.
The moderators are referring to the site as a petition but this is not the traditional petition where reams of paper are presented to a politician on the steps of Parliament, although it may come to that. What the Facebook page is showing is the modern (perhaps young) take on generating support for a cause through the technologies with which the supporters are most familiar. Continue reading “Social networking and OHS”
Search terms cloud for 2009
Below is a “tag cloud” of the most popular search terms used to arrive at SafetyAtWorkBlog. The smallest tag has a minimum of 30 entries.
Safety photo article reproduction
A very popular posting at SafetyAtWorkBlog has been Col Finnie’s piece on taking photographs for OHS purposes. An edited version of Col’s article was published, with authorisation, in the 19 November 2009 edition of Accident Prevention e-News which is now available online.
Our thanks goes to editor Scott Williams, firstly, for reading SafetyAtWorkBlog and secondly for going through due process in seeking a reprint of the blog article.
Col has been an important addition to the small group of SafetyAtWorkBlog contributors and we hope to see more of his articles in 2010.
Union OHS guru on quad bike safety
Yossi Berger, Australian OHS guru with the Australian Workers’ Union, has posted an article on the Croakey blog explaining his thoughts on the issue of quad bike safety.
SafetyAtWorkBlog becomes a LexisNexis top blog
On 26 October 2009, SafetyAtWorkBlog was informed that it has been considered “a LexisNexis Top 25 Blogs for Workers’ Compensation and Workplace Issues – 2009, in the Best International Blogs category”.
The site coordinator of LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation Law Center, Robin Kobayashi, provided this overview of the importance of the Top 25 Blogs:
The Top 25 Blogs contain some of the best writing out there on workers’ compensation and workplace issues in general. They contain a wealth of information for the workers’ compensation community with timely news items, practical information, expert analysis, practice tips, frequent postings, and helpful links to other sites.
These blogsites also show us how workplace issues interact with politics and culture. Moreover, they demonstrate how bloggers can impact the world of workers’ compensation and workplace issues.”
Specifically on SafetyAtWorkBlog, LexisNexis says
“Safety at Work Blog from Australia recognizes that workplace safety is both a business and social issue where workplace safety, human resources, industrial relations, organizational behavior, environment, quality management and social or psychological issues converge.
Safety at Work Blog seeks to break down the barriers of each discipline, providing thought-provoking blogs on a wide variety of topics from workplace safety to workers’ compensation to politics and much more.”
SafetyAtWorkBlog and all our contributors thank LexisNexis for this unexpected honour and are very proud.
We encourage all SafetyAtWorkBlog readers to look at the other top blogs that are listed HERE.
Why have a SafetyAtWorkBlog?
Some people have mentioned to me that they find blogs a mysterious thing. It’s a media that is gaining attention from mainstream media, in fact, most mainstream media have embraced blogging to supplement the “official” media content in newspapers, journals and on television. Some blogs have become an important source of news and commentary feeding into the mainstream media.
SafetyAtWorkBlog does not provide all the safety news that is happening in Australia or elsewhere. In fact nobody is. But what we can do is select those items of news that we think have a broad appeal to safety professionals.
Also, in Australia, there are only a handful of writers and journalists who specialize in writing on OHS issues and there are many events, conferences, seminars, talks, podcasts, books and other information sources that fall under the radar of mainstream media. It is in this niche that SafetyAtWorkBlog exists.
Commentary
Blogs were original a web-based log or a web diary where people can put down their thoughts of the day. But they have become so much more and the feature that is most overlooked by readers is the capacity to comment on the articles posted to a blog.
There is some resemblance to “Letters to the Editor” in traditional media where issues can be raised but, more importantly, readers can comment on the news of the day or the thoughts of columnists, and can clarify inaccurate opinions.
The ability to respond to articles is very important to SafetyAtWorkBlog because we do not know everything about our profession. OHS is a discipline that continues to evolve just as rapidly as new hazards appear. The expert who says they know everything is a fool, the smart professional learns all the time. That is one reason why people read SafetyAtWorkBlog but the blog can be so much better when readers provide their own opinions, particularly if what is said in the blog is wrong in some way.
The best example of reader comments in this blog was the response from Peter Sandman to a piece on a book by Cass Sunstein. Sandman says
“…a few comments in the review, though flattering to me, are misleading about Sunstein.”
He goes on to list the article’s shortcomings. One comment from Sandman was then disputed by another reader, Thomas Durkin.
This dialogue showed a terrific level of opinion and provides a better understanding of Sunstein and his place in US politics and government regulation than the solitary review that generated the comments.
News
SafetyAtWorkBlog is not an OHS news service, one can get that from hundreds of news aggregators (the bane of Rupert Murdoch) on the web. SafetyAtWorkBlog provides commentary and opinion on things that are happening in the OHS world. If the opinion is wrong or the logic has severe shortcomings or the content is inaccurate, blogs provide the opportunity to correct the information or to balance the opinion.
We have ALWAYS encouraged people to comment on articles we post. If we can start a debate or help clarify an OHS concept, that’s great. But if you have something to say about what we say, email it in or post a comment. Unless it is defamatory or nasty or rude, it will be included and any points made will be genuinely considered and pondered on.