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the lion king
the lion king

Of course he does. If he still has time to use the net then it's a fairly safe bet that at some point he will visit a joomla powered web site.

With Joomla being used by the UN, National Governments, leading NPO's and US Senators and Governors he surely must.

But that isn't what this blog post is really all about or why there is a photo of lion accompanying this blog post.

The power of the headline

Many years ago I used to teach a course on propaganda and it's role in the press. Since then tabloid journalism and bloggers have raised the art of writing a headline to new levels.

With the advent of RSS readers, twitter and google alerts your headline is often the only opportunity that you have to grab the readers attention and get them to read on. Without that snappy headline it really doesn't matter what else that you write as no one will see them.

A good headline must grab the attention of the reader without telling them the whole story.

  1. "Portsmouth wins the FA cup"
  2. "Portsmouth face last minute nerves in FA Cup"

See the difference?

Let's take another more extreme example of how a headline can be used.

A man visiting New York Zoo see a lion grab a little girl through the railings. He runs up to the lion and punches it hard on the nose and the lion let's go. The parents run up to the man and offer their thanks. Whilst thanking him they started chatting about the patches on his leather jacket.

The next day the NY press headline read

"Gang member assaults African immigrant and steals his lunch"

On a more joomla related note last month I wrote a blog post titled "Joomla warez and downloads", which now ranks very highly on google, about my experience in Thailand in 2001.

But the more observant amongst you may have recognised the article as one that had appeared previously on the blog under a different headline entitled "Copyright, theft and encryption".

I'll leave it to you to decide which of these two blog posts has been read the most.

J o o m l a !

Brian Teeman

Brian Teeman

Who is Brian?

As a co-founder of Joomla! and OpenSourceMatters Inc I've never been known to be lacking an opinion or being too afraid to express it.

Despite what some people might think I'm a shy and modest man who doesn't like to blow his own trumpet or boast about achievements.

Where is Brian?