Fortune Cookie
From my fortune cookie last night: “Your business will assume vast proportions.” I’m not sure if I dread or welcome this.
Motivation Through Procrastination
I’m working today on writing the pages I need for the BitTorrent for Dummies book deadline I must meet on Monday (I know it’s a holiday—what’s up with that!), but you may have noticed that I’ve posted several times to this blog.
Procrastination on another big project is sure a great way to get work done on other projects, or on your blog!
I hope my editor isn’t reading this. 
Blogs Are a Call-In Radio Show
During a meeting yesterday I was explaining the different types of interaction possible on the Web: bulletin boards, blogs, email forms, guestbooks… During the meeting someone said how interesting it was that so many of these interactive technologies have a real-world analogy or equivalent. It got me thinking—if that’s true, what’s the real-world analogy for blogs? My first thought was that there might not be one, which would be sort of exciting, and also explain just why blogs are so hard to explain to people.
• Guestbooks are easy—think of any actual guestbook you’ve seen in a hotel lobby or at a scenic overlook. Online guestbooks work essentially the same way, where visitors leave a sort of “Hi, I was here” note and perhaps read a few that others have left.
• Email—well, those are letters, of course. Faster, shorter, and more informal than most written letters, but letters nonetheless. Email forms on Web sites also fall into this type of communication.
• Instant messenger and chat—Ever had a conversation with someone? There you go.
• Bulletin boards—Also called discussion boards and forums, bulletin boards are actually nothing like a real bulletin board. I think of them as being like meetings—people coming together in a group to talk about particular issues, topic, problem, etc. Bulletin boards server something of the same purpose as a book club group, a Scout troop meeting, even a meeting in the corporate world.
And then there are blogs. I left the meeting puzzling over whether there really was a good real-world analogy to use about blogs. Arriving home, I talked over the idea with Travis, who suggested that perhaps the best model to compare them to was a call-in talk radio show.
And they are, aren’t they? You have one person—the blogger/host—who spends a few minutes on something, and then people calling in to comment or question or criticize. And, like talk radio, some blogs are fascinating, some are written by cranks, some are dead boring! I’m liking this analogy more and more as I think about it.
What do you think? What real-world analogies have you used to describe blogs?
Full or Partial Posts in RSS Feeds
A little flurry in the blogosphere this week: Robert Scoble announced that he was going to stop reading blogs that don’t include full entries in their RSS feeds. Namely, he was going to stop reading Chris Pirillo’s blog, despite the value he finds in it. Pirillo called this ”cutting off your nose to spite your face” but has actually turned on full posts in his feed.
I sympathize with both sides of the argument here. If your main way of reading blogs is through an RSS reader, it really interrupts your workflow to have to go to the blog itself to get the rest of a post. On the other hand, we’re all publishing blogs and if nobody ever visits them, well, what’s the point? Maybe we should just be publishing feeds and call it done.
Speaking for myself, I know I prefer RSS feeds that include the full post, and I’m much less likely to read a blog post that is only partially available through RSS than I would a full one. But, of course, when I get the full post I almost never click through to the blog. So actually, neither technique gets you good traffic to your blog.
But here’s the real problem, as far as I’m concerned: partial posts in RSS feeds that are so short you can’t even get a grip on whether the post is something you want to read more of. Twenty words isn’t enough, unless you’re an exceptionally tight writer or have amazing titles. This is the worst of both worlds—no one will click through to your blog to read the full post, nor will they read it through a newsreader. Now that’s shooting yourself in the foot!
I’m begging you, folks, throw those RSS-reading folks a bone and give them some motivation to click through to your blog!
Here are a few people’s thoughts to consider:
- Darren Rowse - Should Bloggers Learn about Change Management?
- Tris Hussey - Full feeds aren’t the problem. Better advertising choices are needed
- Chris Pirillo - Full-Text Feeds are Dead
- Constantin Basturea - Why I’m asking for full-text RSS feeds
- Allan Jenkins - Pirillo and Ochman Declare Full-Text RSS Dead; Wake Me Up for the Funeral
- B.L. Ochman - I’m With Chris Pirillo: Full Test RSS Feeds Are Dead
- Agylen - Switching to full feeds
Need a Editor? Try Barter.
In response to my earlier post about setting yourself up with a blog coach to keep you on track and motivated, I’ve learned that potential blog coaches are more interested in food and services than money.
Tris Hussey would be a blog coach for coffee and chocolate. Toby Bloomberg would be a blog coach in exchange for wine (as long as you don’t consume your payment while you do your coaching, Toby!).
Darren Rowse would coach in exchange for blog design. And Seth Miller wants better page rank.
The lesson here is a heartwarming one—the blogosphere is full of generous souls.
But the other thing that interests me is how much blogging is related to barter. I’m no economist, but it seems to me that one of the significant ways that blogs play into business is in making connections between people who need each other’s services, and who trade those services. I love barter as a way to get what you need; there’s something so much more satisfying about dealing with individuals than there is with big companies—and if that isn’t some kind of grand statement (phrased awkwardly) about the value of the blogosphere, then I’ll eat my hat.
(I am actually wearing a hat at the moment.)
Pushing the Boundaries on Blogs: Do Fake Blogs Work?
I’ll be talking about fake blogs, spam blogs, and other marketing blog experiments as part of Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff’s “Conversations with Experts: How to Build Your Business On and Off-line” series. If you’d like to participate, it’s free, but you need to register here.
Here’s the official write-up:
Pushing the Boundaries on Blogs: Do Fake Blogs Work?
Wednesday, June 8, 2005, 8:30 p.m. ET
Guest Expert: Susannah Gardner of Buzz Marketing with Blogs, featured in the Build a Better Blog System
Blogging continues to move out of the realm of personal diarists and into the hands of business
professionals and marketers. The transition isn’t always smooth, especially as creative marketers use blogs in new ways to promote products, businesses and business strategies. Long-time bloggers often refer to these efforts as “fake” blogs, and the resulting hue and cry generates publicity – of the negative kind. Are there lines that can’t be crossed? What has been tried, and failed? What has been tried, and succeeded? Learn to plan for the reactions you will get as push the boundaries with new and exciting ideas.
Susannah Gardner, author of “Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies,” will review recent efforts to create creative blogs. Learn where and why marketers have had problems, and what strategies are succeeding. We’ll talk about the Lincoln Fry blog, the Mazda blog, Moosetopia, Where The Secret Girls Get Real, and others. As well, Susannah will talk about some of the programs and efforts that exist today to recruit popular bloggers as marketers. This session will give you some targeted suggestions for creating a marketing blog that won’t rock the blogosphere with outrage.
Conversations with Experts: How to Build Your Business On and Off-line
Hosted by Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff and sponsored by Build a Better Blog System.
Get a Big-Picture Person
I was just sitting here feeling a bit dissatisified with myself and with this blog. How can I get more comments? How can I be better motivated to write more? How can I know what my readers really want from me?
And then it hit me: I need an editor.
Oh, not an editor in the traditional sense. I don’t need someone to check my spelling or grammar, or to make sure I’m libeling people. I take all that onto my own head. What I really need is someone who is interested in my focus, and who reads my blog and is tasked with thinking about things on a macro-level. Someone who can say, “Hey, you really missed the boat on that one,” or “I’m desperate to know more about X, Y, and Z.” In a sense I need a coach—a blog coach.
I’ve recommended just such a person to several business clients, and folks who are just starting out. The blogger in the trenches can easily loose track of the big picture, so it’s really handy to have someone who only has to think about the big picture. So I knew the benefits of having an editor—I just forgot to apply my own advice to myself! It’s so easy to do, isn’t it?
Having a coach or editor of this kind is similar to the concept of the ideal reader, often discussed in the journalism industry. The ideal reader is the one you write directly to, an amalgamation of all the typical characteristics and behaviors of your audience. The ideal reader differs from publication to publication, and of course in the blogosphere you’re talking about huge variations in ideal readers between blogs, and even between one blogger’s different topics. Still, the concept is useful to keep in mind as you write.
Some of today’s blog consultants are acting as blog editors/coaches for their clients (Tris Hussey, Paul Chaney, Jeremy Wright, and Toby Bloomberg, among others, come to mind), tracking their client’s posts and suggesting strategies for improvement and future growth.
This is great for a business, but there must be a need for indvidual bloggers who are using their blog professionally, and who may not have the resources to hire a blog consultant. I can think of some informal ways of getting this kind of advice off the top of my head, but I’m interested to know if anyone has tried this themselves and how you did it.
So, has anyone appointed a blog editor or coach for themselves? How has it worked for you—or not worked?
SitePoint’s Blogger’s Primer
This article is a bit old, but the information it contains is evergreen: The Blogger’s Primer.
A blog is not a technology, a technique, or a cool trick. A blog is form of content site; what’s important is the information it presents, and the ways in which that content meets the readers’ needs.
The lengthy discussion on readers—finding them, keeping them, tracking them—is thorough and easy to understand. This is a great article for beginnines, but also for those of us who have been blogging for a while and have gotten distracted or forgotten what we were trying to do.
Need BitTorrent Stories
So I mentioned a while back that I’m writing another book, and that this one is about BitTorrent.
(BitTorrent is a distributed file-sharing technology. I’m sure that explanation answers all your questions!)
I’ll post more about BitTorrent, but before I do I need a bit of help. I’d love to hear from anyone who:
- Could help me get in touch with Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, for a short interview
- Knows of an example of legitimate uses of BitTorrent that I can use as examples in the book (The torrent of SXSW music files is a great one.)
- Uses BitTorrent for business or education purposes like sharing training content or software apps
- Is a BitTorrent expert and knows just the right anecdote for the book
Thanks!
Incidentally, it’s Victoria Day here in Canada. Happy Victoria Day!
Blog Entry Catches a Killer
File this one under super-weird and spooky: Simon Ng blogged about letting his sister’s ex-boyfriend into their apartment and wished he’d leave soon and quit messing up his clean floor. When Simon and his sister Sharon were found stabbed to death, that blog entry put the ex-boyfriend—Jin Lin—in the apartment. Police used the blog post to get a confession from Lin, since it destroyed his alibi.
You can read the New York Daily News’ story about the crime. Here’s Simon’s post:
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Today I missed my Japanese class again, since I have gotten a bad throat. I only went to the class once this week, so I am probably so far behind now. I will catch up in the summer tho so no worries hehe. Anyway today has been weird, at 3 some guy ringed the bell. I went down and recognized it was my sister’s former boyfriend. He told me he wants to get his fishing poles back. I told him to wait downstair while I get them for him. While I was searching them, he is already in the house. He is still here right now, smoking, walking all around the house with his shoes on which btw I just washed the floor 2 days ago! Hopefully he will leave soon, ...
Source: Saw this on Darren Barefoot’s blog first; it’s also on Doc Searls’.
A Design is Worth a Thousand Words
Yesterday I found a post on the Work Boxers blog titled ”The Prelaunch Success Plan” that had some interesting observations about the importance of designing an attractive blog:
...if you have a design blog and it is well-designed and looks “pretty” then this instantly builds credibility for yourself. On the other hand if you launch a design like my own with very little use of images and color then the initial impression of the first-time visitor is that my credibility isn’t as high as the next guy who has a better looking design. Notice how all of this occurs even before they read the content?
(There is a lot of good stuff in this post about preparing to launch a blog, so be sure to go read it.)
Bloggers talk a lot about words. How long should posts be? How frequently should you post? How do you write well for the Web? What posts get users to comment? Words are key, and of course they are mostly the point. (I’m not talking about photo, audio and video blogs, of course.) But given all that, an blog that is unreadable because it uses dark grey text on a black background is just as unreadable as one that uses poor grammar and spelling.
Design sends a message to your readers, literally unspoken, about your attitude, seriousness, reputation, and credibility. Design makes a statement you don’t have to spell out in words, and everything about the way the page looks influences how it is read.
I’ve been thinking a lot about blog design these days—not a big surprise given my job, of course—and looking at a lot of blogs. I’ll share some of that thinking with you in the near future.
Until then, think about the idea of design and how it applies to what you have to say:
- What is the tone of your Web site? What impression do you want to give your visitors?
- What kind of imagery is appropriate to your topic(s)?
- What are others doing on their blogs with design?
Amazing AmazType
Let me introduce you to AmazType, a cool little Flash application that turns search results from Amazon into a visual representation of your search term. If you visit the site and do your own search, you’ll find that each little book cover is clickable, giving you basic information about the book, with a link to the full Amazon page.
It’s cute, but is it useful? That’s for you to say. What I have to say is that I love seeing any Web site that turns out something more than list of text for search results. And I love cool little Flash files.
Source: Saw this on Sitepoint first.
Saturday Meme - What Is Your World View?
Apparently I’m a postmodernist.
You scored as Postmodernist. Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis.
| Postmodernist | 100% | ||
| Materialist | 88% | ||
| Cultural Creative | 63% | ||
| Romanticist | 56% | ||
| Existentialist | 44% | ||
| Modernist | 38% | ||
| Fundamentalist | 13% | ||
| Idealist | 13% |
What is Your World View?
created with QuizFarm.com
Blogopoly
blogpoly, the Monopoly game based on blogging, is for now just an idea. It comes from someone who blogs as littleoslo, and he has a remarkable, if mysterious, history.
Thanks, Boing Boing!
Is Blogging Advertising?
There’s an election coming soon here in British Columbia, and the Elections B.C. board has an interesting take on the role of bloggers when it comes to posting election-related opinions and recommendations.
CBC British Columbia - Blogs are advertising: Elections B.C.
VANCOUVER – Elections B.C. is having a hard time keeping up with a boom of bloggers who are publishing partisan messages during the current election campaign.
They’re supposed to register themselves as advertising sponsors if they post a partisan position on a candidate, party, or referendum question.
“Under the Election Act, it will fall within the definition of election advertising, and we would ask them to register,” says Jennifer Miller, of Elections B.C.
Bloggers I know of who would fall afould of this so far:
Ian King talks makes an STV plea;
Darren Barefoot pledges his support;
Sacha Peter talks about voting;
Raymond Tomlin spends a lot of time on many election issues at VanRamblings.
So the question is: when you choose to support someone on your blog—is it advertising? Before you answer—realize that some of these people make a living, or part of a living, as bloggers. And then ask yourself, it it any different if a business is the “owner” of that blog, or a person. Hmmm. Interesting issue.
About
This blog is the companion Web site for "Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies," a book for business professionals looking for advice and solutions for business blogging by Susannah Gardner. In stores now!
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