Lightning started a fire at the Magellan Petroleum factory in Kansas City, MO and uber-blogger Chuck Zimmerman share this video shot from the downtown Marriott hotel.
Category Archives: Blogging
Coppyblogger Twitter Writing Contest
Congratulations to Ron Gould, first place winner the Coppyblogger Twitter Writing Contest. His winning entry:
“Time travel works!” the note read. “However you can only travel to the past and one-way.” I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill.
Second place honors went to Anthony Juliano:
“Tony was a snitch, so I wasn’t surprised when his torso turned up in the river. What did surprise me, though, was where they found his head.”
Thelonius Monk took third place for:
“When Gibson hit that homerun in the fall of eighty-eight, my old man had never been so happy. He hugged me for the first time. I was eleven.”
The challenge was to write a story in exactly 140 characters. I fear my humble submission was too… belittling? Too pissy? We’ll never know.
“To my immediate left, a hipster dwarf leaned into his urinal, cleverly achieving a haunting reverb for his “big” finish to Unchained Melody.”
Blogger’s High
E-Media Tidbits points us to an article in the May 2008 Scientific American, by Jennifer Wapner (Blogging: It’s Good for You):
“Blogging may make us feel better because it acts as a substitute or placebo for real satisfaction. Or, according to one neuroscientist cited by Wapner, our limbic (primitive) brain may have an innate need to communicate — akin to our drives for food or sex. Thus, as we blog, our bodies may release the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine.”
I feel better already.
The Digital Cottage Industry
I’ve posted frequently about my friend Chuck, who –with his wife Cindy and a SWAT team of free-lance bloggers– have built a thriving business providing blogging, podcasting and related services to a growing list of clients.
"Cindy and I have been going over calendars and we just realized that we have 23 events scheduled to blog in the next 3 months. Yeeow. Just the hotel reservations, credentialing, registering, airline reservations, etc. are a task. We’ve also got 5 website projects underway just to add to the fun."
Can you make money blogging? For most, the answer is "not likely." For the few, the proud, the Marines… yes. Booyah!
“We make money because we blog, not from our blog.”
“We make money because we blog not from our blog. We earn because we learn from sharing our experiences with others, not because we let advertisers hitch a ride on our writing for a fee. No one pays attention to the ads, so it doesn’t matter if you include them or not.”
— Dave Winer quoting Doc Searls
A blogging case study, close to home
I’m always on the lookout for good (or bad) blogging stories. I found one in our own back yard during the last few days. The story isn’t complicated but I think our corporate blog tells it better than I can. Just read the original post and the comments. It’s all there.
I’m really proud of how our company and our CEO has used the blog to explain a difficult decision, and allow interested parties to tell us how they feel about it. I’ve been thinking about how this would have been handled pre-blog.
We might or might not have put out a news release. This had to do with an unpleasant decision. If the public wanted to tell us how they felt about it, they could write a letter or send an email, to which we might or might not have responded.
Whatever communication took place, it would have been slow and not very public. With a well-established corporate blog, our CEO just put it out there. The reasons for the action we took… comments… and his response to some of those comments.
Not everybody is happy with the outcome but nobody can say we haven’t been open about it. As an employee –and blogger– I’m proud of how this was handled.
Full disclosure: My wife works for a law firm that represents one of the companies mentioned in the post and comments.
“If it’s relevant, I’ll read about it on Twitter”
Chris Pirillo was –and remains– an early thought-leader for me. Blogging, RSS, video… Chris was always out there on the front edge. So, when he says Twitter has become one of his primary sources of information, I’m inclined to listen.
“Back in ‘the day’, we used to have to visit web pages to get our information. Those pages didn’t tell us when they updated, so we had to find out manually. Then, along came RSS. The idea was you could subscribe to something, and it would tell you when there was a new update. Now comes Twitter, with its flood of information that allows me to spot trends in general. Twitter has supplanted the information I used to receive in my news aggregator. I don’t follow many websites anymore, and don’t really ’subscribe’ to anything. For me, if something is going to be relevant, I’m going to read about it on Twitter. With Twitter, I’m able to follow people much easier. As disorganized as it is, it’s easier for me to learn about personalities. You can understand thoughts and feelings much easier than you could with a simple RSS feed.”
I’m not quite there yet, in part because I don’t “follow” as many people as Chris does. But I’m starting to see what he’s talking about. A few of the folks I follow on Twitter are very plugged in and I can count on a line or two with a link when something in their area of interest breaks.
CNN: Student Twitters way out of Egyptian jail
“James Karl Buck helped free himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word blog post from his cell phone. Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator Mohammed Maree were arrested April 10.
On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.
The message only had one word. “Arrested.”
Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted he was being held.” [CNN]
How long to lose your blog readers?
The J-Walk Blog is very popular. For all the usual reasons. He writes well about interesting stuff and he posts every day. Usually several times a day. John Walkenbach (Mr. J-Walk) was called away to a meeting and didn’t post for a week. Upon his return, he checked his stats and did a little trending to determine he would lose all of his many readers in 17 days if he stopped posting altogether. One assumes it would take less time for blogs with fewer readers. I wonder how long –if at all- it would take for visitors to return. And why would they?
Seth Godin: “Write like a blogger”
I quote Seth Godin so often I gave him his own tag. And sometimes he writes/thinks something so dead-on that I have to quote the entire post. Every word is gold:
"You can improve your writing (your business writing, your ad writing, your thank you notes and your essays) if you start thinking like a blogger:
- Use headlines. I use them all the time now. Not just boring ones that announce your purpose (like the one on this post) but interesting or puzzling or engaging headlines. Headlines are perfect for engaging busy readers.
- Realize that people have choices. With 80 million other blogs to choose from, I know you could leave at any moment (see, there goes someone now). So that makes blog writing shorter and faster and more exciting.
- Drip, drip, drip. Bloggers don’t have to say everything at once. We can add a new idea every day, piling on a thesis over time.
- It’s okay if you leave. Bloggers aren’t afraid to include links or distractions in their writing, because we know you’ll come back if what we had to say was interesting.
- Interactivity is a great shortcut. Your readers care about someone’s opinion even more than yours… their own. So reading your email or your comments or your trackbacks (your choice) makes it easy to stay relevant.
- Gimmicks aren’t as useful as insight. If you’re going to blog successfully for months or years, sooner or later you need to actually say something. Same goes for your writing.
- Don’t be afraid of lists. People like lists.
- Show up. Not writing is not a useful way of expressing your ideas. Waiting for perfect is a lousy strategy.
- Say it. Don’t hide, don’t embellish.
What would happen if every single high school student had to have a blog? Or every employee in your company? Or every one of your customers?"