Author Archive for Tim

Community Building Friday

Published by Tim on October 10, 2008 in Blog Writing. 2 Comments

Hat tip to Beth to sending us a link to Chris Brogan’s great post on 25 Ways to Build Your Community. Twenty-five is a lot of ways, but Chris is clearly passionate about the matter and the lessons in this list are ones we see paying off for people everyday here in BlogBurstLand.

While not everybody has the fortitude to read at least 100 blogs regularly (suggestion #1), one’s reach should exceed one’s grasp, and many of the suggestions here are very attainable.

I encourage you to read the original post, but if I had to boil down the principles espoused here I’d say they are:

  • care about what you write, take care to write well, don’t be snotty, and top it off with a good headline
  • link to other people and posts and promote other people’s work; trust the great karma boomerang
  • use the tools at your disposal: comments, Twitter, live meetups, whatever you got
  • think ahead, use strategy

Considering the fact that Chris has pages of comments on his post already, it seems to be working for him.

Be a BlogStar

Published by Tim on July 11, 2008 in Blog Writing. 19 Comments

We just came across this post So You Want to Be a Blogging Star on NYTimes.com, which serves as an excellent primer on how to write and keep a successful blog.

Here at BlogBurst central we look at blogs all day, of course, and these points are spot on:

  • Don’t do it to get rich (but blog passionately and rewards will follow)
  • Blog about your passions, and in your own voice
  • Fit blogging into your daily schedule
  • Join the community
  • Plug yourself

The best thing about the suggestions above are that they’re geared toward fitting your blog into your life and building it slowly over time. We see scores of blogs that are well written and fit a niche, but which don’t last more than a couple of months. The truth is, it’s hard to sustain an extracurricular activity like a blog, especially when blogs don’t make you money unless / until they get popular (which usually takes a long time).

If you have other recommendations for blogbuilding, leave them in the comments below!

How To Name Your New Blog

Published by Tim on June 4, 2008 in Blog Writing. 11 Comments

So you’re just about to give birth to your brand-new baby blog — exciting! Time to name your little bundle of joy.

But what makes for a good blog name? Here are some tips for coming up with a monikker that you, and the Web, will love.

Pick a name and stick with it

You probably want people to read your blog and to grow it into a healthy little gal or fella (it said its first word!).

The more posts you write, the more your blog gets into the search engines like Google, and the more other people will link to you. As time passes, you build up credibility on the mysterious Interwebs, and this credibility sends you visitors. If you change names down the road, you lose the credibility you’ve built up and have to start over. Try to pick a name you can live with.

It has to sound cool to you

No matter how brilliant your thinking and your writing, our BlogBurst scientists have determined that the most important aspect of blogging may just be posting regularly and sticking with it. If you lose interest in your own name, you won’t continue. Pick something you love.

Details, details: what makes a successful name?

Your blog name should be memorable, and stick as a “brand” or a monikker, like a band name (Winger!). That said, all kinds of names can work. In the olden days before the Web (*shudder*), publications had to have super-snappy titles dreamed up by marketing teams; in the blogosphere, you can look at the top blogs and you’ll see that a lot of the names are funky and random. Look at the big ones: Daily Kos. Scobleizer. icanhascheezburger. Seth’s blog. GigaOM. Random, but all catchy (or at least memorable) in some way.

Like all Web names (”eBay”), there’s no science to what works as long as it’s easy to remember and hard to misspell. Some ideas to consider:

  • play off your own name
  • play off the topic you’re covering (see next point)
  • here are some places to see lists of blog names to get ideas from

Make it topical. Or not.

Some blogs are solely dedicated to a single topic. This can be a great thing, IF you’re willing to dedicate your whole blog to that topic; if you don’t want to stay on topic all the time, consider a more generic name. For example, Stuff White People Like or Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide are so topical that the authors have to stay close to those topics; yet In The Pink Texas (written by our beloved former editor, even if she never comes around no more) or, say, Kottke.org are open-ended enough that those authors can write about whatever they choose.

Finally, naming a blog is more an art than a science. If you have other thoughts about noms de blog, tell us in the comments!

Starting a Blog: Choose Your (Free) Software

Published by Tim on April 25, 2008 in Blog Tools & Technology. 14 Comments

You’ve rolled up your sleeves and you’re ready to start a blog. You’ve picked your topic — say, portraits made out of food — and you chose a blog name (FoodFace?) You’re ready to type away.

But wait, you need a place to blog, don’t you? That’s what this post is about: Good, free blog software.

In the world of free blogging software (aka “blogging engines” - vrooom!), two stand above the rest: Blogger and Wordpress. Both are “hosted,” which means you just visit a Web page to blog instead of having to downloading and install anything.

Blogger

Blogger is owned by Google, and you can tell a lot about Blogger by its home page: it’s simple, clear, and friendly.

blogger.gif

Signing up is easy — in fact, everything about Blogger is easy. Blogger gives you basic options to customize the look of your blog by picking from some 16 templates, and you can rearrange the basic elements like your archive links around your page.

If you want to see what Blogger blogs look like in action, go to Blogger.com and click on some of the recently updated blogs and those “of note” at the top of the page — this gives a good idea of what you get.

blogger2.gif

Wordpress

Like Blogger, Wordpress is free and hosted. When you visit the Wordpress home page, you can see that there’s more going on here; and that’s because there’s more going on with Wordpress. This software gives you many more options for customizing, including pages and pages of design templates to choose from.

wordpress2.gif

It also comes with a host of useful add-ons and features like a spam blocker for your comments, easy-to-place tag clouds, search boxes and the like, and notification when other Wordpress blogs link to your posts.

Note that Wordpress also offers a downloadable version of its software. The free blogging engine lives at Wordpress.com while the software lives at Wordpress.org. If you’re like me, you will type the wrong one many, many times in the course of your blogging life.

How To Choose?

Both of these tools are state-of-the-art and include functions like RSS feeds and what-you-see-is-what-you-get text editing.

My first recommendation is to look at blogs hosted on Blogger and Wordpress and see which has a design “feel” that you like (be sure to look at several from each).

Next: do you want simplicity over all (Blogger)? Or do you think you’ll want to fiddle and tweak and have room to grow (Wordpress?)

If you still can’t decide, you can always start with Blogger and then at some later date suck your whole Blogger blog into Wordpress (a nice feature indeed).

If you have opinions about these, or other, blogging tools, please leave your thoughts in the comments!

Happy blogging…

Killed By … Blogging?

Published by Tim on April 8, 2008 in General. 3 Comments

An article in the Sunday New York Times is getting a lot of play in bloggyland this week – In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop. The gist is that a few prominent bloggers recently suffered heart attacks, and the culprit could be the never-ending stress cycle created by blogging, which just might kill you.

My first reaction was: come on, New York Times, is there really a story here?

Any job that requires you to sit in front of the computer for long hours obsessively watching any kind of information leads to high stress and little physical movement. Is blogging different from day trading, online gambling, or even traditional journalism? I bet stress has taken its toll in those professions too. Or is it just that blogging is a hot topic, so you combine blogging with regular work stress, hit “enter” and you’ve got a story with legs? (Not to mention that some blogs aren’t exactly on the stress program, like the once-a-week-if-that-often Becker-Posner Blog, one of my faves.)

Yet the more I mull it over, the more I think the Times is onto something: the blogosphere does seem to pull successful bloggers toward obsessiveness and high-stress behavior.

In our network (and in the blogosphere in general), the most successful blogs are ones that post frequently and also cover the new developments in their fields. And if you want to keep up with the latest developments, you’re signing up for a never-ending barrage of information — Google Alerts, RSS blog updates, instant messages, emails, comments on your posts. And you might as well get a BlackBerry or an iPhone to ensure you can never escape. As your traffic grows so do the inputs, and the information vortex builds upon itself. The more your attention is dominated by the screen, the more you are apt to sit in one place, maybe eat some potato chips (I think I’m going to go get some right now).

I’m certainly not in a position to give health advice, but what the heck — it’s spring, take a minute to get up and walk around. Go outside and smell the air.

Try to maximize your efficiency. Some bloggers collaborate with others to cut down the work, others make sure to include good search engine optimization as a way of getting more for less.

You’ll also find lots of good tips for work-life balance out there on the Web, and the “getting things done” mavens are full of tips for making your workday (and night) more efficient (like checking your email once an hour instead of every 10 seconds).

Of course, you also can just live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful blog.

Life Cycle of a Blog Post

Published by Tim on January 31, 2008 in General. 1 Comment

Wired has an interesting interactive infographic that looks at all the forces that act upon your blog post in one way or another. There’s you, the blogger; search engines; ad servers; social bookmarks; and several other players, including even the spam blogs who steal your stuff.

wired1.png

New Kinds of Blog Ads in ‘08

Published by Tim on January 16, 2008 in Promoting Your Blog. 1 Comment

Kelly Spors of The Wall Street Journal is pegging 2008 as the year you just might start making money off your blog:

As more people see potential in earning money off the Internet, there is a quickly expanding array of advertising services and tools for bloggers that go well beyond the standard pay-per-click text ads or display ads.

Many of the most widely used programs are adding features to allow users to customize the appearance and placement of ads on their sites. Some also are introducing newer money-making mediums such as audio and video ads.

Of course, there’s no telling whether these new ad types will work. (One she mentions — an audio ad that automatically plays every time someone visits your blog — sounds a leeeetle bit annoying…). And it’s easy to dream about making a living off your blog only to realize that your traffic will only produce a few bucks.

Nevertheless, the more truly contextual and useful advertising gets, and the easier it becomes to integrate into multimedia, the more bloggers themselves will be able to get paid for all the blood, sweat, and tears.

Kindle Commentary — They’re Missing the Story

Published by Tim on November 30, 2007 in General. 4 Comments

kindle1.pngThere’s been no lack of commentary in the blogs this past week about Amazon’s new Kindle reader, the new incarnation of the “e-book” (a device that lets you read books or Internet content like blogs wherever you go, and with a distinctly different feeling than a portable computer.)

Surprisingly, almost all the commentary missed the point, focusing on the Kindle’s flaws (apparently Amazon did not spread the kind of usability love that Apple slathered all over the iPhone). OK, fair enough, most of the posts started as product reviews. But what about the real story? This paperback-sized reader could just change the way we read and write the digital word.

“Madness!” you cry. “Impossible.” Hang on, hear me out.

The big leap here is that the Kindle doesn’t use a traditional computer screen. As mentioned in another post, computer screens typically are low-resolution and flash at you some 80 times per second, all of which makes for a much more jarring reading experience than we all realize.

The Kindle, however, uses “electronic ink” technology where the screen you read is actually made of teenyweeny little balls that show up black or white (see http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/e-ink1.htm) — MUCH more like reading on paper than the screens you’re used to.

So what’s the revolution here? Simple: you can read much longer things. You can focus on text. You can read outdoors. You can even read a whole book on it. The more the world of the blogosphere and the Web moves to devices with non-light-emitting screens, the more chance that the written Web will allow for longer articles.

And in a world of bite-sized tiny info-tidbits, and Web pages that people scan instead of read, I for one think this will be a small revolution and a boon to writers. (Combined with more and more video for subjects that work well in that medium.)

Stopping Content Theft

Published by Tim on November 27, 2007 in Blog Writing. 2 Comments

It’s a dark and dangerous world out there, and all sorts of people would love to steal your content for their own aims (making ad revenue, gathering search engine traffic, etc.)

I’d write a post about how to stop content theft, but The Blog Herald already did a bang-up job of it yesterday. Check out The 6 Steps to Stop Content Theft.

The overview (with details on each at the originating site) is:

  • find out who is copying your stuff
  • preserve the evidence
  • copy the plagiarist first (if practical)
  • contact the plagiarist’s advertisers
  • contact the plagiarist’s host
  • contact the search engines

Why You Need an Editorial Style Guide

Published by Tim on November 14, 2007 in Blog Writing. 2 Comments

style.png OK, so we know you’ve got style, but do you have the right kind? We’re not talking personal flair here — if you want a great blog, you’ll need to think a little about editorial style.

Your editorial style includes the conventions you use for spelling certain words (email or e-mail? Web site or website? Colour? Theatre?) and the basic rules of grammar and punctuation you follow.

If that all sounds too much like school, it doesn’t have to be complicated. The key is consistency. At the simplest, you can keep a list of common words that have more than one spelling (email, website) and always spell them the same way. Decide if you’re going to use the second comma in “this, that, and the other” and thereafter always do the same thing.

An easier way to handle style is to follow a style guide. Not sure if you should use the second comma? Just look it up.

The AP Stylebook is sort of the gold standard for journalists. The Columbia.edu online style guide is a nice online alternative.

If you use other good resources for editorial style, leave a comment!

p.s. As a tangent, it’s interesting (to me. a dork.) how style changes over time. When I started working on the Web in 1995, not only did my AP Stylebook not include any Internet terms, but I thought that email should be spelled e-mail (”it’s electronic mail, after all — e-mail!”) and website should be spelled “Web site” because “World Wide Web is a proper noun!”

Now that ten years and more have passed, I see email and website as words of their own.