Tag Archives: blogging

Remembering Aaron Swartz – “You should blog that.”

Tantek remembers Aaron’s encouragement to blog ideas and solutions:

But the larger point here is that he turned a rant into a positive action. He challenged me to do something about it, to blog what I’d figured out, to provide a clear constructive encouragement instead of just a criticism.

And..

If you believe something passionately, you should blog that.

I agree. I’ve been thankful to myself for nearly every post I’ve ever written. Even if only a handful of people read them also I’d always have the posts for myself.

I need to blog a lot more than I do. About solutions, practices, and processes. And I’m going to. Just wait.

Tantek also has Part 2 up.

The web we lost

Anil Dash waxes poetic about the web of turn of the century before Facebook and Twitter. But then talks about what is happening now:

But we’re going to face a big challenge with re-educating a billion people about what the web means, akin to the years we spent as everyone moved off of AOL a decade ago, teaching them that there was so much more to the experience of the Internet than what they know.

Facebook is definitely the modern-day America Online. Twitter the modern-day SMS. But our blogs are still here. And Google does a decent job of indexing them. And maybe, just maybe we’ll see a resurgence of people “getting onto the web” as opposed to “getting on Facebook”. But the only way that will happen is if these tools of yesterday get as much attention and focus as the social web. And I think I see that coming.

 

Signal vs. Noise redesigns

Mig Reyes writes about the redesign of the 37signal’s blog:

More often than not, company blogs are littered with pitches for their product. I don’t want to throw new job opportunities at you right away. I don’t want to ask you to subscribe to our RSS feed when you haven’t even read anything yet. These rules informed the layout: content first, everything else second.

On quibble I generally have about company blogs with multiple authors, and this new redesign (lovely as it is) is no different, is that I’d like to see the byline at the top of the page somewhere. I want to know whose post I’m reading from the start.

Update 31 October 2012: I’m back from vacation and I see that 37signals has added a simple byline under the title of their posts. Winning!

My island on this ocean

Me, over four years ago:

As it stands I post what I’m currently doing to Twitter, I am testing out Pownce with mobile blogging, events, links, and files, I post mobile phone photos to Flickr (as well as the occasional screenshot), videos go on Viddler, bookmarks end up on Ma.gnolia, tasting notes end up on Cork’d, and my thoughts on Apple products find their way to TUG.n.

What a difference four years can make! Pownce, Ma.gnolia, Cork’d, TUG.n, all gone. Flickr rarely gets my attention. Twitter is still here but is changing policies more often than I change my shirt. Viddler, I’m very proud to say, is stronger than ever but is certainly a much different service than it was then.

The Internet is like the open ocean and what we publish seems to be on a life raft simply going along for the ride. Yet our personal websites seem to be like small islands in this ocean. Sure, their beaches may change from time-to-time but the island remains – like a beacon to all travelers that we’re still here – somewhere to always come back to as these rafts take on water and eventually sink into the deep.

This environment forces me to rethink, yet again, how and where I publish on the web. This internal debate seems to be one that keeps coming up, over and over, year after year, as the ocean of the Internet ebbs and flows.

Should I simply post everything that I publish directly to this site and nowhere else? Do I cross post things to this site and also onto other services? Do I simply link back to this site from those services? Do I syndicate to those services with their own accounts (like I do now on Twitter and Facebook for this site)? Do I post some content here and some content elsewhere?

Believe it or not, and you may think I’m crazy, but these questions plague me all of the time. I constantly struggle with this. And I never seem to muster the conviction to make a hard choice and so I’ve got content everywhere; Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, the brand-new App.net, Flickr, a little on Google+, and so on.

Why does it take conviction to limit myself to only posting on this site? Because there is a pull and a need to share this content with as many people as possible. With nearly 2,000 followers on Twitter, a few hundred on Instagram, friends and family on Flickr, etc. it is hard to limit the exposure of this content. I want people to see what I’m publishing. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. This site, as it stands, only has a relatively small audience. Some of my posts get views in the single digits, others, in the hundreds of thousands. So I can never really be sure how many people are paying attention. That is why it takes conviction. I have to be OK with the fact that maybe, just maybe, no one will notice. And maybe, just maybe, no one will care.

I think I’ve gotten to that point. Even as I write this I’m coming around to the idea that I don’t really need anyone to read this post. And if they do read it I’d much rather them read it here than on Facebook or Google+. Whether or not I choose to publish here on my site or elsewhere doesn’t really matter at all to anyone but me. And I want to publish to my site. So I should publish in a way that makes me happy, right?

There is an upside to making this a hard, line-in-the-sand choice. If anything I post is shared around the web it will point back to my website. My island. Some have built up enormous followings on Twitter and Instagram. What happens when they go away or change? I’d much rather people remember me for my website than for my Instagram stream.

So what does this mean? Well, I’ve thought about it. And I’m still going to tweet. Though probably far less. Twenty-five thousand plus tweets so far and counting. My entire family and most of my close friends are on Twitter. And, using Twitter Lists, I’m able to get a lot of value from this service. Far more than any other. However, I’m done with Facebook, Google+, Flickr, ADN and Instagram (even though I love Instagram). Everything that I publish is going to be on this site. Follow, don’t follow, it is up to you.

 

Do you deal with this struggle? I’d love to read about how you’re dealing with it on Hacker News.

 

Some have asked if they’ll be able to stay subscribed to this site via Twitter and Facebook. Yes, you will. As long as their policies allow for it. And also RSS if you’re a nerd like me.

Building community before the shrine

Craig Mod, for Contents Issue No. 4:

I received an email from the company sometime in March. We’re a publisher with four million fans on Facebook. We’d like to talk with you.

Fascinatingly well-written story about a publisher that started with a Facebook fan page (rather than a website of their own) and quickly grew to 4,000,000 fans. As one of the old guard from the days where you needed to build everything from scratch that you wanted to see on the web this is a great reminder that today’s tools are sitting there, ready to use, ready to be utilized and leveraged, all we need to do is pick them up.

/via Tina Roth Eisenberg.

Why the WordPress theme customizer matters

Andy Adams of The Theme Foundry:

I’d like to suggest that competitors like Squarespace are going to start eating WordPress’s lunch on the “ease of use” front if WordPress does not adapt.

Adams goes on to say how important the theme customizer is to helping WordPress to keep its competition at bay.

Remember, Matt Mullenweg said that they are focused on “radically simplifying what we currently do”. This is key for WordPress to continue to be the platform of choice for so many sites. There are much easier solutions out there – though arguably more or less powerful – but WordPress really could use a major (radical as Matt put it) rethink because the years of adding features have made it much more complex than its newest competition.

More on linking by Matthew Ingram

Matthew Ingram wrote a good piece entitled Why links matter: Linking is the lifeblood of the web for Gigaom. First, about giving credit:

In the days when newspapers ruled the world of information, giving credit to other outlets was (and often still is) discouraged. Rewriting or “matching” a story that someone else broke — or taking wire-service reports and rewriting them a little — was standard practice, and code words such as “one report” were often used so a newspaper wouldn’t have to mention a competitor’s news story.

And, about burying links to the original source or credit:

One reason people often give for the failure to link (or the “hiding” of links at the bottom of an article, for which some have criticized outlets like The Verge) is that the financial model for digital media — that is, advertising — relies on page views, and one of the ways to juice those numbers is to pretend you broke a story.

This is yet more confirmation on my decision to finally bite the bullet and use Daring Fireball style links here on my blog. This blog only makes a few dollars on a few sparse articles that, for some reason or another, have hundreds of thousands of pageviews due to Google search results. I do not care about or even track those pageviews very often so making the link to other websites as prominent and easy to find as possible does not conflict with my blog’s “business model”.

The Verge’s model of putting the source and via links at the very bottom of the post could probably be improved on. I remember when their site first launched I had a heck of a time finding the links at all. I think they should work the links into the main content of the post. They can afford to do the right thing.

/via Shawn Blanc who has a great point about pageviews:

Metrics like pageviews and subscriber counts are a cheap and dying metric.

The web is getting too big for these numbers to matter as much as they used to.

The way we handle linking

For the past week or so I’ve been publishing Daring Fireball-style links for the links category (or as some call them, the link list). I’ve been going back and forth on whether or not to link this way for years. (The things geeks worry about.)

Readers find these style of links much more beneficial. Especially RSS feed subscribers. And, indeed, it does seem less “spammy” when you’re linking readers directly to the sources rather than to a webpage of your own. Though, this site very, very seldom has any sort of advertising or affiliate links – it can still seem spammy. When linking to something the full credit for that something should go directly to those who published it.

I’m not the only one who was mulling this over, on 1 July Stephen Hackett made the switch.

More writing tips from McSweeney’s

Colin Nissan (great name, by the way) writes The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do. Great list… here’s one tip:

STUDY THE RULES, THEN BREAK THEM
Part of finding your own voice as a writer is finding your own grammar. Don’t spend your career lost in a sea of copycats when you can establish your own set of rules. If everyone’s putting periods at the end of their sentences, put yours in the middle of words. Will it be incredibly difficult to read? Yes it will. Will it set you on the path to becoming a literary pioneer? Tough to say, but you’re kind of out of options at this point.

I agree with the entire list but I especially agree with this tip. I have my own style of writing. I over use periods. I’m pretty terrible. However, I’m terrible on purpose. I want to be a decent writer and I certainly want my writing to be readable – but I don’t necessarily care about following the rules perfectly. If I was worried about following the rules I’d never publish anything. I err on the side of publishing.

21 tips to start blogging by Chris Brogan

Chris said not to share this list but also said that every rule on this list was breakable so here is me breaking the rules and sharing the list anyway. My favorite is #3:

3. Start writing.

I’m a bit biased but I truly believe everyone should have a blog. And a Twitter account.

One thing I can not back fully on this list is #2. Pick an area of focus. If you want to be successful at blogging – and that usually means building a fairly-sized audience and making money – then yes, pick an area of focus. For me, at the moment, that’s The Watercolor Gallery. Laser-focused blogging. Crazy successful. Much more successful than this blog.

But, I also think that if you just want to maintain a blog. Don’t worry about an area of focus. This, my personal blog, is about whatever I want. Whenever I want. However I want. It gets almost no traffic and generates about $50 bucks a month. And I’m tickled pink about it.

A Geek’s Journal 1976

Steven Thompson took his journal from 1976 and made it into a blog. It took off. He was offered a publishing deal. But he turned it down and decided to run a Kickstarter campaign instead.

I thought it would be a clever idea to do my 1976 high school journal as a blog but I never realized just how many people the world over could relate on so many levels to my general seventeen year old geekiness. The blog quickly became amazingly popular with coverage from major sites and write-ups from various different countries.

So, why is his campaign only at $127 of the $12,000 goal even after being featured on Boing Boing? My guess is because the rewards for pledging to the campaign aren’t worded correctly. At first read it looks as though you have to pledge at least $250 in order to get a copy of the book.

I think if Steven rewords the rewards and makes it clear at which point you get a copy of the book his campaign will get some traction. Awesome idea.

Trent Walton on blogs

Trent Walton on blogs:

Places on the web for sharing content and ideas often remind me of real life interactions. Facebook is the everlasting high school reunion. Twitter, which I love, is maybe half cocktail party, half party-line. Flickr & Instagram can be the best way to send a postcard, while LinkedIn is the best way to send a fax ;) To me, there’s something sacred about reading a blog post on someone else’s site. It’s like visiting a friend’s house for a quick meal ‘round the breakfast table. It’s personal— you’re in their space, and the environment is uniquely suited for idea exchange and uninterrupted conversation. In many ways, we should be treating our blogs like our breakfast tables. Be welcoming & gracious when you host, and kind & respectful when visiting.

Twitter, for me is slightly more familial, professional, and often news breaking but otherwise I whole heartedly agree with this sentiment. If you have a blog you should feel it is your home online – everywhere else are places you go out to.

How do blogs need to evolve?

This is a subject that is near and dear to me. It is a bit cliché to say this but I’ve been blogging since before it was a common verb. I’ve watched, very closely, as the blogging world has evolved over the last decade and even took some small part in that evolution.

It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote that I thought that blogs were ripe for disruption. And I still think we’re on the cusp of that. Or, perhaps, it is happening right in front of my eyes and I am simply not noticing it.

In a recent discussion between Anil Dash and a few other veterans of blogging Anil mentioned that even something as simple as a status update or tweet could be considered blogging. Although Twitter is rarely referred to this way today it was, at its inception, called a microblogging service. So maybe blogging has already evolved and we just haven’t noticed. The frog in the boiling pot comes to mind.

Although the conversation seemed to focus a lot on commenting I would have liked to have seen much more discussion around the topic of ownership. Some of the participants felt that ownership was important. Others not as much. If you look at how the party split it was split between the platform-builders and service-builders. Ev and Meg built services (Blogger, Kinja, Twitter) while Anil worked on a platform (Movable Type). I think there was much more to say on this topic.

Meg Hourihan on ownership:

But I’m not convinced people view what they’re doing [on social networks] as producing content, nor thinking it’s something they should own, anymore than I want to “own” my phone call with a friend. (Sure I don’t want someone to record it and sell it, but that’s different.) My call is ephemeral, and it’s about conversation and communication, not content.

While Meg believes that she’s seeing the world as it is I think she’s really just identified the problem with these social networks. Twitter and Facebook have permenant URLs for every single tweet and status update that people post. Those links are not ephemeral as Meg describes. She may feel as though they are because Twitter doesn’t give you access to your entire stream but – in reality – these tweets do not go away.

And that’s where Anil nails it.

So that point is very, very interesting, Meg: What if the phone company gave you free unlimited phone calls but they could record, monitor and sell your phone calls and information about what you said on them.

I do agree so much of why people don’t value ownership in social media is that they see it as conversation, not content, but that’s often because we don’t *know* in advance when it becomes meaningful.

In other words, people are viewing Twitter and Facebook as conversation platforms more than they view them as publishing platforms. Facebook and Twitter are finding value in what we all consider to be valueless conversation. They are making money based on what we are saying, what we’re interested in, and what is happening in the world. If they find value in our “content” why don’t we? And, if they treat this information as permanent why aren’t we?

Back to the evolution of blogs. I don’t think there is much argument about whether or not Twitter and Facebook can be considered blogging platforms. So we should lump them into the conversation of how blogs need to evolve. Which brings us full circle back to ownership. I think that people should own their own content. And they should know, up front, that they will own the content if they use a particular service or choose to host it themselves. It shouldn’t matter. They should also feel as though the content they post to any service is to be considered permanent – not a phone call that is soon forgotten.

I don’t think that a blog needs to run on software that you install on your own server in order for you to feel as though you own the content. WordPress.com and WordPress.org are nearly identical services with the same import and export capabilities yet one is a service and the other a platform. So you can use either of these products and feel pretty confident that you own the content and that the information you post there is permanent.

So how does this particular aspect of blogging need to evolve? I think other services such as Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and (fill in the blank) should do a better job of making your content searchable and accessible (read: exportable into a readable format) right out of the box. Not hidden somewhere in a Mac-only application or three-levels-deep in an API doc. One click easy.

The next aspect of blogging that I believe needs to evolve is the reverse-chronological homepage. In May of 2011 I wrote:

I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.

Imagine you landed on /blog/ here at my cdevroe.com URL. What you’d find there would be what the typical blog homepage looks like. Just a list of posts from newest to oldest. It’d be very difficult to find out what I blogged about based on only the last few posts. This is why I chose to put my about page front-and-center. I believe that is a better way to get to know me, what I’m up to, and what my blog is about.

I don’t think the blog format is broken but it is certainly stale. Someone needs to come along and give us a new way to look at things. And not just in a novel way like tiles or something else that is pretty and neat to look at – I’d like to see something that is valuable, makes it really easy to see what the blog is about, perhaps what is popular now, or what was at one time popular. I think of the currently most visited URLs here on this blog. They are not the most recent posts. Not by a long shot. My top URLs on this blog are a few links that I’ve posted in the past that have somehow found their way to the top of the search engine rankings. Would that be important to show on the homepage of a blog? Or, what about the fact that a few of my posts have had hundreds and hundreds of comments? Would that be important to show?

Sidebar “widgets” sprang up years ago as ways to solve some of these issues. Related posts, popular posts, most-used tags, and other widgets made it easier to discover content that has already been pushed off of the homepage. But I still think that someone, somewhere has an idea of how to fix these issues and that one day we’ll wake up and someone will have made something better.

One last issue that I would have liked to see discussed in regards to what aspect of blogs that may need to evolve would be the use of databases. This is a more technical topic than the others but many platforms and services suffer from downtime whenever a post goes viral or hits the mass media. This simply shouldn’t happen.

Each platform and service chooses to handle content management in their own unique ways. Blogger and Moveable Type, for instance, used to publish HTML files (I have no idea what they do nowadays) while WordPress opted to use a simple database to host the content and serve those pages dynamically. Each approach has their pros and cons. But one thing is certain – it is far easier to serve a static HTML file millions of times than it is to request content from a database millions of times. Today’s web is one where at any moment an URL could be plagued by millions of visitors. Modern day blogging platforms and services should take this into consideration regardless if it was manually installed or hosted.

Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook all have extremely capable infrastructures in place to handle these issues. With WordPress.org you’re on your own to setup WordPress properly to handle load. It has taken some heat for this and while the argument could be made that people that are installing software on their own server should know better – the argument could also be made that by simply pre-bundling one of the many caching plugins into the core codebase this issue would be all but solved.

Tons of traffic to any particular post shouldn’t be thought of as an edge case. If you’re a blogger it will happen. Even if you’ve been writing for 40 years and it has never happened to you. It will. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not your blogging product of choice will crumble under the pressure of today’s web. Ever.

I could go on about this topic all day. The rest of the discussion is fantastic and I suggest that anyone with even a passing curiosity about the world of blogging – where it has been and where it is going – should give it a read at your next opportunity.

More benefits of turning off comments

Over four years ago whether a blog should or shouldn’t have comments was a heavily debated topic in the blogging community. Back then I wrote about one possible benefit of disabling comments.

One of the benefits I see coming from disabling comments is the number of links you end up getting back to your site.

Almost a year ago I wrote about the fact that blogging was ready for disruption. (I still think it is.) And that the new “pro blog recipe” was a blog without comments.

Lately this topic seems to have risen its head again yet not in the same way as it has in the past. In fact, rather than there being a debate for or against a blog having comments it appears that most independent bloggers have resolved that a blog without comments is simply much more enjoyable and manageable while larger outfits still see the need to engage the community.

Matt Gemmell, who recently shut off comments on his personal blog, added a few reasons to the fray. Here is one of his reasons that I have also enjoyed since turning comments off on my personal blog.

I feel more willing to publish short pieces, and to write more frequently.

When I had comments on I wouldn’t publish anything that I thought may not start a conversation. Which ended up leading me in a direction I simply didn’t want to go in – I was starting conversations for the sake of starting conversations. That isn’t why I have my personal blog and I don’t want it to be. So, off went the comments. And it isn’t because I don’t want to hear the opinions of those that read my blog. It is because I don’t want to write simply for the gratification of receiving comments. It has been very liberating.

There is still a place for comments on blogs. Even personal blogs. Some blogs have very good reasons to have comments on them. In fact, even Jason Kottke turns on comments from time-to-time when they are needed. But there are better examples like Horace Dediu’s Asymco. He has made it plainly clear that he runs Asymco in order to work with his community on figuring out a problem. He wants feedback, questions, answers, rebuttals to his hypothesis and blog comments is his primary way of accomplishing that.

So while the debate rages on – and all debates are good when they furnish constructive conversation – unlike Gemmell I firmly believe it is a matter of choice by the publisher rather than a cut-and-dry answer. There are pros and cons to having comments on or off and, once weighed, the publisher can then make a decision on how he or she would like to run their own blog.

Goodbye chronological. Hello realtime. Sad face.

In the good old days of the web I was able to subscribe to any site and receive updates via my feed reader for every post that the site made in the order that they were published. Even though RSS feeds typically only held a finite number of items in them the feed reader I used would typically cache all unread items so that I could always catch up later.

In short; I never missed a post.

In some ways, those days are going away and now I’m at the mercy of the realtime web and an algorithm. And so far I don’t think I like it.

On Twitter, from what I can tell, I have access to about 7 days worth of tweets in their official clients; web, mobile, and apps on the iPhone and iPad. Tweetbot, a third-party Twitter client for iPhone, only pulls in the latest 50 messages in my Timeline and also on Lists that I’ve created. If I haven’t checked Twitter via Tweetbot in more than 50 tweets I simply miss those tweets.

Some people do use Twitter just to see, as Twitter puts it, “What’s happening now”. And, of course, that is extremely valuable. The pulse of the planet. But I use Twitter to keep up with family, friends, a few interesting people, a couple of companies, and yes – even a few celebrities. But I want to see every tweet. Not just the most recent few.

On Facebook the News Feed is run by some algorithm (which I shall now refer to as “secret sauce”). This secret sauce is both pretty bad and pretty nebulous. It is pretty bad because I’m routinely missing posts that I probably would have cared about. Case in point, my brother asked me the other day if I had seen a video he put on Facebook. “Nope, never saw it.”, I replied. I have my brother marked as a family member on Facebook. Surely Facebook’s secret sauce would deem a post by him as something I would like to show up in my News Feed? Apparently it didn’t. It is pretty nebulous because apart from some controls on the News Feed about the types of items I would rather not see, there really aren’t many controls for this secret sauce recipe thingy.

I realize I’m probably in the minority but I prefer to have access to every single update from the blogs that I subscribe to, Twitter accounts that I follow, or people on Facebook that I friend. I wouldn’t have decided to make those connections if I didn’t care to see them all. I’m going to miss the good old days.

Om on writing

Happy Anniversary (sort of) to Om Malik of Gigaom for a decade of blogging. I haven’t shared much about Om on this blog save this experience from Wordcamp 2007 in San Francisco when I wasn’t feeling very well at all (travel often makes me sick).

When lunch break hit, I was hurting pretty badly. So I ended up sitting just outside the Swedish American Hall for a while and finally, while Om and I were speaking outside, Om said: “Go get some rest buddy.” Good advice.

That is Om in a nutshell. Easily one of the nicest and hardest working guys around.

His and Fred Wilson’s post made me try to figure out exactly when I began blogging. My best guess is somewhere in 1997. Unlike Om I haven’t been blogging every single day and I only made my living on blogging for a short period of time in these last 14 or so years. Someday I’ll have to write up my experiences though… it’d be fun.