billso.com

Last Thursday I said that I’m taking a break from blogging during my conference in Anaheim this week.

Instead, I’ve been posting a rant or article each day since then. 

Will someone tell me when my intervention is scheduled? I’ll block out some time on my calendar.

I’m flying to Anaheim this evening for the annual Academy of Management conference, along with 10,000 other management professors.

I’ll resume my daily blog posts on Monday, 18 August 2008. It’s not like there’s a daily quota or anything… although I’ve been posting an article a day for a while now. (See Relax, Bloggers: Nobody Is Keeping Score, and There’s No Quota.)

In the meantime, I’ll be on email, Facebook, FriendFeed and my other haunts.

Ryan Ozawa, one of our better-known bloggers on Oahu, invited me to this month’s Manoa Geeks meeting, which will be held at the HMSA building in Honolulu tonight. Details are available here.

This year I’ve set up some landing pages for my social networking services:

• A Facebook page with an expanded badge that lists my recent blog articles, and a list of my posts about Facebook
• A FriendFeed page that lists my activity on that service and several other social networking services. I have discovered FriendFeed groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, too.
• A LinkedIn page with my profile badge and my articles about LinkedIn, the most popular of all the professional social networks right now.

I started blogging back in 2003, and I learn something new every day about writing, attribution, and basic research when I write a story. When i was in art school, my drawing instructors told us to draw something every day. It’s a skill, not a gift. Skills need work and practice.

Friends of mine who do SEO (search engine optimization) consulting have told me that I should be running several different blogs, each with a different domain name. My mobile technology posts could go in one blog, while my Honolulu political posts could appear at alohapundit.com, for example.

I have made one major change in my blogging model. I’ve started writing articles about home office technology, the Mac and small business security for BrightHub.

There are some benefits in writing for a larger web site. At BrightHub, I have three editors that provide feedback and topic suggestions. BrightHub sells ad links to the articles, and maintains the site and its content management system (CMS).

BrightHub keeps the copyright over the articles I write for them, I do earn some revenue on each article. My BrightHub articles are listed in my profile on that site, as well as my BrightHub page at billso.com.

FriendFeed is another service that I use. It’s a social media aggregator that collects my posts, comments and items from other services like Twitter, StumbleUpon, Google Reader and my Amazon Wish List.

I have set up a page at billso.com that lists my recent FriendFeed activity. It’s not as pretty or as organized as my FriendFeed.com page but it was a fun way to do some RSS filtering.

While I enjoy posting a new entry at billso.com every day, I may scale back that commitment so that I can post more articles on BrightHub and other services.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• BrightHub
• 25 June 2008: Honolulu Advertiser blogs need more content and authority

The Honolulu Advertiser, like other Gannett newspapers, has spent a considerable amount of time and effort to set up a hyperlocal blog network at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com. The Advertiser’s web site is littered with small graphical ads that promote individual blogs with the same cookie-cutter approach: the blog’s name, along with the author’s name and picture, with an uninspired tagline such as “A blog by…” or “Blog with…”

Advertiser Editor Mark Platte wrote a progress report in this Honolulu Advertiser op-ed article called Blogs a hit, and we’d love more. One section of this article is interesting:

I’m always on the lookout for new blogs, specifically in areas that aren’t already covered, and I am always asking staffers and those outside the staff if they are interested in blogging. Some have started blogs and decided the time commitment is more than they bargained for, so they drop out. But blogging is about experimenting, and if a blog doesn’t work, there’s no problem replacing it with another authored by someone with a fresh perspective.

This Poinography article from the same day, 15 June 2008, called Editor wants more hits and ad revenue, er, bloggers examined the same section with a cynical view.It’s true that print and broacast advertising revenues have been on the decline for years, as advertisers make more online media buys. The title of this TechCrunch article is a good starting point: Top 100 Advertisers Shifted $1 Billion To the Web Last Year At The Expense Of TV And Newspapers.

As Advertising Age notes, the economy has something to do with this trend: Top 100’s Ad-Spend Growth Grinds to Halt.

The Advertiser has been involved in a long-running labor dispute with its writing staff. The blog network is one way to recruit new, non-union writers who could provide online content during a strike or walkout.

Many of the Advertiser’s bloggers are already union journalists for the newspaper, but the majority of the neighborhood bloggers are new recruits to the Advertiser.

Authority and timeliness

A newspaper’s blogs should be as authoritative and reliable as the print and online editions. I enjoy reading the New York Times’ blogs, especially Bits and The Lede. The blogs provide Some of the Times’ blog articles are a draft or preview of a longer article that appears a few hours later in the print and online editions of the newspaper itself.

A few of the Advertiser’s 36 bloggers need assistance in learning how to blog. Kim Fassler, in an article called Friday Tidbits in her Quarterlife Cafe blog, mentioned that she has problems finding topics for her blog posts:

I suppose Quarterlife Cafe would probably fall into the category of “meaningless fluff” designed to entice the twenty-something crowd into reading the newspaper. But, hey, if I can get just one more apathetic twenty-something to read just one more article and learn just one more important aspect of some Hawaii issue, then I’ll write all the meaningless fluff I can muster.

That post had five subheadings in it, with Kim’s comments on Iran, teenage pregnancy, and cloning. I would have split that single post into 4 articles posted throughout the day.

Some of the comments on Kim’s story were excellent. One person noted that the Advertiser’s blog software seems slow, for example. Their pages do resolve at a lazy pace, but that’s some a good server-side cache could fix.

Tomorrow I’ll post an announcement about a new direction for my blog.