Category: Blogging

This excellent article on the Commoncraft blog does a good job of answering the questions I’m often asked by clients and prospective clients about using a blog to promote and organize a conference.

One-way blogging of conference announcements is low effort — and low return. Lee Lefever recommends creating a conference blog that enlists the talents of key presenters and invites discussion via comments. It’s a sure-fire way to attract attention, and to energize the audience in advance of the actual event.

But, as his post points out, conference organizers need to be willing to deal with the controversies that can emerge.

I don’t know if blogging has “jumped the shark,” but I do know that quite a few good bloggers are moving away from blogging. Some are doing this consciously, and stating their reasons. Others just find themselves doing other things and allowing their blogs to go cold.

I think I know why.

In his post “Blog Pimping, or: Who Do You Want to Delight?” Merlin Mann of 43 Folders talks at length about pressure in the blogosphere to blog “smart” — to be so audience-conscious, so link-conscious, so Digg-conscious that you end up satisfying a big audience but boring yourself to tears the process. Mann observes:

But, ultimately, our most important decision may be deciding who we want to please, and what we’re willing to do, allow, insert, or put up with that potentially will make those people love, hate, or even feel indifferent toward our sites and our work. Not only must we contend with the institution, we also have to figure out who we want to delight and how. That’s where the art is, and it’s arguably the turning point for whether a young blog will get noticed or won’t.

Pandering kills passion. Formulas kill spontaniety. And writing what people want to hear, instead of what you want to say, will eventually catch up with you. You don’t necessarily lose your audience, but you do start to lose yourself — and you’ll surely lose the love you once had for your blog.

If you’re one of the bloggers who started out full of fire and now find yourself sitting down twice a week and flogging some book you wrote, or product you endorse, or censoring your heart-felt opinions because they might offend a prospective client, take a few minutes to consider the costs and benefits of going back to your blogging roots. Look at your original posts — was your writing more distinctive and more compelling then?

Let me know what you find — even if you have to post your comments anonymously!

I overcame my aversion to vlogging and watched Darren Rowse’s post “5 Emerging Trends in Blogging.” It’s pure talking head interspersed with screenshots, but it’s packed with good observations and nicely organized.

As a long-time personal blogger, I’m discouraged by the increasing technological requirements of blogging (widgets, feeds, and elements that cut into the spontaneity of blogging, such as high quality video and audio) because many of my favorite blogs are strong personal voices with simple photo illustrations. But as a professional blogger, I’m fascinated by the developments Rowse notes in multi-person blogs and blogs integrated into other types of sites.

Bloggers run the gamut—from writers who just love a personalized platform from which to hold forth to entrepreneurs who use blogging as a key promotional strategy for their businesses and causes.

The Seattle Weblogger Meetup attracts both types, and plenty of bloggers in between.

The first half hour of the monthly meetup (at Ralph’s Grocery and Deli in Belltown) focuses on a topic (this month it’s “Blogging for Profit and Visibility”) and the rest of evening is chat about everything from the state of local news reporting to online identity to the fine points of HTML coding. Ralph’s has wifi, so people bring along laptops and call up web pages to illustrate the discussions. You’re also likely to get a peek at some cutting edge tech gadgets.

Interested? The next meeting is May 21. Find out more.

Really serious? You might want to check out the content folks, from marketing to technical communications, gathering at a Ning group called The Content Wrangler Community.

Scott Abel, who leads the wranglers, is the organizer of major content management conferences including Web Content 2008 in Chicago in June.

Much of the discussion at Content Wrangler seems to involve folks in large organizations with complex requirements for content management systems. But there’s also a fledgling sub-group devoted to blogging issues. And it’s valuable to have the Wrangers as a resource to get a sense of emerging issues in the field, many of which will eventually trickle down to the small-organization level.

It’s been a busy but very satisfying week, with significant progress on a number of projects and some inspiring get-togethers with friends, new and old. By the end of the day today I’d cleared my desk for the first time in some weeks. (It will be tempting to avoid checking email tomorrow!)

Travel, work, and socializing had me neglecting my usual blog reading, and I’m trying to catch up this evening. Just came across this great post from social networking expert Jim Benson on four ways to nurture your blogging community.