Once more, why dos’t thou blog?
Recently there was a comment to one of my post asking the perennial question that non-bloggers ask of bloggers, (and bloggers ask of themselve all the time too 🙂
"Hello,
I was wondering if you could answer these 3 simple questions for a school project about blogging. It would be great if you could help me out. THANKS
How did you get into blogging?
What drives you to blog about something?
How has blogging affected you?"
If you search around you will find numerous people who have answered this question over the years, including my own self. So I won't wax too philosophically but just give you my gut responses to these questions:
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"How did you get into blogging?" I checked my records, and my first post was about four years ago. At the time I was just fooling around, starting to read certain blogs religiously, and decided to see what the world looked like from the writers side. So, like many things I got into, it was pretty much an experiment, pretty random.
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"What drives you to blog about something?" It varies. Often I discover something, figure something out, see something that piques my interest. Working solo, I don't have the outlet that I used to have while working in an office to pop over to someone and share my insight, joy, amusement, amazement, whatever. No office to pop over to. So this blog becomes an outlet for that same impulse. Now that I have a (bit of) an audience (see all my posts about Search Engine Optimization) there are occasionally other motivations, like wanting to bring attention to something or someone by linking to it from this blog.
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"How has blogging affected you?" I can't say it has affected me that much. I go through spurts of blogging and not blogging and I always enjoy it. It's kind of my personal scratch pad or notebook of stuff that I want to get out of my head and 'down on paper' and so it's enjoyable. Now that I've been doing it for several years, I have quite a public record on what I care about, believe, am interested in and so on, so, for better or for worse, this blog has become a significant component of my public resumé or reputation.
[GEEKY] SEO Expert Advice, debunked
Search Engine Optimization is a weird wacky world with experts, oracles, analysis, opinion and superstition. If you are into it, here's a look at how complex and intricate SEO gets. But when there are gazillions of dollars involved, I guess is kind of inevitable.
Amazing pictures
I can't figure out exactly how it was made. I would have expected to see the
photographer and camera in each shot.
They must be some kind of composite.
Are we (we are) heading for a recession?
Just check out this well argued, detailed piece, "Wake up to the dangers of a deepening crisis", by Lawrence Summers:
"Three months ago it was reasonable to expect that the subprime credit crisis would be a financially significant event but not one that would threaten the overall pattern of economic growth. This is still a possible outcome but no longer the preponderant probability.
Even if necessary changes in policy are implemented, the odds now favour a US recession that slows growth significantly on a global basis. Without stronger policy responses than have been observed to date, moreover, there is the risk that the adverse impacts will be felt for the rest of this decade and beyond." (from Financial Times)
This gloom and doom view is echoed by much of the commentary I've come across over the last month, for example, this from today's New York Times, "Innovating Our Way to Financial Crisis":
"The bottom line is that policy makers left the financial industry free to innovate — and what it did was to innovate itself, and the rest of us, into a big, nasty mess." (from Paul Krugman in the New York Times.)
You be the judge. I'm calling my broker 🙂
Wikipedia on a map
I am a huge fan of
Wikipedia. Here's a new neat hack: Wikipedia
Vision.
This is a live, animated, world map, showing in real time each edit to the Wikipedia, as it happens. Makes the world feel even smaller, doesn't it? It's a cool way to learn about topics in Wikipedia that you may not have known about.
Check out Wikipedia Vision
Building traffic for your blog
If you're a regular reader you know that I've been studying Search Engine Optimization. As I've said before, it's one of those topics that sounds like all common sense once you hear it, but then why didn't you think of it yourself?
Anyway here's a good article with lots of good solid common sense about building traffic for your blog.
How to be creative
I just came across this thoughtprovoking bit called " How to be creative." It's a quick read in the short form and at least for me, hit home. Here is an expanded form of the same ideas, with illustrations. Recommended.
How does Fake Steve get away with this?
Everyone by now has heard that the Diary of Fake Steve Jobs is actually written by Daniel Lyons, a Senior Editor at Forbes.
In a recent article, as an example, you can see, Fake Steve can be downright catty:
"[snip…]I pointed out to Otellini that in fact this just makes Negroponte look like a jackass , which is why the Journal placed that statement into the story and attributed it to Negroponte.
The way this technique works is they try to seem all cool and neutral but they're really making Negroponte look like a donkey -- and right on Page One of the world's biggest business publication.
Nice.[…snip]" (from The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Give one, get one, right in the ass)
Ok this is satire. But it is tremendously harsh. And there is a continuing stream of aggressively mean things that he writes about Mr. Negroponte.
It's kind of amazing that now that the true writer of this stuff is known, that this continues. I mean, sure he must get lots of traffic, but it has to have permanently changed his reputation as a journalist.
[geeky] Dang – I was looking for one of these just last week
Yeah very geeky , eh? All I was able to locate was 7-port USB hubs. Why not daisy chain them? I have reason to believe that while logically it should not matter, in practice it does.
My reason is that I've read tech notes on at least one device that told me specifically to plug it directly into the USB 2.0 port of my computer and not into a hub. which made no sense to me, but made a difference in fixing a problem I was having.
In the end I bought another 7-port hub (which seemed to be the flavor I saw most often) and plugged them together in a way to have as few "hops" as possible. All seems to work ok.
In fact who knows if internal to the 13 port hubs there are 2 7 port hubs, daisy chained. Anyone know?
The F-Word
Over on Copyblogger, a good reminder of a bit of common wisdom:
"[snip…]Yep, it’s the “F” word.
Fear.
Fear affects us all more than we care to admit, and it’s especially insidious for writers. Writing online is one of those activities where you’re really putting yourself out there, and the critics are always waiting to pounce. But as we’ll see below, failure and mediocrity are not the only things we fear.[snip…]" (from Copy Blogger: The Nasty Four Letter Word…)
I cite this because reading it reminded me of a cute but fairly profound play on the word FEAR:
F.E.A.R = "False Evidence (or Expectations) Appearing Real"
I don't remember where I first heard it. I did some digging and googling and found these references for your further edification. You can see that it's been around a while and has been used in all kinds of contexts…