Home » Posts tagged 'blogger'
Tag Archives: blogger
24 reasons to blog – which are yours?
ON BLOGGING
Sources of inspiration and getting it down.
Get this for a start: Use of Blogs (2006) Axel Bruns and Joanna Jacobs.
It persuades you why to blog. Each chapter is written like an academic paper – an essay at least. Chapter 5 I found I was copying out verbatim (which I can’t do here). Go see ‘Can Blogging Unspin PR’ Trevor Cook.
Your starting off point can be anything at all, once you start (for me at least) it is like opening a vein.
Who cares if it is a note to yourself. If it’s work or course work remember that you can compose then recraft as often as you like; what is more, you can turn access on or off as you please too – even allow comments as you please – with other blog platforms the list of linking choices is as broad as the destination board at Heathrow – you can ‘blog’ to a person, a group, people in different groups and so on (though this is a level of complication may turn the novice off).
If you are at all stuck for content ideas then my suggestions are:
- 1) Write about the deep past (everything you write is of course in the past) – what this might means is thinking of your earliest experiences of whatever your blog may be about – if it is about education then try these:
- 2) Your best friend at nursery school
- 3) Your first day at school
- 4) The funniest thing that your witnessed or did at school
- 5) The first thing you learnt and how
- 6) Add a caption to an old photograph then expand these thoughts into the era.
- 7) A birthday party
- 8) A Christmas
- 9) A first book
All of these are possible jumping off points; once you’re in flight you’ll be surprised how easy it is to steer back to where you had planned to be – who cares about the journey you took to get there – you can leave it in or edit out the first paragraph / chapter.
If you kept a diary at any time in your life – milk it! Put it up, selectively, verbatim and / or relived – you can even retrofit the date.
Getting it down
There is a beauty and simplicity to pen/pencil onto paper. Personally I find typing it up afterwards tedious and will find myself inevitably expanding beyond the way the thing was initially written. The mistake here is that you can/do with ease turn a natural, conversational flow of thoughts into something else – verbose at best, disjoined at worst. You then get into editing and saving sections/chunks for future entries.
Ideally, whether you have notes, an essay plan or mind map to guide you, I’d recommend typing directly into the Blank Box. The QWERTY keyboard is a piano keyboard and you’re playing a ditty or having a jam.
Most blog platforms have ample editing tools, the only warning is to save regularly in some if you are prone to distraction.
Even back up onto a clipboard or Word, though personally I’m not a fan of overworking a piece in Word first.
Have a notepad, record a thought on paper or into a digital recorder, have a device that you can readily use on the go – my most fruitful blogging years were when I had a Psion – I could type this spec-case sized device and draw it into my Mac to upload.
I’ll discover in due course an iPad can offer this facility – I believe it will (and some).
A final thought for now – if you can touch-type and write stream of consciousness then how many words can you get down in so many minutes?
Let’s say you think at FIVE words a second, talk at THREE words a second and type at 40-60 words a minute. In theory in five minutes you can blog between 200 and 300 words. Perfect length. Have a plan, three or so points to make and fire away.
The phases of becoming a blogger
It’s rare for me to miss a few days but the simple truth I am too wrapped up in the rebuild of one ‘storyline’ in the OU Business School website.
This and preparing another presentation, this time on ‘blogging’ having opened what will become a series with ‘Social Media’ last week.
I see three necessary phases in becoming a blogger:
- Listen
- Comment
- Create (and collaborate)
‘Listen’ as in reading loads, being led wherever someone appeals to you, ‘listening in’ on the conversations that are being started and saving these sites to peruse regularly.
There were over 150 million blogs the last time I cared to seek out the statistics.
How do you even begin to find those few that you are prepared to read on a regular basis?
Clearly you cannot read everything; even in your own field of interest, unless it is the tightest niche, might have thousands of commentors.
I go for ‘like minds’, authors with whom you feel you could converse, those you wish to emulate, whose thoughts maybe like your own, but fully fledged.
I am currently following Andrew Sullivan a bit, but some of the many other bloggers he lists a lot. Andrew is British born and raised, though now living in New York, somewhat right-wing (has always been wedded to the Conservative Party), gay (he played the lead role in Another Country at Oxford though took a while longer to come out – at Harvard I believe.
Is his background relevant? Probably not, this is about intellect, confidence, informed opinion and a degree of early precociousness and desire to be heard.
His intellect and presumption took him to Oxford (Modern History) and then Harvard.
By all accounts, with 1,000,000 page views a month Sullivan has many followers.
He does this by
- being well informed
- being willing to express an opion
We look to commentators for ‘breaking views’, as another Oxford graduate of this same era puts it; though Hugo Dixon, a grandson (or great grandson) of Winston Churchill has a somewhat different background to that of Sullivan.
Irrelevant? Both men are a product of their intellect, so more nature that nurture in this case.
What they had in common as undergraduates was a precocious desire to express their opinion. Is it any wonder that we are drawn to what they have to say ? Even more so now than in previous eras we are in desperate need of people to filter the overwhelming deluge of information and offer some path through-out, in their different ways these too do it. All I need are other minds like these across other fields.
They make a convincing point succinctly.
I’m clicking through the 60+ blogs Andrew Sullivan lists in his blogroll and find it hard not to click the ‘save bookmark’ option with every one of these. Nice when someone has done it for you, though I am yet to come across the UK equivalent. The idea that these are read but Sullivan regularly is also daft; look at my own blog roll (somewhere needs to tear a few off for me).
Any suggestions for the most informed bloggers to follow?
Stephen Fry is of the same ilk as the two given above, though more embedded in the performing arts than Andrew Sullivan.
In search of the perfect blogroll. Any suggestions?
It’s rare for me to miss a few days but the simple truth I am too wrapped up in the rebuild of one ‘storyline’ in the OU Business School website.
This and preparing another presentation, this time on ‘blogging’ having opened what will become a series with ‘Social Media’ last week.
I see three necessary phases in becoming a blogger:
- Listen
- Comment
- Create (and collaborate)
‘Listen’ as in reading loads, being led wherever someone appeals to you, ‘listening in’ on the conversations that are being started and saving these sites to peruse regularly.
There were over 150 million blogs the last time I cared to seek out the statistics. How do you even begin to find those few that you are prepared to read on a regular basis? Clearly you cannot read everything; even in your own field of interest, unless it is the tightest niche, might have thousands of commentors.
I go for ‘like minds’, authors with whom you feel you could converse, those you wish to emulate, whose thoughts maybe like your own, but fully fledged.
I am currently following Andrew Sullivan a bit, but some of the many other bloggers he lists a lot.
Andrew is British born and raised, though living in New York, somewhat right-wing and from a modest background. His intellect and presumption took him to Oxford (Modern History) and then Harvard. By all accounts, with 1,000,000 page views a month he has many followers. He does this by a) being well informed and b) being willing to express an opion – we look to commentators for ‘breaking views’ as another Oxford graduate of this same era puts it, though Hugo Dixon, a grandson ( or great grandson) of Winston Churchill has a somewhat different background.
What they had in common as undergraduates was a precocious desire to express their opinion.
Is it any wonder that we are attracted to their words, if only to disagree? They make a convincing point succintly.
I’m clicking through the 60+ blogs Andrew Sullivan lists in his blogroll and find it hard not to click the ‘save bookmark’ option.
Nice when someone has done it for you, though I am yet to come across the UK equivalent.
Any suggestions?
The Contents of My Brain (TCMB)
Fig.1. Glass Skull by Rudat
The current generation will be able to begin to achieve a fraction of this if they please; all I have to go on are diaries I stared in March 1975 and efforts since then to recall all the events, feelings and dreams of my life to that point.
This alongside photoalbums, scrapbooks and sketch books, with lists of books read and films seen, maps of places visited and a complete extended family tree ought to offer a perspective of who or what I am.
Does any of it impact on how I think and behave?
Without my mind is it not simply a repository of typical memories and learning experiences of a boy growing up in the North East of England?
Blogging since 1999 there are like minds out there, though none have come back with an approximation of the same experiences (its been an odd, if not in some people’s eyes, bizarre, even extraordinary roller-coaster of a ride).
It’s value? To me, or others?
I could analyse it ’til the day I die. My goal is no longer to understand me, but to understand human kind. And to better understand the value of exercises such as this, not simply hoarding everything, but of consciously chosing to keep or record certain things.
For now I will exploit the tools that are offered. In theory anything already digitised on computers going back to the 1980s could now be put online and potentially shared. Can I extract material from a Floppy-disc, from an Amstrad Disc, from a zip-drive? Should I add super8mm cine-flim already digistised on betacam masters? And the books Iv’e read, beyond listing them do I add links even re-read some of them? And a handful of school exercise books (geography and maths) A’Level folders on Modern History. I kept nothing from three years of university, yet this is where the learning experience ought to have been the most intense. But I had no plans to take that forward had I?
My university learning was spent on the stage or behind a video camera.
Should I undertake such an exercise without a purpose in mind?
Do I draw on it to write fiction?
There is a TV screenplay ‘The Contents of My Mind’ that could be stripped down and re-written, even shared.
And all the fiction, the millions of words.
Will this have a life if put online?
Is it not the storyteller’s sole desire to be heard? To have an attentive audience?
Related articles
The more control you keep over the message, the less credible it is.
Fig.1. The diary of Jonathan Ferguson Vernon Age 13 1/2 … still at it 37 1/2 years later.
Socially constructive learning finds in legs, mouth and finger-tapping-tips courtesy of blogging, content curation and communities of like (and not so like) minds.
My first diary entry is dated 6th March 1975. I as visiting a school as a potential music scholar. I played the flute and the piano. I should have been asked to sing, I’d been a chorister for five years.
My naive title for the diary was ‘from boy to man.’ I never thought that one day I’d be old – I’m six months short of 50. I feel more like a teenager than ever, that’s the odd thing. It’s all this blogging. I feel as if I’ve found my voice.
My first blog post was on 27th September 1999 and was titled ‘What’s new about new media?’
Let’s jam then. Here’s how.
Blogs and social communities have sparked ‘a complete overhaul of the business environment, especially in the context of communication.’ Agenti and Barnes (2009:K168) – (The K refers to the Kindle reference of the eBook version).
Education is changing too, blurring the lines between school and the workplace, and encouraging workplace learning with distance learning specialists and online courses from members of the Association of Business Schools surely set to grow
The difference between web 1.0 and web 2.0 – observation versus participation, status versus dynamic, monologue versus conversation. (Agenti and Barnes 2009)
What is most relevant to corporate communications managers is as relevant to other institutions, whether government, education or charity. You need to be using:
- Blogs (such as WordPress. Edublogs, Diaryland)
- Microblogs (Twitter and Yammer)
- Social Networks (such as Linkedin and Facebook)
- Video-sharing platforms (YouTube, Vimeo)
- Search engine marketing and optimization
- Corporate web sites/ online newsrooms
- Wikis
- Mash-ups – now curation.
- Viral/word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing.
The trick is to find ‘a middle ground between a completely centralised and a wholly decentralised structure is the best way to maintain an effective communications strategy in today’s environment.’ Agenti and Barnes (2009:K593)
My take on this is that to succeed organisations need to be:
- Informed
- Engaged
- Responsive
- Frequent
- Authentic
- Relevant
- Appropriate
- Pithy
- Real (neither journalistic, corporate or academic in style)
- Understanding
- Passionate but not obsessive
- Media Savvy
- Connect
- Tool up
- With a give, take, try anything and receive mentality.
- Tag it all
- Optimise out of habit
- Have fun, be playful with surveys, questionnaires and polls.
The view Sir Martin Sorrell takes is ‘The more control you keep over the message, the less credible it is. And Vice Versa.’ Martin Sorrell (2008: K1520)
There are three skills sets required to take advantage of this:
1. Identifying influential bloggers
2. Building relationships with them
3. Engaging with them with the intent of receiving positive coverage
Points 1 and 2 was the experience I had in Diaryland. Here from 1999 bloggers teamed up with designers, where the two functions were recognised as different, like the copywriter and art director in advertising. Here you could form groups and join groups, link to friends for a myriad of reasons, but best of, in the list limited to 70 friends you were/are updated constantly on the status – it helps to know that you’re in a group where people update regularly. It is largely from the community of those who write, that you find people who also read and comment, they are various consumers and emitters of content.
So much that I experienced here has migrated to other blogsites. Things that work, as well as buddies and buddy updates, are the surveys and groups, creating engaging or fund questionnaires to share with others and forming groups too, where for example I set up lists for those to be the first to make 500, then 1000 and then 2000 entries … Fun too are the banner ads you can make and use to promote interest within the Diaryland community. Perhaps Andrew’s (its creator’s0refusal to allow advertising is what is causing a Diaryland demise.
‘Metaphorically speaking, RSS is the gateway drug of experiential online monitoring’. Agenti and Barnes (2009:K1183)
My view is GoogleAlerts does this better, it spread the net for you, whereas with RSS you need to have found the feed first. What is more GoogleAlerts feeds you snacks of information that are easy to consume, note, reference, keep, pass on or over.
In emails the authors interviewed Courtney Barnes and Shabbir Imber Safdar.
‘You need to understand that it’s not a cut-and-paste job. You need to participate in the conversation and adapt the content for the environment. ‘ (Agenti and Barnes (2009:K1159)
Look, listen and learn
To do this engagement is the first things, so blogs and Twitter, social networking and video, photographs … even some family history and reuniting with school and college friends. Then you tools like Technorati and Goole Alerts.
Technorati http://www.technorati.com
Google Alerts http://www.google.com/alerts
Search out appropriate keywords
Joined Linked In too.
Having been engaged with four/five groups I made the mistake of joining and dozen and will have to drop most of these. Some post several times and hour 24/7 and I have ceased to see the worth of reading that much from one group, especially if the same question is being answered a thousand times. Managing this maelstrom is a task in itself, being alert to the new, dropping the redundant, buying into and out of the right people and places as their influence and quality of comment waxes and wanes.
Forrester Research on 90 blogs of Fortune 500 companies. June 2008.
Most company blogs are ‘dull, drab and don’t stimulate discussion’.
• 66% rarely get comments
• 70% only contain comment on business topics
• 56% republish press releases or summarise news that is already public. The positive spin on this calls it ‘curation’ – at best it is a playfully constructed mash-up that uses though is not dictated to by the tools, perhaps they are a mind-dump or mental compost heap, at worst it is an irritant – a waste of time for content you never get round to reading, and as you never engaged with it the first place, the waste is doubled.
REFERENCE
Argenti P.A. and Barnes M.C. 2009 ‘Digital Strategies for Powerful Corporate Communications’ McGrawHill.
Sorrell. M (2008) ‘Public Relations: The Story behind a Remarkable Renaissance,@ Institute for Public Relations Annual Distinguished Lecture, New York, November 5, 2008.
18 months on (November 2012)
‘You need to understand that it’s not a cut-and-paste job. You need to participate in the conversation and adapt the content for the environment.’ This said in Digital Strategies for Powerful Corporate Communications’ Agenti and Barnes (2009:Kindle page 1159).
As I go through 33 months of postgraduate blog posts (the Masters in Open and Distance Education with the Open University), I stumble upon a great deal that some might call aggregation, but a year or so ago was linking and tagging.
In the module ‘Innovations in e-learning’ we were give a list of aggregating tools to try. Personally, the curator – and potentially their team, as in the real world of museums and galleries must surely add value above and beyond the mere pulling of content using a set of terms in an off-the-shelf bundle of software?
Over the last week or so since the meet up I have returned to various tools and tried new ones. I’ve gathered screen grabs and given it some thought – and largely concluded that as a result of this exercise I will be dropping them all in favour of reading a few choice blogs and receiving feeds from them – blogs where an opinion is expressed, you can leave a comment and expect feedback. At the heart of this is socially constructed learning.
Why digitising your every action may have some value – the Quantified Self
 |
| From Drop Box |
I’ve ignored ideas in the past and regretted it.
I recall a lunch with a Cambridge Graduate who had created software that made texting possible. His company was looking at ways to expand its use on mobile phones. All I could think was that it was a retrograde step and would take us back to pagers; remember them? How wrong I was.
I recall also reading about someone who had kept a ‘web-blog’ (sic) and photo journal of their business year in 1998.
Even as a diarist and blogger I thought this somewhat obsessive. From research into the patterns and networks created ‘LinkedIn’ emerged.
So when a Microsoft programmer Gordon Bell decides to make a digital record of everything they do to see what patterns may emerge THIS time I take an interest. (New Scientist, Opinion. 23 December 2010 / January 2011
My immediate thought, not least because I lack the resources, is to be highly selective. Had I a team to take content, edit, transcribe, edit, collate and link, maybe I’d do more; I don’t.
A professional swimming coach should assess and reflect on the sessions they deliver. I did this without fail for nearly three years, by which time a good deal of it was repetitive and I felt comfortable with the many different plans I was delivering to different groups. I’ve been videod, I use video to analyse strokes and skills and I use a digital recorder to jot down observations of swimmers. So what if I leave the digital recorder open for a session. Am I prepared to run through this hour for a start? If I do so what might I learn?
That this is a valid form of evidence of my abilities (and weaknesses)
That edited (no names revealed of swimmers) it, especially parts of it, become a training tool (best practice) or simply insights for others on how, in this instance, a one hour session is transmogrified for use with different levels/standards/age of swimmer.
I video lectures in 1983 on Sony Betamax. I did plays. Debates. All kinds of campus activity around Oxford. I learnt a good deal. The camera is not your mind’s eye, this is why you edit and develop craft skills, not because you want to dramatise reality, but because the mind does it for you. We don’t go round with fish-eyes taking everything in, we do jump between a wide, mid and close shot. And when we concentrate on something the proverbial naked woman could walk down the street and you wouldn’t notice. A camera around one’s neck cannot and will not establish or adjust to any of these view points.
The act of recording changes your behaviour, it is therefore a record of a false behaviour.
I filled some of the gaps. I set down some of my thoughts on how swimmers were performing whereas usually I’d make a ‘mental note’ or jot something down on paper.
Shortcuts will be uncovered, valuable algorithms will be written. Might, for example, the old corporate audit of how people spend their time be transformed if, putting it at arm’s length, the function is monitored during a working day?
We’ve seen from the reality TV show ‘Seven Days’ shot in Notting Hill how tedious the lives of Jo blogs can be as entertainment. We’re tired of Big Brother too. As Bell remarks, ‘most of the moments he records are mind-numbingly dull, trite, predictable, tedious and prosaic.’
To deliver further the New Scientist advices that we take a look at:
DirectLife
Dream Patterns
Mood
Brainwaves
Use of email
Online interactions
Optionism
Moodscape
Track Your Happiness
Your Flowing Data
Mycrocosm
One-tricks
personalinformatics.org/tools
Why a handwritten diary my be better not only that digitising everything, but even a blog?
The way you write reflects your mood, captures tone, even levels of intoxication, passion or aggitation, as well as your age. Though I fear the work of the graphologist is redundant. A choice is made over the writing implement, and the book or pages in which it is expressed. You make choices. If you must, you can have bullet points of events. It doesn’t take much of a tickle for the mind to remember an exact moment. Such moments digitised are two dimensional, with no perspective. A memory recalle matures, its meaning changes as does your interest in it. A memory loved and cherished is very different to one that you wish to forget. What happens when both haunt you in their digital form? And when such memories become everybody’s property?
Where does copyright stand if you are digitising life?
We watch TV, we read books, we play video games, we read letters and bank statements, we have conversations that are meant to be private …
Meanwhile, I’ve barely dealt with the fall out of this Opinion piece in the New Scientist and the next issue looking at neuroscience does my head.
Here Vilayanur S Ramachandran gets his head around the importance of metaphor in creativity and how it separates us from all other beings. I used to cheat
 |
| From Drop Box |
It took you out of your own mind and messed it up; sometimes useful, sometimes not. The way to be creative is to develop an inquiring, critical, educated, multi-outletting, messed up mind. Sing, dance, draw, paint, play musical instruments, climb trees, exercise in crazy ways, every week do or say something you’ve never done or said before. ‘Quantable.’ (sic) Radio 4. 6th Jan 2011. 20h30. The context was using the process of counting numbers to quanitfy some excess and the interviewee used this term ‘quantable’ which the producer of the programme must have liked because it was repeated. Amazing how we can mash-up the English Language and the new word may make perfect sense. Where ams I? ECA and a job interview. So what am I doing here? Habit. I want to come back to these ideas later and by doing this I know where it is.
Can blogging be taught?
Can you teach someone to swim if they won’t get in the water?
You can take a horse to the trough, but you can’t make it drink?
What therefore will motivate, drive, persuade, cajole, convince or oblige a.n.other to blog?
I’m seeking advice and help here as I am on a mission to initiate and nurture 12 new bloggers over the next four months. It feels like cheating to go on a quest for those who blog already and call them mine but surely this is the crux of the matter. I can preach to the converted, until then my words will fall on deaf ears.
Invite people to enjoy a variety of successful bloggers to help them find their way? How many do I have listed here? 100+ but where’s the attraction in a list, you need guidance.
Define a blog?
Academics I quote and review here say you can’t. They are beyond simple definition, but ‘electronic paper’ where people spill words, images, video (though not coffee), where they aggregate other people’s content, majestic lists, dumb notes, a writer’s journal, an academic’s draft papers, a student’s e-portfolio.
Is there a role for a blog buddy or blog secretary? I believe Richard Branson has a blog and Twitter double,i.e. He doesn’t write a word of it himself. That would be cheating. I can’t write 12 blogs for other people (even if I write/produce or create some 16+ of my own).
Stuffing in things you’ve already written is fine with me. I call up content from a diary I started in my early teens as well as from 2,000 odd blog entries posted from 1999 to 2004 and the 1000 odd posted since early 2010.
Try building a house on a landfill site.
I have this crazy idea that I should write 10,000 pages, 1,000 words per entry then hit the ‘enter@random’ button to create a novel.
It won’t work will it?
I’ve tried it with 1,500 pages. I’ve printed it off.
Try building a house on a landfill site. Try listening to six radio stations simultaneously.
Where’s the thread?
Content. Only because I’m tapping with such speed and ferocity at the keyboard that my finger tips hurt. Thimbles for keyboard addicts?
Twitter has me on its line, for now. Several other blogging sites have their nets over my head. I tickle them then let go, or get out … whatever it is. LiveJournal, Blogger, Writerspress.com, MySpace and FaceBook soon irritate me.
Why?
F*cking adverts smacking me in the face very few seconds, scr*wing the download and mangling my already tired brain.
My Brian.
Mind Bursts 