Five more online skills you must master BEFORE you start a blog

Earlier this week, I launched the first of my two part campaign to encourage people to master five online skills before they start a blog. I promised five more online skills. So here they are.

Once again, I make suggestions for both journalists who already write for websites but also for people who do not have access to a website.

Research

In the previous post, I encouraged you to identify a community.

You still need to find out all you can about that it through research.

You might find that your chosen community is overwhelmed with good blogs. What it actually wants is a closed group on a social network where it can discuss business issues. Without research, you might overlook the social network your community is already in. Why set up a LinkedIn group, for example, if your community is obsessed with Facebook.

If you are a journalist, a few questions on your website is one way to collect information.

If you do not have a website, why not use a social network? Join LinkedIn and write up your profile. Then join a group in a sector closest to your potential blogging community. Participate in the discussion areas. Why not ask a few questions yourself?

You don’t need a blog to do research.

Categories

One of the key questions in the research of your community for your blog might be “what information do you need?”.

Once you have the results, you could write a list of subjects in which your community is interested.

Whooa! Don’t let it become too long. Just as your blog will attract more users the more closely it focuses on your community, so those users will be more likely to return if you can keep the content within a narrow range.

Why not try to keep it within ten core subject areas?

Whether you are a journalist of not, visit some blogs and notice how the best blogs use few categories.

You don’t need a blog to work out the core subject areas for your community.

RSS feeds

Bloggers are, by the nature of the media they use, more likely to be web-savvy. Many of them sign up for RSS rather than email subscriptions. Whether you understand RSS feeds or not, find out before you start your blog.

Sign up to Google Reader. Sign up to some RSS subscriptions. Learn to manage you daily reading through RSS feeds.

You don’t need a blog to make yourself familiar with RSS feeds.

Optimise

Have you noticed how certain parts of this post have links, in bold,  to other posts on this blog ? If you click through, do you notice how the same words appear in the original post’s headline? You need to do the same.

If you are a journalist, you have started to put links between stories, one of the five online skills to master before you start a blog that I mentioned in part one of this campaign. Try to use the same words as the previous post’s headline. It’s awkward at first – perhaps you need to rewrite the previous post’s headline – but you will get used to it. Over time, you will begin to notice how you write headlines ready for use as links in future posts.

If you do not write for a website, sign up to Twitter as soon as possible. The discipline of writing meaningful messages in 140 characters will improve the brevity and directness of your writing – all good practice for your future blog.

You don’t need a blog to learn how to write so that your content is more easily found.

Analyse

You’re going to be so proud of your blog when it takes off. But you are only going to be able to assess the success if you have learnt to understand the quantity and quality of your traffic. One way to do this is to get to know Alexa. It shows the traffic and ranking of any site.

If you are a journalist writing for a website, why not input your own site. Then input your competitors!

If you do not have a website you can access, why not log in your favourite site and see how it compares to others that you view.

You don’t need a blog to learn how to analyse traffic.

Are there an other online skills that you think are essential to acquire before starting a blog?

If you think your followers/community on Twitter would be interested in this post, show them your value by reTweeting it to them!

Photo credit: Leonard Low

Technorati and Pew surveys contradict eachother

I am sitting here confused, and to be honest rather angry.

Yesterday’s Technorati: State of the Blogosphere 2008 got me really excited with its claim that over three quarters of internet users read blogs. I even wrote a posting about it. Then today ReadWriteWeb posted a Pew survey that showed a mere 11% of people who used computers at work read blogs. Even if one survey refers to the total population and the other to those in work, the difference between the two is somewhat alarming. As I asked in a comment on ReadWriteWeb’s story:-

Does one believe one, the other or neither?

I was not alone. Three hourse later Matt Lee of the Hill Library Blog made an even better comment to the same effect:-

I’m with John: confused. We have to be careful about taking the source into account, I think. Just a couple of days ago (9/15), Read Write Web discussed another study (from a social media company) that said “75 percent of employees are already using social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn for business purposes.” That seems totally at odds with this Pew data, if I’m reading both correctly. And a little suspicious, too, especially coming from a social media firm. Technorati also has a vested interest in putting blogging into the mainstream. The Pew, I don’t think, has anything to gain one way or the other. I’d put my trust with them.

So why am I angry? Simple really, neither the Pew nor Technorati has bothered to explain how such a contradiction could arise. And where is ReadWriteWeb on this. Come on guys, I say, get your act together. We bloggers want the blogosphere to be blooming. But we certainly don’t want to be part of the misinformation. Get onto your keyboards and give us an explanation.

Two surveys reveal social media becoming mainstream in the US

Two surveys out this week – one by Technorati and the other by MarketTools – show just how big, just how mainstream the blogosphere has become in the US. Here is a quote from Matt Rhodes’ posting on FreshNetworks Blog.

Two pieces of research out this week highlight the fact that social media is truly entering the mainstream. The Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008 report shows that three-quarters of active Internet users globally read blogs, and 184 million people have set up a blog. If the blogosphere were a country, it would be the sixth biggest in the world, just smaller than Brazil.

Then today came research from MarketTools showing that 70% of US adults visit blogs, social networks, online communities or other social media. And 42% report that their use of these sites and tools has increased in the last six months.

Both of these reports show that social media is more and more forming a part of people’s lives. With three quarters of global Internet users, and 70% of all US adults visiting social media sites it truly now is the mainstream. 

Technorati’s survey has five days’ worth of material so I will leave people to follow it themselves. I will reproduce one pie chart and one graph. For the pie chart I will simply repeat a comment made in a posting by Adam Tinworth of One Man and His Blog (UPDATED: not ‘Dog’ as previously written – thanks Adam!) who alerted me to the Technorati survey.

Lots of people blogging about their jobs. That’s very interesting for B2B media indeed.

And parts of the survey seem very close to home!

Also read how almost 50% of Fortune 500 companies now use social media to deal with their customers, click here.

Here’s blogger Peter Kim’s collaborative list of mainly US companies using various types of social media to interact wit their customers, click here.

Cool function when commenting on the Skype blog!

How cool is this? When you go to comment on the Skype blog, you do not leave your blog’s URL, as is normal, but your Skype name which clicks through to your Skype profile. Nothing too unusual in that but it also display the call icon and even your SkypeMe status icon – that is whether you are available for a call or not!

Skype's comment functionality

I like this integration between blogging culture and platform. But it underlines yet further the issue that I raised in an earlier blog about the etiquette of using Skype. Then I asked what was the etiquette of making B2B calls if people’s workstations were on all day.

Skype’s blog raises yet one more question. Let’s say you see a comment on a Skype blog and are sufficiently enthused to respond. But instead of adding a comment to a post, you press the call icon of someone you do not know. You are not supposed to contact a blogger directly but use comments to do so. So what is the etiquette if you Skype a blogger?

What is the etiquette for B2B Skype phone calls?

PS  I promise not to write about Skype again for a while!

Why not use FriendFeed to live blog – how to live blog an event/part II

Darren ‘Problogger’ Rowse’s recommendation to read WebWorkerDaily’s posting on live blogging comes just as a colleague has done just that on his blog. It gets me thinking.

Why not use FriendFeed to live blog from a conference, for example? In fact, why not use FriendFeed to encourage all attendees – not just speakers and journalists - to live blog?

This is how it might work for an all day conference of around 50 people. Choose groups where people have some digital profiles – Facebook/LinkedIn, at least. 

• Encourage all participants to sign up to FriendFeed before.
• Create, what FriendFeed calls a ‘room’.
• Ensure there is Wifi and plenty of access to power in the room.
• Project that FriendFeed ‘room’ on to a wall in the coffee/registration areas, blank, at the beginning of the day but for all the faces of the attendees who have done what they have been told – registered with FriendFeed.
• Remind everyone to bring their laptops, cameras, phones, video cameras – basically anything that they can use.
• Encourage them to take photos, videos, post blogs, sent Tweets.

And there you have it. Soon the FriendFeed will be filling the screen, not just with one person’s take on the day but of everyone’s take on the day, not just with comments on a blog but also videos, pictures and Tweets. Even more importantly, the feed will survive the event leaving attendees to go back for the detail. Like any good wedding, you only take in 15 per cent of a conference. This way you see complexity and substance in the conference you could not possibly have noticed during it!

Of course you could as easily do this with a Facebook group but what I like about FriendFeed is that it comes without all the clutter of Facebook.

How to live blog an event part I, click here.

What will blogs look like in future?

It is quite clear that there are about to be fundamental changes in what blogs will look like. Or, perhaps a better phrase, what part blogs will play in people’s future digital identity.

Blog ReadWriteRead summed up the changes recently in a posting The Future of Blogging Revealed. To summise, the blog argued that blogs would become less of a steam of thoughts and more location for a person’s digital identity presented as a narrative or “Lifestream” – the place where all your digital activity, whether on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook or any other, is brought together in one list.

An example fo this might be friendfeed but better presented, as in Sweetcron due to be launched soon. These are blogs that feed horizontally across the screen and leave the life of a blogger as if like a narrative read left to right

The examples given by ReadWrite Web were a fellow WordPress blogger Kieran Delaney with his Lifestream page on a regular page of his blog. And even more radical, blogs that are just a Lifestream such as Alan Cheslow. And my own discovery in the debate, the Uk blog of Martin Stabe who takes Cheslow’s idea one step further.

His blog is only a list of his recommendations to other articles through his choices on delicious. So, just as a traditional blog is a set of ideas but written by oneself, this is a set of ideas but just from other people (NB Stabe also has a regular and traditional blog with UK B2B magazine for journalists Press Gazette).

What does this all mean? That blogs themselves willl die out? That we will all rely on others’ opinions for our blogs? Not at all. A blog will still remain a key part of people’s intellectual activity and a vehicle for networking but it might be entered through the diverse online activities of a Lifestream. A blog would then just be one of many digital activities but a most important part,

Oooh, I really like this idea. It is only in the last few weeks that I have consciously gone through all my digital identities – Flickr,Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, WordPress, delicious - and cleaned them up. In pulling them together, it has really helped push my own name and that of this blog up Google, it has really it has really brought all my online activities together into a formidable digital identity. Or, digital footprint.

This is what it comes to. A digital footprint that clearly marks out the measure of your thoughts, the interaction of your activities and, dare I say, become the prime repository of your memory. Not to get to sci-fi on the reader, but could this be the start of a life outside our bodies? Could this be the beginning of our memory – our visual, intellectual, aural and oral memories – stored online ready to be fed back into our minds at some moment in the future when we need it most?

Enough of such thoughts. It is sufficient that the blog is about to change visually, functionally and, most interestingly, become just one part of that digital identity.

Want to find out what the editors of the future will be like, click here.

Blogging like “karaoke” according to former Orlando Sentinel reporter

Mark I Pinsky, a former reporter on US paper the Orlando Sentinel, analyses why the US newspaper industry is in such parlous states in the Guardian. 

There’s also a problem we cannot control. Journalism’s statesmen and academics may differ, but many reporters have concluded that the fault is neither in our stars, nor in ourselves – but in our audience. Middle-aged readers say other media now trump newspapers. But more and more, reporters mutter, Americans – especially younger people – choose apathy and superficiality, the luxury of living in a normally prosperous superpower. If they want any information, they can get it from blogs – the hobbyist, derivative haven for karaoke journalists.

Never has Jeff Jarvis’ quote “curmudgeons who bark against the full moon of change” been so apposite.

These Digital Times Daily 06/08/08 – Press Gazette online-only future and rules for bloggers in big corporations

My views on the most important digital stories of the day from the web, from the papers, from radio and TV.

more about “These Digital Times Daily – 8. 6. 200…“, posted with vodpod

In today’s broadcast

• “Press Gazette owner mulls online-only future” in the Guardian. How will reporters reporting on the digital revolution feel about it if they are feeling vulnerable because of the very event itself?
• “Employees of big corporations who blog – what are the rules?” in my own blog. Following the demise of a personal blog by someone who also happened to be the copyright lawyer for Google and the revelation of US broadcast CNN’s rules for its own employees who blog, what are the rules?

If you liked my pick of the day, why not see what I recommended yesterday and the day before?

How to get more traffic to your blog

Two recent postings really pushed up the traffic on my site this week: one pretty logical; the other far from it! 

What has been working? The first trick has been to get a comment on Michael Arrington’s Techcrunch that really worked. His story profiled four interns working on the site over the summer. I pointed that they were all male but also linked to a posting that I had made more than a week before.

I had picked up a Tweet from Arrington that he was interviewing Shira Lazar, an entertainment reporter, for “a writing/video position” on TechCrunch. My posting was picked up immediately and originally by a celebrity news site in the states but nothing else happened.

A week later, and reshaped as a posting suggesting that Arrington’s original Tweet might have been a joke, it provided me with an opportunity for a bit of a rant. Why should an entertainment reporter not report on Twitter or Digg or Facebook when their owners and founders have become something of celebrities themselves. The WordPress Dashboard showed immediately how the traffic jumped from TechCrunch to this blog. I imagine the average age of each visitor to have been 22. 

So I get that – a comment that carefully linked my subject with TechCrunch encouraged traffic to my posting. But another comment by me on nj.com commending its new daily broadcast Ledger Live had a similar effect. Just consider this, as of yesterday my most visited posting in one day has been where I, based in the UK, comment on a website in New Jersey. Those people then jump to my site, in the UK, to read what I have to say about a very local broadcast, in the US.  Strange, to say the least, but underlining that however local a site may be, never overlook the global.

What do I draw from this? Of course a blogger needs to focus on search at all times – I can guarantee that the headline to this posting will do just that. But do not just think like a Geek. Think strategically about those comments. Ask yourself, is there a posting that I can rework to make it become part of another blogger’s thought process?.

It is worth the effort. On Tuesday this week, I managed the most views of the site in one day ever. This is doubly good when you consider that I am on annual leave and no longer working through my work email address. It has a link to the blog, as I encourage my colleagues to read this. But it left me unclear as to how much I relied on my work community for my traffic. Now it appears I am definitely interacting with a wider community as well.

Next posting on this subject will cover my experience of “sphinning”, see Friday 8 August.

If you found this posting interesting, why not read “How to get blogs to the top of Google”.

Employees of big corporations who blog – what are the rules?

I don’t know which one I find more disturbing:a blogger who gives up his blog because no one can distinguish between him and the company he works for; or a company that produces such rules for its own staff about their personal blogs that it challenges the meaning of the  linked in, collaborative world of the blogosphere.

Patry's last posting

The first concerns William Patry who wrote The Patry Copyright Blog, a good and decent blog over a four year period. It focused on “the geekery of copyright law”, it did not obsess with companies and Patry obviously had some serious things to say. But his problem was that he worked for Google so any time anyone refered to the blog, Patry was described as “Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel”. It meant that people questioned the validity of his comments and began to restrict on is comments.

Patry announces in a posting entitled “End of the Blog”, that he has now closed it.

A posting from Bloggasm, written by Simon Owens, shows how a corporation can also challenge blogs from

Bloggasm's Simon Owens

a different direction. In a posting entitled“CNN creates blogging policy, encourages employees to engage in sockpuppetry”, Owens quotes extensively the blogging rules for the employees of US broadcaster CNN. It’s pretty tough.

The employee is left with a pretty clear indication that CNN does not distinguish between the corporate and private identity of its employees. That seems fine until you think – why would an employer allow its staff to blog and then get surprised when they stray? Surely for an employer to be that enlightened, to be that aware of where it needs to stand in these digital times, it must have considered the dimensions of this collaborative, linked in world? If not, why be surprised. Perhaps it shows that even the most forward-thinking of traditional firms are still have a problem making the leap all in one go.

Sockpuppetry

And back to William Patry. I think he is wrong to have forsaken us. This blogging world mixmashes up our professional and private selves, as CNN feared. Whether your company name is on your blog or not, your LinkedIn or Facebook profile will lead you to a blogger’s identity in several different ways: those photos of a family trip to Paris on Facebook….the mention of not just one employer but several predecessors on LinkedIn. It all comes out. There are no longer any boundaries, only those one sets up oneself.

And for any journalist, and I have been one myself for years, any association with a big name is going to enhance a story. The blogosphere might play at being a republic where everyone is equal but it is actually an Empire made up of a few grandees and several million serfs. Just as bloggers circle the grandees, so journalists will inevitably do the same. Perhaps William Patry, like CNN, should not have been as surpised as he was at the result. 

So William Patry. I think you gave up too early. Come back in! For employer/employee, trad’ company/digital company, we are all struggling with what I have called the indefatigable digital identity of the editor 3.0. We need help from exactly people like you and the employees of CNN to show us how.

If you want to read my posting on the indefatiigle digital identity of the editor 3.0, click here.