Darren Rowse writes about the Melbourne Bloggers Meetup. They have a group on meetup.com, which I am not that fond of personally - I believe that there are things that upcoming.org does better.
Anyone in the Canberra, ACT area want to meet for coffee with a group of other bloggers? I know a few other Canberra and area bloggers (like Steve Collins, Donna Maurer, Matt Hodgson and Maria Murphy) but there must be a hundred others - if you are interested please email me via facibus AT gmail DOT com, and I’ll add you to the invite/notification list. We’re getting closer to holding BarCampCanberra - we could make an effort to get together then as well.
I’ve just joined BloggBuzz. I’ve looked at Digg and coRank, and while I like coRank a lot, I’ve been looking at other directory/voting sites as well.
I learnt about BloggBuzz from ProBlogger’s Speedlinking post from yesterday. So far, BloggBuzz is a relatively small community - in time it will grow, but in the mean while, it is refreshing to see the start of something good.
Darren Rowse gives some good advice for Prebloggers on how much work is involved in Problogging. Prebloggers are would-be Probloggers - people who are interested in finding out how to blog for a living. Darren’s readership must contain a lot of Prebloggers amongst the Probloggers that regularly comment on his posts.
I think that the point of Darren’s post is that Problogging is hard work. He lists the following as typical Prologger tasks:
- Posting Posts
- Researching Posts
- Moderating Spam Comments
- Dealing with Comment Trolls
- Responding to Comments
- Responding to Emails from Readers
- Following what others blogs in the niche write
- Following what mainstream media is writing on the niche
- Commenting on other blogs
- Administering Servers
- Renewing Domain Names
- Marketing/Branding the blog
- Chasing up spam blogs stealing content
- Promoting posts to other relevant bloggers
- Search Engine Optimization
- Blog Design
- Monitoring Blog Stats and Metrics
- Testing monetization strategies
- Administering payments, banking cheques, invoicing advertisers
- Networking with other bloggers via IM or email
There are a lot of Prebloggers that are doing a lot of this stuff (except for banking the cheques) already while holding down a full-time job. So here is the question that I need answered for myself: how do we, as Prebloggers, maintain the work/blog/life balance?
Indulge me for a little while and I’ll take you through a day in my life to provide background to the question. A typical day for me starts at around 5AM. I’m an early riser, and like to get stuff done while the rest of the world is quiet. I’ll spend until 6:30AM or so working on blog setup, blog postings, or ‘afterwork’ (take home work from my day job as a consultant). The afterwork workload varies - some days (and weekends) I do little else in my spare time, other days it might only take 15 minutes - some of it involves a lot of playing with the mediawiki wiki platform, which is a tale for another day. At 6:30 Helen and I start getting ready for work, so that we can be there by 8AM. Depending on what is happening and how I am feeling on the day (at the moment, getting over a cold, I might not be up to much after about 4PM) I’ll leave the client site and either head home or into the company office. There is usually at least one meeting in the company office requiring my presence a week, often two. If I am heading straight home I might get into a bit more work/blogging (up to an hour or so) before getting dinner ready. If I am think my emotional health requires it I will rest or play games on my Nintendo Wii. Helen gets home and we spend some time together discussing our respective days, we eat and watch a little TV or a movie. After that I’m back on the tools for an hour or two before retiring with a book. Some evenings we go out to eat (probably once a week) and maybe a big-screen movie.
In other words, I will spend four hours or more on an average day working on afterwork and blogging apart from client-time work (minimum 7.5 hours per weekday) and liesure time. Where is the balance? How do I find it? It is interesting enough that I’ll probably blog about just that - finding the Work/Blog/Life balance.
John Chow makes the following challenge: write a post that links to his blog and he’ll mention you on his site, JohnChow.com. You have to follow the rules on his review my blog posting - including a mention of his blog home page, and mentioning that he helps you make money online.
Now that we have the rules out of the way, here is my honest opinion of John and his blog - he is one of my must-read bloggers on blogging. Why? Because he is successful at what he does. He is unashamedly blogging about making money for people who are interested in making money from blogging. I never wonder if I should be reading his posts, never think that I am wasting my time. Sure, I do not agree with everything that he says or does.
I find inline advertising annoying but I put up with it to see what he has to say - and there is a hint in that for new bloggers like myself - we will put up with advertising when we’re keen on the content.
The facibus.com “mini-empire” has been more or less moved to the new hosting server - lots of configuration still to come, and I wish I hadn’t been so profligate with my tagging at Facibus Reviews (tags are recorded as categories in WordPress export/import, I should have known, there are 200+ categories over there, a little bit of sorting out to be done, ack).
I’ll put a lessons learnt/howto together and post it here. A complicating factor is the cheaper domain names available through my new hosting arrangements - so I’m putting GetYerOwn.com and AndrewBoyd.name together at the same time.
Anyhow - if you have any comments on the layout here - apart from the fact that it is very K2-bog-standard (which I am working on), please let me know 
facibus.com is moving! The blogs need more room to grow and a bigger traffic allowance, which is a good thing.
What this means is that until the DNS change propagates around the world, this blog will appear to be off the air. All going well this will only be a day or two - at the most.
Thanks for reading - it is because of your interest that this move is possible.
I’ve added a blogging on blogging swicki to Eurekster. Cool, but what is a swicki? According to Eurekster:
Swickis are a cross between search engines and Wikipedia - the community can add, delete and improve the results.
First impressions are that it provides nothing that mediawiki (the platform used for wikipedia.org) can’t do - but it can do more: swickis search across a wide range of sites (including blogs). Not only that - and here is where it gets interesting - every reader can add their own links into the results, changing them. The swicki will still give results based on relevance, but user-voted popularity can also alter results. Not only that, but you can ask questions and provide answers to those of other people. I can’t pretend to understand the full implications of this concept but I am willing to play along to find out
I’ve put the blogging on blogging swicki tag cloud equivalent into my sidebar on this blog. If it sounds like you, I would encourage you to have a look. If you want to use the swicki tag cloud in your own blog, please follow this link.
CopyBlogger is offering $10,000 in prizes for creating an irresistable offer.The judges are all top blogging mentors:
- Seth Godin: Seth is a legend in Marketing 2.0 circles - he invented several core concepts, like permission marketing and the ideavirus.
- Darren Rowse is the legendary problogger.net problogger himself.
- CopyBlogger’s Brian Clark is also judging, which is appropriate.
I’ll notify you here when I have my entry together. In a world of hype and buzz, this competition stands out for its sheer size and likely benefits - if you think you have the time, and want to see your blog traffic increase, you should probably think seriously about entering this one. Who knows, you just might win
According to Brian at copyblogger, donkeys kill more people than plane crashes. This is one of those rare articles that will still be significant in five years. The key benefit is in the use of contrast (donkeys kill more people than plane crashes, you are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than a poisonous spider, and so on) in differentiation. If you cannot differentiate your product then you have nothing substantially new to offer - and when you are a blogger, differentiation is a good way to keep readers.
Brian’s article also talks about the power of contrast to help identify and overcome objections. He gives the example from the world of real estate: of the difference between an ordinary house and the perfect home - if it means going 10% over budget, and that translates to an extra repayment amount that sounds reasonable when contrasted to a cheaper but less desirable property, you might indeed go for the extra.
There has been a lot of interest in the last week or so in my Government 2.0 and Government blogging posts. As a consultant working in the government space, I know a lot about the concerns that have been quietly expressed to me by would-be government bloggers. As a consultant, I can help one organisation at a time with their issues - as a blogger, I might be able to provide real solutions to a wider range of people.
Accordingly, I’ve started BlogDotGov, a government blogging resource site. Time will tell if it has been of any use.
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