Facibus On Blogging

Glen Stansberry discusses two types of bloggers:

Musers- Musers like to take information and extrapolate. Or abstract ideas. Or nothing related at all. But that’s ok… their readers know and expect this whimsical style from the writer. (Think Kottke, SvN, Seth Godin.)

Reporters- Information junkies that think structurally. Information is currency, and these bloggers are stinking rich. (With information, that is.) Reporters typically don’t deviate too much from the facts, and like to be the first to spread the word. And boy are they regular. They’re like prune juice of the blogosphere. (Think Techcrunch, Micropersuasion, GigaOM.)

Glen goes on to talk about determining your style and accepting it. This is a good thing - self-awareness is the first step to enlightenment, or so it is said. If you do what is easiest for you, then you will find it easier to do (and this is both a terrible truism and a profound statement). In other words, if you pick your style (Muser or Reporter) and stick to it, then you will likely be more successful. Basic common sense, and I can’t fault the logic.

Does this mean that Musers can’t stick to a posting schedule, or Reporters can’t do some analysis or reframing with the news? No. It is just harder. If you go with the path of least resistance, then things work better.

There is a concept in consulting called “embracing the chaos” - taking advantage of things that don’t look like they form part of the solution. It’s about putting some lateral thinking/reframing/edgecraft into action and coming up with a way to make the problem the answer. If you’re stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere and life hands you lemons, pass the tequila bottle and the salt - then apply for a liquor license

What is the easiest way to follow the path of least resistance, to embrace your own blogging chaos? Here are a few things to get you started:

• Identify your blogging style by reading Glen’s article.
• Look at your life situation - if you are a stay-at-home parent, you don’t have to join the mommyblogger/daddyblogger world (but you could think about it).
• Look at your challenges - if you’re an out-of-work car mechanic, think about ways that people could benefit from your knowledge and experience. If you’re suffering from a chronic illness, think about how other people could benefit from the things you have learnt (in the UK they have embraced this particular chaos and have “professional patients” who help other people with the same condition as them).
• Look at what you have around you and hit them with lateral thinking techniques like reframing and edgecraft.

There are a thousand opportunities in the chaos of everyday life - and it can be the greatest feeling in the world to embrace the chaos and turn it into something truly remarkable.

What’s your blogging style like? Are you interesting in Internet marketing tactics or are you content just publicizing your site by word of mouth? Cheap web hosting will let you explore your blogging style. After you establish your sites, you can even sell your domain to make some money off it.

Friends make things easier. They are there to share the good stuff and help you through the bad.

It is said that three friends make a bad job bearable. Returning to a client site this morning where I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of years certainly brought this point home - I’ve worked with these folks a lot and consider many of them friends as well as clients.

In the blogging world, it is the same - friends make the blogging easier. And blogging isn’t always easy - it can be hard work killing the blog monster before it kills you.

I’ve got a lot of real-world friends who blog, and I’ve made a lot of friends blogging. I won’t mention them all here - because I would forget to mention one or two without meaning to in my tiredness and offend them. I link to them when I can, and they are all wonderful.

I’d go so far as to say that it is impossible to blog for any length of time without genuine friends who also blog - and there have been many occasions over the last few months where it has been so much more than just digging for reciprocal links - bloggers are some of the nicest, most selfless, helpful people I know. When you’re married to the blog, friends can make all the difference.

There are some blogging friends that you only get to “see” online, so giving them a friendship bracelet isn’t really an option. But why not! There are many fashionable bracelets that would perfectly fit a blogger’s style, like bracelets with web-themed charms or bracelets that support a cause that’s important to them, like a Lance Armstrong bracelet.

The second day of Oz-IA is just about to start and I’m feeling a bit weary after a hectic day yesterday. I’m asking myself if it is worth blogging when tired.

We’ve seen posts over the last couple of months on how to blog when you’re ill (and when not to blog). In this busy busy world, should you blog when you are tired?

For some people, the answer has to be ‘yes’ - at least if they want to blog at all - because lifestyle/work issues mean that they are always tired. This is not ideal (either as a way of life or as a way of blogging).

So you need to think it through: do you really need to blog when you’re tired?

Let’s say you’ve thought about it and you’ve decided that you need to blog anyway. Here are some tips for blogging when you are tired:

• it seems easier to rant when you’re tired. This is OK when you run a rant blog and your readers are expecting it - but not OK if it is out of character. The lesson here is think twice before getting snarky (easier said than done)
• mistakes are easier to make - going without sleep can be the equivalent of drinking over the legal limit and contributes to a lot of road injury statistics. If you’re tired, re-read the post top-to-bottom and make sure you’ve used spell-check.
• it’s harder to think when you’re tired - posting ideas can be too hard to come up with. My solution to this is to have a store of posting ideas saved as drafts in WordPress - they are there every time I click on the “Write” tab. Every time I think of an idea I email it to my GMail account from my phone with a ‘todo’ title - GMail tags todo emails separately.

So how are you feeling now? Are you tired? Are you going to blog anyway?

I like Susie Bright: she is witty, irreverant, and interesting.

What she is not is kind to readers of her RSS feed - she publishes a partial feed and then you have to go to her site to read the rest of the article. Which means waiting for a heap of ads to load. This is not so much of a problem for desktop readers - to them it is merely annoying. Portable readers (like myself using Opera Mini) get to wait while a whole page (as far as we can scroll down) loads every ad in her left sidebar, then go to the bottom of that page, then click on “Next” before we get to the actual content we’re interested in. It is needlessly unpleasant.

When you’re famous, you can get away with this sort of thing because people will read what you have to write anyhow. Well, most people. I’m voting with my feet and like John Chow, Susie is off my reading list. She won’t miss me, and if I miss her, there is always the occasional session on Google Reader on the laptop to catch up.

…there aren’t enough of them.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the BlogRush concept. I joined myself. But the $%^&* categories aren’t finely grained enough to fit the niche here or over at On Blogging Australia. I blog about blogging and (sometimes) about other metabloggers. So my attempts to follow Darren’s advice to pick the right category (and he says that this is hard for the same reason) falls a little flat because there isn’t a blogging/metablogging category in BlogRush.

Pop psychology 101 moment: Matt will pick me up on this and quote the right references as he’s a genuine psych nerd People categorise things to put a boundary around them so that they can be dealt with - excluded from stream of consciousness such that we can do what is in front of us. In my head there is a category of things called ‘elephants’ - because one is not sitting on my keyboard right now I don’t have to worry about any of the things called ‘elephants’. If I think about it, I am concerned about the ivory trade and habitat devastation in Africa and Asia that affects elephants, but I can probably get through my day without having to engage with the concept of elephants. We categorise because we must, and humans are very good categorisation machines. I work as an information architect mainly because I understand that different people categorise things differently and I love to find out why and how they do so.

Categorisation systems fail for a variety of reasons. One of the easy ones to spot is when they are too coarse - that is, there aren’t enough categories to fill the needs of the people using them. Most tagging sites (like Digg and coRank) don’t have enough categories - they use this as a way of limiting the types of posts that they want to promote.

Where BlogRush has gone wrong is to limit the potential usefulness of the concept. They’ve done this by not allowing users to be specific enough with their categories. Contextual advertising (even of shared blog links) relies on the links being clickable - if they aren’t of interest to the people who are reading the blog, they will not be clicked on, and the increased traffic becomes an empty promise.

How do they fix it? Add more categories. Lots more. This needs to be done carefully for the following reasons:

• because different people think differently, coming up with a taxonomy (a pigeonhole system where every blog has only one category) that will work for the greatest number of bloggers is no easy thing. If it was, we wouldn’t need librarians (acknowledging that librarians do a whole lot more than this).
• category labels are going to be an issue - they need to be thought through to avoid confusing user bloggers.
• currently the structure is flat - should they move to a hierarchical model? And if so, which one? Because a lot of Aussie bloggers write about Australia, is it sufficient to have a Country > Australia sub-category? Or should it be Blogs > Australia? And what about Aussie bloggers that blog about Aussie bloggers? Would enough people use a Metablogs > Country > Australia category to make it worthwhile? And if they allowed user creation of categories, would there soon be a Country > Australia > Metablogs category as well as the Metablogs > Country > Australia one? You can probably see how messy this might get in a hurry.

The BlogRush concept is a good one and I believe that it is worth taking part in it as an experiment. But they do need to do something about those %^& categories