Friday, March 7, 2003

Blog early, blog often Mike Sanders has been exploring habits of highly effective blogging. The series starts here. [Doc Searls] Basically, Mike applies The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to blogging, for some interesting results. The first three habits suggest that we should take control of our lives (to the extent possible), define our direction, and then make sure that we are doing the things that head us in that direction. If blogging is a part of your life, why should it be any different. I need to better define why I blog. Part of it is to document my life, but personal diaries aren't very interesting to anyone except really close family and friends. Another part of it is to figure out my next business venture. I'm fascinated with the potential for weblogs and RSS-style feeds, and I think we'll see the promise of PointCast reborn in the distributed grassroots efforts now taking place. Lately, I've become acutely aware of you, my audience, when I consider what items to blog... is it interesting, is it informative, is it persuasive enough? Mike emphasises that last point when he focuses on Habit # 3 - Put first things first: In Blogging, this habit presents many challenges. So much of blogging is focused on reacting to the latest news stories, blogosphere post or email. We constantly get distracted from what we wanted to blog about. So we must try to keep our I on the ball. Make sure that the majority of our blogging is fulfilling the "Why Blog?" question we thought about in Habit 2. Mike's series is continuing, and I highly recommend it. BTW, i found this series a bit late, and he doesn't appear to have an RSS feed, so I'd like to see a single article version of his posts.. an interesting observation about how serialized content can sometimes be packages up into longer presenatations with as much or more potential impact and value. 11:06:27 AM