Radio Fun
Radio UserLand, RSS, Weblog Tools and Design
Thursday, July 31, 2003
[back-dated from 10/5/03]
Inc.com has a RSS Feed.
[back-dated from 10/5/03]
Re: Radio using all of my CPU power. try this: http://jake.userland.com/categories/radioDevelopment/2003/03/28.html
[from RSS on 7/31/03]
THE BLOGGING PROCESS
A pretentious and presumptuous attempt to document what bloggers have learned, without any formal instruction, to do every day.
And then a description of what's needed to make blogs a medium for real conversation.
For some bloggers, just writing is enough. For most of us, though, we're looking to the blogosphere to provide us with useful and interesting information, education, entertainment and/or inspiration for our writing, and feedback, a critical audience, and help with the creative and publishing process. That process looks (to me at least) something like this:
As we all know, this is a lot of work, and there's never enough time to do it perfectly. I budget 75 minutes/day for reading (the steps in red), 60 minutes/day for writing (green), 15 minutes/day for promotion (blue), and, on the weekend, 60 minutes/week for blog community activities, focused on Salon Blogs, my chosen community. As an empty-nester and night-owl, I do most of this between 8-11pm, but I try to post during prime blog time (5am-5pm) so my posts show up in the 'recently updated' lists when most people are reading.
Blogging has taught me to write better (believe it or not), to write faster, and what blog readers like and don't like of my work. That's enough to keep me blogging. But I know of several bloggers who gave up because they didn't discover, or didn't feel, a sense of community. Or they found blogging too impersonal compared to chat, IM, and the telephone. A blog is a very blunt tool, and provides little context of the writer's personality, the kind of context that allows the development of real relationships (business or personal).
For personal relationship building, some bloggers have added chat, IM or webcam functionality to their blogs. Group blogs, forums and wikis allow collaborative work, which enables some real relationship building. And business networking tools like Ryze and LinkedIn allow bloggers to identify business needs and credentials to forge stronger business connections.
But in the absence of these appendages, blogs remain primarily one-way communication media. Comments threads, especially when they get long and divergent, are very clumsy ways of carrying on a communication. As a result, back-channeling (taking a comment thread 'offline' and continuing it by private e-mail) deprives the rest of the readers of the benefits of the conversation, and e-mail threads aren't very good conversational vehicles themselves (compared to face-to-face, telephone, chat or IM).
Why can't we enhance blog software so it allows a discussion, at the author's discretion, to migrate simply to other, more powerful conversational tools without losing the connection to the initial blog post that provoked it? I could (as lots of bloggers do) add applets and links for chat, IM, voice-over-IP, a webcam, desktop videoconferencing, my forums and groups, and my Ryze and LinkedIn pages. But they still wouldn't be connected, and I'd expect few readers to comfortably jump to the other 'channels' to continue a discussion started by a blog post. Or to use these tools 'cold' to communicate with me out of the blue. This probably shows I'm just not used to these other tools and their codes of behaviour, but I'd bet most of us are in the same boat. What's needed is a seamless migration path between the 'channels', and an accepted and intuitive protocol for deciding which 'channel' to use when.
Not all bloggers will want or use this bi-directional communication functionality, of course. The blogosphere has multiple information cultures, and many bloggers are perfectly content with one-directional communication. Some don't even turn on their commenting capability, following the historical magazine dictum of only allowing readers to write 'letters to the editor'. And I respect their right to do so.
But I think many of us are aching to enrich the relationships with our readers, to whom we owe a great deal, and would welcome bi-directional, multi-channel communication functionality, tightly linked to our blog posts, to allow us to engage in true conversations and community-building with them. If you know of examples of blogs that have been so enriched (probably by tech-savvy bloggers tweaking their own blogs) please let me know, and I'll start a list of them on my blogroll.
In the meantime, I'm going to try to push the blog envelope in more modest ways, within my very limited technical capability. I've put up my picture at right and updated my bio, so I'm not so mysterious. Watch for some peculiar boxes to appear at the end of certain posts that will take you to my IM address, scheduled discussions on my forums and groups, or my Ryze or LinkedIn pages.
Yes, I know that figuring out blogs' peculiar technical foibles is already hard enough for most of us, and that none of us has enough time even for the steps in the chart above. But if we're going to save the world and stuff we need to really communicate, to make blogs tools to really connect us with like minds, not just to inform and entertain. I've 'met' a few of my readers in person or by telephone conversation, and let me tell you the sudden jump in medium and connection is psychologically jarring. It shouldn't have to be.
Who knows, maybe by next year the chart above will be so much more complex it'll look like a plan for extricating Bush from Iraq.
[How to Save the World]
[from RSS on 7/31/03]
Nick Finck: The Why and How of Blogging.. Great introduction to blogging in a work context. From a presentation web designer/developer & information architect Nick Finck gave at Web Design World this week. Nick's the publisher of Digital Web Magazine and a blogger. [a klog apart]
Radio UserLand, RSS, Weblog Tools and Design
Thursday, July 31, 2003[back-dated from 10/5/03]
Inc.com has a RSS Feed.
Here's a feed I've been looking forward to for a long time: Inc.com RSS 2.0 Feed [via Scripting.com]
[inluminent/weblog]9:50:35 PM
categories: Radio Fun
[back-dated from 10/5/03]
Re: Radio using all of my CPU power. try this: http://jake.userland.com/categories/radioDevelopment/2003/03/28.html
it greatly reduced the CPU usage on my Windows XP machine, now its down to 30-40 percent when I run Radio and doesn't lock up my taskbar except everyonce in a great while
Julie http://radio.weblogs.com/0119318/ By Julie Wiggins. [Radio UserLand Messages]
[from RSS on 7/31/03]
THE BLOGGING PROCESS
A pretentious and presumptuous attempt to document what bloggers have learned, without any formal instruction, to do every day.
And then a description of what's needed to make blogs a medium for real conversation.
For some bloggers, just writing is enough. For most of us, though, we're looking to the blogosphere to provide us with useful and interesting information, education, entertainment and/or inspiration for our writing, and feedback, a critical audience, and help with the creative and publishing process. That process looks (to me at least) something like this:
As we all know, this is a lot of work, and there's never enough time to do it perfectly. I budget 75 minutes/day for reading (the steps in red), 60 minutes/day for writing (green), 15 minutes/day for promotion (blue), and, on the weekend, 60 minutes/week for blog community activities, focused on Salon Blogs, my chosen community. As an empty-nester and night-owl, I do most of this between 8-11pm, but I try to post during prime blog time (5am-5pm) so my posts show up in the 'recently updated' lists when most people are reading.
Blogging has taught me to write better (believe it or not), to write faster, and what blog readers like and don't like of my work. That's enough to keep me blogging. But I know of several bloggers who gave up because they didn't discover, or didn't feel, a sense of community. Or they found blogging too impersonal compared to chat, IM, and the telephone. A blog is a very blunt tool, and provides little context of the writer's personality, the kind of context that allows the development of real relationships (business or personal).
For personal relationship building, some bloggers have added chat, IM or webcam functionality to their blogs. Group blogs, forums and wikis allow collaborative work, which enables some real relationship building. And business networking tools like Ryze and LinkedIn allow bloggers to identify business needs and credentials to forge stronger business connections.
But in the absence of these appendages, blogs remain primarily one-way communication media. Comments threads, especially when they get long and divergent, are very clumsy ways of carrying on a communication. As a result, back-channeling (taking a comment thread 'offline' and continuing it by private e-mail) deprives the rest of the readers of the benefits of the conversation, and e-mail threads aren't very good conversational vehicles themselves (compared to face-to-face, telephone, chat or IM).
Why can't we enhance blog software so it allows a discussion, at the author's discretion, to migrate simply to other, more powerful conversational tools without losing the connection to the initial blog post that provoked it? I could (as lots of bloggers do) add applets and links for chat, IM, voice-over-IP, a webcam, desktop videoconferencing, my forums and groups, and my Ryze and LinkedIn pages. But they still wouldn't be connected, and I'd expect few readers to comfortably jump to the other 'channels' to continue a discussion started by a blog post. Or to use these tools 'cold' to communicate with me out of the blue. This probably shows I'm just not used to these other tools and their codes of behaviour, but I'd bet most of us are in the same boat. What's needed is a seamless migration path between the 'channels', and an accepted and intuitive protocol for deciding which 'channel' to use when.
Not all bloggers will want or use this bi-directional communication functionality, of course. The blogosphere has multiple information cultures, and many bloggers are perfectly content with one-directional communication. Some don't even turn on their commenting capability, following the historical magazine dictum of only allowing readers to write 'letters to the editor'. And I respect their right to do so.
But I think many of us are aching to enrich the relationships with our readers, to whom we owe a great deal, and would welcome bi-directional, multi-channel communication functionality, tightly linked to our blog posts, to allow us to engage in true conversations and community-building with them. If you know of examples of blogs that have been so enriched (probably by tech-savvy bloggers tweaking their own blogs) please let me know, and I'll start a list of them on my blogroll.
In the meantime, I'm going to try to push the blog envelope in more modest ways, within my very limited technical capability. I've put up my picture at right and updated my bio, so I'm not so mysterious. Watch for some peculiar boxes to appear at the end of certain posts that will take you to my IM address, scheduled discussions on my forums and groups, or my Ryze or LinkedIn pages.
Yes, I know that figuring out blogs' peculiar technical foibles is already hard enough for most of us, and that none of us has enough time even for the steps in the chart above. But if we're going to save the world and stuff we need to really communicate, to make blogs tools to really connect us with like minds, not just to inform and entertain. I've 'met' a few of my readers in person or by telephone conversation, and let me tell you the sudden jump in medium and connection is psychologically jarring. It shouldn't have to be.
Who knows, maybe by next year the chart above will be so much more complex it'll look like a plan for extricating Bush from Iraq.
[How to Save the World]
9:13:45 PM
categories: Radio Fun
[from RSS on 7/31/03]
Nick Finck: The Why and How of Blogging.. Great introduction to blogging in a work context. From a presentation web designer/developer & information architect Nick Finck gave at Web Design World this week. Nick's the publisher of Digital Web Magazine and a blogger. [a klog apart]
9:10:04 PM
categories: Radio Fun