Broadcasting Brain

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Today’s brain food comes from Patrick Bisaillon (aka Pat Biz) from Piggy Bank Pie! In addition to growing the readership of his own blog, Patrick’s had some recent guest-posting success with John Chow’s blog and also at Darren Rowse’s blog (ProBlogger.net). Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then catch the brainwaves!

1. Why did you start Piggy Bank Pie and what do you hope to achieve with it?

The main reason why I started Piggy Bank Pie is my passion for writing. This can sometimes be challenging for me since my mother tongue is French - I’m from Montreal, Canada. But I do my best hoping it’s not too obvious, and sometimes when I work on a very important post, I have collaborators like Sharon Hurley Hall who kindly review my draft before I submit to a client.
I hope to achieve a good reputation as a guest blogger. My ultimate goal is to bring enough readers and RSS subscribers to Piggy Bank Pie, and sell enough guest and ghostwriting posts through the Writing Services to pay writers with whom I’m collaborating.

2. I notice that you are using and writing about BloggingZoom. What advantages do you think it has over other social news sites?

The more I use it, the more I like it. To tell you the truth, I capitalized on the recent interest in BZ to generate traffic to Piggy Bank Pie. To my great surprise, it works, and it does a great job. So far I’ve hit the front page twice, with the two top positions. This gave me very good visibility and new RSS subscribers. Now it’s important to understand that this has nothing to do with mammoth traffic you can get out of Digg, but remember that BZ was launched on Nov 1st 2007. Give it a few months, or maybe a year, and it will be BIG.

3. Are you familiar with Seth Godin’s writing? If so, what do you think about it? If not, are there are any particular writers that you follow?

I don’t know much about marketing gurus. I’m more of a techno kinda guy… or geek I should say. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in marketing. Online marketing is more my cup of tea. Seriously, if you ask me who would be my online marketing guru, my answer would be Maki at Dosh Dosh. Note: I also admire his writing, styling, design, and originality

4. I believe you live in Montreal, Quebec. Can you describe the blogging/social media scene there?

Yes I do live in Montreal. Journalist are the most popular bloggers in Montreal. Some of them have very large readerships, but you know, they cover stuff from their respective newspaper. I’ve never heard of any pro-bloggers such as Maki (Toronto) or John Chow (Vancouver), who would be a true Montrealer, and a habs fan. I guess I’m the only one If you find one, please let me know.

5. Somewhat related to (3), have you met any bloggers/social media participants in person?

Not yet. I followed Blog World Expo in Las Vegas recently, and to tell you the truth, I would’ve loved to attend. I am seriously considering attending next year - if there is a second edition. Talk about a great occasion to network…

6. Do your friends and family use social media as much as you do? What do they think of it?

My nickname is Biz. And some of my friends, the more computer savvy ones, are calling me Biz 2.0… this should answer part of the question I do have friends reading blogs, some even reading Digg and Slashdot, but that’s it.

7. Do you think the Quebec separatist movement has evaporated? Is anyone blogging about it these days?

You know what? I’ve never looked for blogs discussing Quebec’s independence before I read this question that tells you a lot about my position on the issue. It looks like Google shows MANY results for this topic. Obviously, you have to query in French to get more results.
I’ll give you an idea of how frequently I hear about this. I read the newspaper, listen to talk radio, and watch the late evening news almost every day. I can fairly say that I hear about this subject on a daily basis. So no, it hasn’t evaporated. However, more and more people realize that Quebec needs to stay in Canada to maintain its fragile economic situation.

8. What’s the funniest thing that you’ve ever seen on the Web?

Oh, this is a no brainer. Call Center, the movie. It’s a 12 minute professional quality movie on the issue of outsourcing call centers to India. I swear it’s the funniest thing I’ve seen. You can find the video here.

This one is very good, too, it’s a remake of 24 as if it would’ve been filmed in the nineties.

9. Scenario: the Internet is destroyed overnight. What do you do the next day?

Let’s have another baby.

10. What wisdom to you have to share with the blogosphere? Here is your chance to broadcast those brainwaves. Go!

I had great hopes for a device known as the Kindle from Amazon, but was disappointed by a stupid limitation. Here’s what I’m waiting for: I wake up in the morning, fire up my wireless RSS reading device (similar to the Kindle) and read my favorite blogs and news while having breakfast. This is all possible with the Kindle. However, Amazon only allows RSS feeds they are reselling… So, not only do you pay $400 for the Kindle, but you also need to pay a monthly fee for each RSS subscriptions - that are usually free - and you only have access to a limited number of blogs. I think blogging will be mainstream soon, and this will change how we consume information. Sites such as Digg allow readers to decide what’s the top news, and this is only the beginning. A dynamic and real-time global wireless news reading system built on top of an RSS backbone is the future. Get ready for information 2.0.

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