Broadcasting Brain

Your deadline is approaching; time to write a new blog post. But… you don’t know what you’re going to write about.  You feel your heart racing, sweat pops out on your forehead, and your stomach begins to ache.  Your mind races but it can’t settle on any one good blog post idea.  What to do?

If you are in this unfortunate situation, try reading this post for help!

Here are 82 handy ideas or subjects for a great blog post if you’re a bit too lazy or pressed for time to come up with your own:

1. Read the newspaper and write about the front page news
2. Surf the Web and find out about the day’s news. Write about a story that’s popular.
3. Check Twitter for interesting stuff, especially stuff that a lot of people are talking about.
4. Complain about how Digg’s front page sucks these days
5. Complain about how Digg’s algorithm is still broken
6. Complain about all of the people who complain that Digg’s algorithm is still broken
7. Complain about any other bookmarking/news service
8. Comment on the latest Scobleizer post
9. Explain why Scoble is the most important blogger ever
10. Explain why Scoble is losing his influence
11. Comment on the latest Scoble FriendFeed discussion
12. Complain about Scoble when he doesn’t give you the “juice” that you deserve!
13. Write a post explaining why Robert Scoble is just this guy, you know?
14. Complain about Twitter
15. Explain how Twitter could be so much better if the following changes were made
16. Write about the coolest new Twitter app that you’ve discovered
17. Explain why people don’t read anymore
18. Explain why people read more than ever
19. Explain why people actually scan content instead of reading it
20. Talk about how you or someone you know suffers from ADD
21. Talk about how everyone’s attention span is shrinking
22. Complain about (pick one of: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Apple)
23. Praise (pick one of: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Apple)
24. Rant about how the banks make too much money
25. Complain that taxes are too high
26. Complain that taxes aren’t high enough and your country is going to go broke
27. Explain how the economy is going into a recession
28. Explain how the economy is going to pick up any day now
29. Explain how the economy is better than ever
30. Make fun of a well-known politician/celebrity/business leader/religious leader/blogger
31. Praise a well-known politician/celebrity/business leader/religious leader/blogger
32. Complain about how all of the good ideas have already been taken
33. Define social media
34. Explain why everyone else has the wrong idea of what social media really is, but you’ve got it right - and why
35. Explain what Web 2.0 is
36. Explain what Web 2.0 isn’t and why everyone else is wrong
37. Explain what Web 3.0 will be
38. Explain what Web 3.0 won’t be and why everyone else is wrong
39. Explain why Web x.x is a stupid, stupid way to classify Web technology
40. Take a common noun or verb, add x.x to it, and explain what it really means.
41. Find an unknown blogger and sing their praises
42. Crap on the A-list bloggers
43. Praise the A-list bloggers
44. Explain why you should really be on the A-list
45. Explain why you’d never, ever want to be on the A-list
46. Explain what the A-list really is
47. Explain how you can make money online
48. Complain about Google Adsense
49. Explain how you have a fool proof system to make good money with Google Adsense (but give very few details)
50. Complain about how Technorati authority is really, really broken
51. Defend the merits of the Technorati authority doo-hickey
52. Complain that (insert blogger here) isn’t giving “link juice” like they should be
53. Complain about how people are bugging you to link to them
54. Explain how the music industry is doing just swell in the digital era
55. Show the world how and why the music industry is F&$^^d
56. Defend Torrents and other file sharing services
57. Explain how it is so obvious that “free” is the killer business model
58. Complain about how people should be paying you for your creative work
59. Complain about spam
60. Complain about all of the social media “noise” that you have to deal with!
61. Explain why “noise” and comment dispersion aren’t bad things
62. Explain why comment dispersion and dispersed conversations will kill your blog
63. Rail against injustice of some kind
64. Rail against censorship
65. Complain that some @ssholes shouldn’t be allowed to blog
66. Eviscerate someone who’s been talking trash about you or your buds
67. Tell the world why Wordpress is the best blogging platform
68. Complain about “echo” in the blogosphere
69. Complain about websites and companies that enforce the “walled garden” approach
70. Explain to your readers why it is EXTREMELY important to write your posts in advance
71. Give advice on creating and launching the perfect meme
72. Complain about the use of memes and how they are a waste of time
73. Complain about how you get pitched by too many people and they don’t do it properly
74. Complain about how professional sports suck all around
75. Complain about how no one understands (someone or something else other than you)
76. Complain about how no one listens to you
77. Explain your fascination with superstition, particularly numbers
78. Debunk superstition and myths because it’s all dumb
79. Explain with enthusiasm all of the great blog post ideas that you have
80. Complain that you don’t have any good ideas for blog posts
81. Complain that you don’t have enough time to write the good posts that you really want to write
82. Write a post listing a bunch of different posts that you could write

This list is a combination of serious and silly ideas and hopefully you’ll find something in there to help you with your blogging dilemma.  Feel free to try them out - I’ve written this list of blog ideas to help people like you and me.  If you do try one of these ideas on your blog, please consider linking back to this post.

Good luck and hang in there!

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Over the past few days I’ve been tracking some conversations about the potential shift in blogging which has led some people to coin the phrase Blogging 2.0.

Steven Hodson of Winextra links to a number of these conversations at his blog.  Without going into too many details, a number of bloggers think that blogging is starting to undergo a fundamental shift whereby more and more things are pulling people away from blogs towards other sites which carry the conversations about the blogs .  This activity could pose a big problem for probloggers who are dependent upon site visits and ad-clicks for revenue.

Steven also posted a great rant post which pointed out that there are much bigger problems in the world than trying to track what people are saying about you or keeping up with every hip conversation.

“Blogging 2.0″ Misses The Point has a great point that shouldn’t be lost in all of this chatter, however and it’s a point that I believe in.  Put simply, blogging, like other social media, has the potential to be a great equalizer and advocate of democracy.

Social media gives anyone a relatively cheap and powerful means to communicate to the entire world, as long as they have access to the Web.

Per the post:

What makes blogging and podcasting interesting is that you can do it. You can make the “long tail” longer.  And when you make the long tail longer, that means there’s more tail for everybody. (Or something like that!)

Definitely.

That’s where the real value is, in letting more people broadcast to the world and get feedback, because you never know where the next good idea will come from.

Social media used to carry a lot of talk about social networking apps Facebook, and MySpace before that.

Twitter started to catch on in 2007 and became a potentially indispensible (although not irreplaceable) communication channel to supplement the blogosphere. There are several microblogging applications out there now, designed to capture short comments for the SMS user, but easily adapted to support desktop and laptop computer users who roam the Web.

Then came FriendFeed and things changed a bit for those of us who have adopted that app. Some people love FriendFeed, some hate it. FriendFeed seems to have a loyal user base, although it’s smaller than either Facebook or Twitter.

FriendFeed has some obvious functionality and value, but the real value of FriendFeed might be somewhere you didn’t expect - in the comments.

An overview of FriendFeed

It’s common to call FriendFeed a content aggregator or a lifestreaming application – one-stop shopping for all of your online creative output. Tamar Weinberg and Maki (Dosh Dosh) have written some good overview articles about FriendFeed (Robert Scoble also writes about FriendFeed regularly) if you want deeper details, but in simple terms FriendFeed is like a versatile RSS reader built to handle multiple types of creative output.

You can publish or aggregate several different types of social media output into this single location, including:

• News (e.g. Digg, Mixx, Reddit, and Google Reader)
• Bookmarking (Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon, etc.)
• Status (Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, and GTalk)
• Video (YouTube, Seesmic and Vimeo)
• Photos (Flickr, Picassa, etc.)
• Blogging (multiple blogs, just need the RSS feed URL + Tumblr)
• Music (Last.fm, Pandora, etc.)
• Books (Goodreads, LibraryThing)
• Miscellaneous (a hodgepodge of other services, including the Disqus commenting system)

You can select as many or as few of these services as you want, as long as you already have an account on them. Then, your activity that occurs in these services will appear in FriendFeed, giving people a more comprehensive glimpse into your social media activity.

Aggregation of content - fragmentation of discussion

Despite the advantages of collecting your output into one location, FriendFeed isn’t for the faint of heart if you try to follow lots of feeds. Specifically, I’m referring to the flood of information (some call it noise) that can come through your feeds and those of the people who you follow in FriendFeed. It’s the same as what happens when you subscribe to a lot of blogs or follow a lot of people on Twitter, but magnified: a ceaseless noisy stream of chatter, data, links, and miscellaneous tidbits.

At the same time, FriendFeed’s commenting functions have become popular with a number of FriendFeed users. You can comment on individual items within FriendFeed: the stories they Digg or Stumble; the music they like; the videos they watch; their photos; and… their blog entries.

Bloggers love to control their comments - FriendFeed foils that

Although it takes an extra step or two, some social media users (including some prominent bloggers) like to comment within FriendFeed instead of in the comments section of the blog itself. In fact, it’s caused some controversy because most bloggers like to see these comments directly on their blog: comment activity can be seen as a way to measure the value or worth of a blog in terms of:

• quantity (how many)
• quality (how well they are written, how they contribute to the blog’s posts)
• presence (who is leaving comments on the blog)

FriendFeed allows you to bypass that and comment within FriendFeed itself. This splits the conversation into multiple pieces and can make it hard for the blogger to track what’s being said. Some people don’t mind; other people resent the dispersion of blog comments.

The opportunity: the comment nexus

At this point, I think it’s important to look at the advantages of allowing commenting within FriendFeed:

If you don’t have a blog, there are fewer places for people to contact you and discuss your ideas. Perhaps you are a photo enthusiast or a music lover, but you don’t like to blog. Websites like Flickr and Last.fm do have built in commenting areas and communities, but they are limited to those communities unless you have blogs.

Put simply, FriendFeed allows a central point (or nexus) to be the repository of all your social media activity as well as feedback on your work. This functionality can be hard to aggregate otherwise. Likewise, FriendFeed is an opportunity to bring the comments together.

Even if you are a blogger, this can still work quite well for you. Many bloggers use social news, bookmarking, and other media in addition to their blogs. It requires a shift in thinking to accept that the comments aren’t on your blog BUT there are ways around that. I know of at least one app which will display your FriendFeed comments within your blog, so you can still maintain that visibility.

For the reader, this approach allows a centralized place to comment on someone’s activities. Plus, it gives you an opportunity to comment on likes and dislikes that aren’t easily visible unless the blogger links to it on their own blog.

Look at the opportunity instead of the challenge

I think of FriendFeed as a personal nexus of your social media activity because it ties (almost) all of your web presence into one location.

FriendFeed could create blog-like functionality for people who use other types of social media; ways to aggregate all of that content under your name and user ID. If you don’t have a blog but you do have significant presence on other applications like StumbleUpon, Twitter, or Digg, this gives you a new opportunity to interact with your followers. Remember, it’s social media.

Above all, FriendFeed is, like most things, an option. You can choose to bypass it entirely and keep doing the things that you always do. However, FriendFeed is still in early adopter mode and it does have a number of prominent bloggers as users. It’s another channel to both broadcast and receive content. And it’s a place to showcase your work to new people.

FriendFeed can be noisy, messy, and confusing. However, it does offer a number of advantages that other services don’t offer. The chances are good that the FriendFeed team will continue to improve the service as well.

If you can get past the idea of possibly losing control and look at the advantages of lifestreaming, you may find that a service like FriendFeed will offer you some interesting opportunities. It’s a chance to create and publicize your own social media nexus: what you do with it is, of course, up to you.

Edit: Colin Walker has a few things to say on the subject as well.

The Uncanny Evolving Social Media Blog List has been newly updated with almost 100 additional blogs.

It’s now up to 225!  Check it out!

I joined Facebook about a year ago.  You might say that Facebook was my first step, along with user-generated content sites like Helium, into social media.

Like a lot of people, I went through a period of intense usage, backed off Facebook quite a bit to focus on other things, then I came back to it on a limited basis.  I’ve renewed some old acquaintances (some really, really old ones, for that matter) and added a few new ones.  It really hasn’t affected my non-virtual life, but it was really nice to get back in touch with a few old friends, especially those of us who used to hang out in my hometown about a dozen years ago.  :: suddenly feels old ::

It’s odd how Facebook becomes a given in your life: an essential service, if you will.  Twitter and this blog have become more important parts of my social media experience, but Facebook will always have a place.

Which is weird since I only started using Facebook a year ago.  Will I be using it in five years?  Ten years?  Twenty five years?  In the retirement home?  It’ll be interesting to see.

Now over to you.  Do you use Facebook?  How long have you been using it?  Do you spend a lot of time using Facebook each day or barely a moment?

Twitter is starting to feel like an essential part of the Web experience. I don’t know how long it was down tonight, probably only an hour (but likely more).

Yet, during that time I felt so disconnected from the Web that I found myself checking out Pownce (which I use a couple of times per week) and Jaiku (maybe once/month).

Random thought: why on earth did Jaiku build in the 140 character limit? And what does Jaiku mean anyway?

It’s funny how… quiet those other two services feel. However, it’s primarily due to the fact that I have less than 50 followers between those two sites, whereas I have around 800 with Twitter. Naturally it’s going to seem quieter.

One thing this experience shows me is that Twitter, or another site like it, has certainly become an almost indispensible comms channel. Well, it felt like it! I can reach a lot of people via Twitter that I can’t seem to reach any other way.

I think I’d be willing to pay some money now if it would keep Twitter up and running on a consistent basis.

How did you feel when Twitter was down Wednesday night? And what did you do? Does Twitter feel indispensable to you now?

EDIT:  anyone feel dependent on microblogging for good blog ideas?

Ever get the feeling that people think they can achieve success by slapping a familiar-sounding label on something to make it sound new and exciting?

OK, it does happen quite a lot, but that doesn’t mean it’s on the mark each time.

A recent post by Greg Verdino caught my attention, where he commented on Generation Virtual, a Forbes article by Gartner’s Adam Sarner.

Generation V (for Virtual), which isn’t a generation in the traditional sense, is a collection of people who use the Internet (a lot) in order to get and share information.

This paragraph really encapsulates the whole thrust of this article:

In 10 years, the largest influence on all purchases will be the virtual experiences associated with them, and, therefore, more money will be spent marketing and selling to multiple online personae than marketing and selling offline.

That’s a pretty tall claim. Let’s dissect this article and see what makes it tick.

According to Sarner’s article, Generation V (there is no age requirement to belong to this “generation” by the way) has three behavioral attributes:

• To use technology as a day-to-day tool to facilitate communication that is not bounded by the previous limits of geography.
• Generation V members demonstrate an overwhelming desire to participate through involvement in global communities
• Finally, the value set of Generation V differs subtly from that of its predecessors. Its members have an overwhelming belief in a meritocratic environment: the value of collaboration, that “we” is more powerful and valuable than “me” and that sharing increases the value of something rather than diminishes or erodes it.

I can buy these three points and I see a lot of myself in them, even if I think that Generation V is a misleading term.

However, Sarner makes a few other statements that I don’t buy:

Web 2.0 signaled a “V-day” shift of control from company to customer, where increasingly powerful virtual environments and social networking communities proliferate. While traditional wisdom has focused on customer identification for one-to-one targeted marketing campaigns, cross-selling and so on, the reality of Generation V members using multiple personae (e.g., Amazon reviewer, eBay seller, Second Life avatar, “World of Warcraft” blood elf, digger, blogger, YouTuber), and the sheer power of their growing influence, means that customers will have a host of online personae driving your business relationship.

As a social media enthusiast, I can certainly appreciate what’s being said here. Although some of the more high profile flexing of social media muscle has been in a negative sense (e.g. Dell Hell, AOL Customer Service), somebody must be using it in a positive way.

I’m not sure that I buy the idea of multiple online personae as a focus for marketing campaigns. I mean, what is World of Warcraft going to market to me if it uses my online persona/character as a basis for anticipating needs: more gold? Better items? Or a new Lexus and whole life insurance?

And how is that going to help P&G market toothpaste to me? Following Sarner’s logic, there would have to be some kind of virtual toothbrushing experience (the Sims v. 10.0?) in order for a company to find the best way to sell me toothpaste.

This is assuming, of course, that I’ve provided 100% accurate information in my profiles AND that my behavior on these services is largely consistent with my non-virtual life. Sorry, no battleaxes or magic wands here. I’m not too keen on the virtual toothbrushing concept either.

The eBay, Amazon.com, etc. activity might be a better basis to market to me, but my Digg behavior might not. Maybe I voted for a story to help out a friend. Maybe I voted for a story because I thought it was well written, even though I don’t care that much for the subject material.

Here’s some more thoughts to consider:

Discovering customers’ true identities becomes irrelevant.

Good, because for the most part I’m happy to remain anonymous to the companies that I buy from.

Multibillion-dollar third-party customer data providers, business intelligence and analytics markets will shift from collecting demographic information to psychographic information to better understand these various personae and their behaviors.

Not necessarily a bad idea, but again it assumes that the way I behave online matches the way that I behave offline. Amazon.com already does this to a certain extent through its built-in recommendation system (largely built on other people’s behavior, not mine), so there is a precedent for this, but it goes dormant after I leave the site, nor does it necessarily provide useful information to other merchants (assuming that they can get access to the data).

Companies will create multiple interactive, virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer exploration toward purchases.

I don’t see any CPG (consumer packaged goods) companies having any success at doing this; not for a disposable or short lived product. Larger, more expensive goods… maybe. Services… maybe. And I think technology, including networking, bandwidth, etc. is going to have to become cheaper, more powerful, and ubiquitous in order to make this work.

By doing so, they will benefit from a deeper understanding of how and what people are exploring or buying, who strays from the normal path and why.

This creeps me out a bit, to be honest. I’m already a bit uncomfortable with the incomplete information I have on Facebook. Why would I go even further for a faceless corporation?

As a member of Generation X I don’t think I’d be willing to take the leaps of faith in this article, even though in many ways I fit the profile of Generation V.

My children, on the other hand… they may see it differently. At their young age they’re already starting to immerse themselves in the online worlds of Ty, Ganz, Lego, and Hasbro, so perhaps they will be more open to this sort of thing.

We didn’t have anything like those websites in my formative years, so it’s harder for me to understand. I’ve certainly spent my fair share of time in social media and in on-line games, but I see it in many ways as a distraction from the “real world” as well as a place to get information. If my job ever changes such that I become more dependent upon virtual interaction with other people, I may see it differently.

Adam Sarner is undoubtedly more informed than I am about trends, technology, and social media (for Gartner’s sake, I hope so), so in some respects I should give him the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, this article strikes me as a dumbed-down white paper (i.e. missing a lot of technical terms, supportive evidence, etc.) that someone created to put a stake in the sand so that they’d look clever a few years from now.

Maybe Sarner will be right. I just see too many potential problems to allow me to make that same leap of faith.

I have two ideas that might provide an alternative to the recent PR firm blacklisting that’s been set up by both Gina Trapani and Chris Anderson (see yesterday’s blog for the context behind this post). I don’t believe in the concept of public blacklisting for infractions of the magnitude that’s been bandied about here. Genocide: yes, that’s pretty evil and a blacklist would be a minor punishment in such a case. I think that improperly using a personal E-Mail address is a somewhat smaller infraction.

So, here they are:

1. Set up a “no pitch” Wiki and remove the “banned PR” lists.

This Wiki would serve a similar purpose to the infamous “no call” registry set up by the US government. Bloggers/journalists/executives can voluntarily register so that they won’t get any unwanted PR pitches. In fact, they probably wouldn’t get any pitches at all.

Pros:

• Makes it very clear, in a public forum, the identities of the people who do not want to be pitched to.
• Less ostracizing than a black list.

Cons:

• Unless flexibility is built in, bloggers/journalists/executives will be cut off completely from PR folks who do provide some value.
• Compliance is voluntary and unenforceable.
• Subject to gaming through the use of aliases and fake accounts to hide the identity of the rabid pitcher.

2. Set up a different Wiki whereby PR firms and employees publicly pledge to respect the rules of engagement for contacting bloggers or journalists.

If they break the rules, then they’re removed from this Wiki and are effectively blacklisted by omission.

Pros:

• Would provide a means for self-regulation.
• Does not publicly ostracize the offenders.

Cons:

• Compliance is voluntary and unenforceable.
• Subject to gaming through the use of aliases and fake accounts to hide the identity of the rabid pitcher.

Shoot holes in them, please

Now, as I’ve previously stated, I don’t work in the PR field and I’m not an A-list blogger, so I really don’t know what other party deals with when their work is a job, not a hobby.

Therefore, I invite those people more knowledgeable than me to tear apart these two ideas and, if they can, build something better. Let’s go!

P.S. (edit after publication) - these two ideas are band-aids, though…

P.P.S. - interesting discussion on this topic by Mack Collier at Marketing Profs Daily Fix.

Geoff Livingston and Jason Falls have both posted some pretty passionate responses to the latest major poke in the eye at the public relations industry. Gina Trapani of Lifehacker has begun a public blacklist of PR folks who’ve not followed her “rules of engagement” for contacting her, similar to Chris Anderson’s public blacklist from a few months ago.

Credit: IrisDragon.

Neither Geoff or Jason are very supportive of Gina’s list and offer their own insights into the PR profession while pointing out that bloggers aren’t always perfect either.

Now, I’m neither a writer or blogger as accomplished as Trapani or Anderson. Moreover, my only experience with public relations is:

• when I was responsible for public relations for my local Toastmasters club
• anything I do related to my social media presence

So, as I write, I write as an outsider. I’ve had some pleasant interactions with both Jason (in person) and Geoff (online) and, of course, I’ve enjoyed a lot of Lifehacker content and have had some positive interaction with at least one person involved with Lifehacker. I like Wired.com and The Long Tail, too.

I guess I’m trying to say that I’m relatively unbiased.  Or biased towards both sets of stakeholders.

The comments that I left at Geoff’s blog summarize my thoughts on this topic:

I’m of two minds about this situation where PR firms are being publicly blacklisted:

a) On one hand, the behavior of some people working in the PR industry may resemble that of the telemarketer, except E-Mail is the medium instead of the phone call. With all due respect to all those people who are trying to make a living as telemarketers, virtually no one wants to speak to a telemarketer and, taken in the aggregate, they disrupt one’s life with little chance of finding a receptive listener. A similar thing happens with the mass E-Mail campaigns used by some PR people, or so I understand. Eventually disruptions will produce a negative response.

b) On the other hand, many beginning bloggers and journalists have probably been in the same situation as both the telemarketer and the faceless PR employee: no one knows you, no one cares about you, and no one has time to talk to you, let alone read your blog. I’ve been there and it took months of work to start to build a network of contacts. You can become quite desperate to make contacts and you may try mass-marketing techniques because you’re willing to try anything. And you’ll make mistakes, like not checking to see how a blogger, professional or entrepreneur prefers to be contacted, or spamming a bit as your frustration and impatience wear thin when you don’t get a response.

I’ve tried to be balanced so far. However, I do tip in one direction with my next comment:

The sad thing, of course, is that some people forget how hard it was in the beginning after they’ve passed through that part of the Dip and become intolerant of the “noob”. Or maybe their impatience of the successful person is genuine when they feel that they aren’t being listened to. Nonetheless, there may be a hint of hypocricy in the behaviour of the journalist, professional, or entrepreneur who erects barriers to communication and, worse still, publicly flogs someone who screws up.

This position is somewhat consistent with my Role Model 3.0 post and follow-up to that post from a couple of weeks ago. On one hand, I argued that accessibility and two-way communication of some sort is a hallmark of the modern role model or thought leader. On the other, I acknowledged that these people have pressures on them that many of us don’t have to deal with, as was pointed out to me in a private conversation with a successful blogger (pun intended).

I tried to look at it again from another angle:

Just like in social media, would it not make sense to try to build contacts among the more accessible bloggers and journalists instead of trying to go directly to the Trapanis and Andersons of the world? In fairness to them, why would they want to talk to new sources if they’ve already built a somewhat trusted network of contacts, especially if the new source doesn’t respect the rules of engagement ?

However, I still come back to this:

• If you’re going to blog under your own name and identity and make public various ways that you can be contacted… it’s only a matter of time before they’re used, regardless if you have “rules of engagement”.
• If you make an extreme response to something, expect an extreme reaction.
• Remember that at one point in time, nobody online knew who you were, didn’t want to listen to you, and didn’t want to know you unless you had a previously established reputation offline. And that didn’t start out full-blown, either.
• Everyone practices public relations, marketing, sales, etc. whether it’s a role or a full-fledged job.

So, what do you think? Is PR a virus that must be destroyed? Are PR people “just folks”? Are bloggers and journalists “just folks”, too, or are we getting too big for our britches?

Catch the Brainwaves is our ongoing series of interviews with a variety of folks participating in blogging and social media. I ask them ten questions and they respond with their brilliant answers and insights! Today we have a special Q&A session where we are featuring Toronto Globe and Mail technology writer and blogger extraordinaire Mathew Ingram.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin!

1. What kinds of changes have you observed in a journalist’s work during the past five years?

I’ve noticed a lot of changes as a result of the Web. What used to be a newspaper’s normal flow, with stories written in the afternoon and filed in the early evening, has become a 24/7 stream (or close to it), much more like what a wire service does. Stories begin on the Web and in many cases are updated and end on the Web, and in between they are packaged and printed in the paper. I’ve also noticed an increasing amount of feedback between the Web and the paper, with readers comments and the popularity of stories helping to change the perception of those stories within the paper and occasionally adding value to them as well.

2. Do you see any potential conflict of interest if a professional journalist has an active social news or social bookmarking user profile (e.g. Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, etc.) where they are actively submitting, voting, or commenting on stories?

I don’t really see that as a conflict at all. Bloggers do it, so I don’t see why a professional journalist shouldn’t do it. Provided that they are actually trying to be part of the community, and aren’t just submitting and voting on their own stories then I think it’s fine.

3. Do social media make any aspects of your life easier? Harder?

Social media make many aspects of my life easier — particularly the part that has to do with generating story ideas and tracking the development of issues within the Web and new media. I guess the only thing they make harder is sorting through all the content that’s out there, since Twitter and RSS and so on can produce a pretty gigantic stream of stuff on a daily basis.

4. Is it difficult to turn work “off” these days, when the world seems to follow us wherever we go?

It is difficult, but in part I think that has to do with the fact that for me it’s not just work. I write about the Web and technology and social media because it interests me, not just because it’s my job — and so I am pretty much always connected and reading and looking around for things, and responding to comments and so on, regardless of what my “work” hours are.

5. In your opinion, is privacy really dead or seriously compromised with the multitude of ways that people can find out information about us?

I’m not sure it’s dead really — but I would say that privacy seems to be much more of a continuum than it used to be, where people are comfortable opening up their lives in certain ways to certain friends or family or co-workers or whatever, depending on which social networks they’re using. It’s when those different groups collide that I think there can be problems, and when people use information they find on a given network for other purposes.

6. Do you have any concerns about the mutations of the English language to include LOLspeak, 133t speak, and the rise of the letter “Z” as a catch-all consonant? (And do you pronounce it “zee” or “zed”?)

I still pronounce it “zed” because I’m old I’m not really that troubled by those sorts of things, to tell you the truth. I think language continually evolves, and there are idiosyncracies that emerge at various times that may become popular with a certain group but overall things still change relatively slowly — and some of those changes become so useful that we don’t even notice them. If you think about it, the language itself is a kind of social network, like Wikipedia; people are voting all the time on the type of language they want, and eventually the culture as a whole decides.

7. Are today’s more popular blogging platforms (Wordpress in particular) needlessly complex or cumbersome? Or are they just fine? Should we strive for simpler and easier self-publishing?

I think things can always be easier — and there are some Ajax-powered Wiki services that make editing and publishing pretty simple, not to mention things like Tumblr. But that said, I’m a big fan of Wordpress — it is extremely easy to use, and yet is almost infinitely flexible as well, which is a rare combination.

8. Would you say that the blogging A-list (i.e. the Technorati Top 100) is an anomaly or will those voices remain strong as the blogosphere (or the Web, perhaps) segments over time the way that television audiences now divide their video watching time between the big networks, cable, satellite, DVD/downloaded video, YouTube, and purely Web-hosted video?

I think the “A-list” is probably something that will change over time, and become less of an influence — in a lot of ways the blogosphere is still a little like the early days of television, when there were only a couple of dozen influential people. But I think the early pioneers always have influence, simply because they’ve been around so long.

9. Pretend the Internet is destroyed overnight. What do you do the next morning?

I guess I would start hunting for a newspaper

10. What one piece of knowledge, advice, or wisdom do you have to share with our readers?

As much as possible, do whatever it is that makes you happy. Passion makes up for a lack of money a lot better than money makes up for a lack of passion.

Thanks to Mathew Ingram for sharing his brainwaves!