I’ve read hundreds (or thousands) of blog posts and articles about blogging.  One of the really timeless ones that I still come back to is a list of ten tips from Jorn Barger that were featured in Wired Magazine.  Barger is generally credited for having coined the term weblog, which we normally shorten to blog.  (this last sentence edited after a commentator corrected me, thanks)

His tips are definitely worth checking out.  As you go through them, you’ll probably note that changes in social media and the tools of blogging will make some of them seem a bit out of date.  When you read through Barger’s article, a lot of what he’s describing is about the best ways to link back to original content.  However, his ten points are definitely worth reflecting over, even if they don’t dwell much on content creation..

Barger’s Ten Tips

Here are the tips from Jorn’s Wired article, with my own thoughts added below each one: Continue reading ‘10 Old School Blogging Tips To Know’ »

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There’s a powerful, useful way to draw attention to your words.  Just define who your arch-enemy is and then start unloading with both barrels.  Continue the relentless assault.  If you’re lucky, your arch-enemy is one of the undead and just keeps getting back up.  Then you knock him (or her) down again, inflicting mortal damage.  And then they get back up again and…  you both win, because everyone loves a good fight.

I may be unobservant or naive, but I can’t really say that I have an arch-enemy, not a person anyway, especially since the little red headed guy from elementary school left the country a few years ago.  But I digress.

Villains don’t need to be people, though. They can be organizations, places, concepts, etc.  Attitudes can make great villains, too.  It’s easy to hate someone who likes things that you hate.  And it helps when you want to come up with material for blog posts.

There are times when I’ve been tempted to try to pick out a villain, an arch-nemesis for this blog, and use it to help refine the focus of Broadcasting Brain.  Ignorance, manipulation, arrogance, greed, hatred itself  - these are all worthy targets.

Here’s the thing, though:

Defining yourself by your villains, your nemesis, your arch-enemy is too easy.  It weakens you and empowers them.  Look at Lex Luthor:  his sole claim to fame is that he chose Superman as his arch-rival.  Despite his genius and riches, the fact that Superman continues to thwart his schemes continues to define Luthor as an incomplete shadow of a person who exists to get rid of his rival.  J. Jonah Jameson pushed his newspaper to tabloid rag status by defining Spider-Man as a public enemy.  The political right portrays the leaders of the political left as demonic spawn and vice versa.

There’s no doubt that picking a target makes it easy to hit.  But maybe it’s better that the target is a constructive goal or achievement instead of something to destroy.  It could be a harder path, fighting to create instead of destroying, but it could be a whole lot better.  Even if you’re just trying to publish a blog.

Image by purpleslog

The blogosphere is dead and its your fault, screams the post’s headline.  But did that actually happen a long time ago?  And was it ever real?

I’ve been chewing over Paul O’Flaherty’s nearly radioactive post since I read it earlier this week.  In summary, his diatribe is hyper-critical of a blogger who may or may not have been treated poorly by the TSA in Atlanta, but who probably took a very liberal interpretation of the word “truth”.

O’Flaherty seemed even angrier at the seeming hordes of bloggers who:

a)  took this person’s words as gospel without questioning
b)  then proceeded to NOT berate this person when huge gaps of her story began to look rather false while she was associated with a respected blogging community and had a badge on her site about blogging with integrity.

O’Flaherty seemed to think that the blogosphere, a grouping of content publishers that’s hard to adequately identify or pinpoint, is composed of spineless individuals that resemble sheep more than human beings:

I’m truly sick of todays blogosphere, where the ultra polite and light on brainwave activity have massivezombie hordes follower numbers while those who dare to express an actual opinion are ostracized to the edges of mediocrity.

Continue reading ‘The blogosphere is as real as the public in public opinion’ »

That’s the question, isn’t it?  You might find this blog post via a Google search, a Twitter link, by E-Mail or in your RSS reader of choice.  Then what?

This post is one of thousands of pieces of information that you have to discover, evaluate, and process today.  The late author David Foster Wallace once said that he was bombarded with half a million bits of information each day and he had to try to figure out which 25 were important.  We’re all in the same boat, even if the scale and ratio is different.

Do you need to read this?  Is it worth your time? Continue reading ‘Do you need to read this?’ »

Image by Marc_Smith

Here are some thoughts about forums and online communities after my first few weeks of belonging to the Problogger Forum.   Continue reading ‘Five crucial tips for bloggers to profit from forums’ »

One year ago I came up with a checklist for getting beyond today’s hot panicky topic.  In other words, how do you avoid the dreaded “echo chamber” of repeated thoughts.  I took another look at it and thought it was fairly good, so I thought I’d share it with you again.

Here’s a short exerpt:

It’s a fairly simple checklist, really.

1.  Did the sun go nova overnight? If you’re reading the checklist, the answer is obviously no (you’d be free floating molecules, or carbon residue, otherwise), so continue to 2.

2.  Did Earth’s surface get buried under massive sheets of ice, indicating the onset of an ice age? If you’re reading the checklist, the answer is obviously no (frozen people can’t move, eliminating your ability to get out of bed and do anything), so continue to 3. [alternate version of this question:  is sea level rising more rapidly than a snail crossing the Mohave Desert?]

You can read the whole thing here.

Have a good one!