Broadcasting Brain

Many thanks to Liz Strauss of Successful Blog for awarding the Successful and Outstanding Blogger (SOB) award (Week 145) to Broadcasting Brain!

What can I say… it was a surprise and greatly appreciated!

If you haven’t already, why not check out Successful Blog - there’s a lot of interesting and informative content there.

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Tumblelogs… what to do with them?

Tumblelogs, such as Tumblr, are used to quickly assemble a stream of links, text, images, etc. Tumblelogs harken back to some of the original intent of weblogs - sharing links to interesting, useful, or cool websites with an application that is also faster and easier to learn that the standard blogging platforms like Wordpress, Blogger, or Moveable Type.

The thing is, once you’re used to using one of these other blogging platforms and dabbling in HTML/CSS a bit, you might not be inclined to use a tumblelog. There’s a tradeoff: while you gain ease of use, you lose some of the flexibility and customization power that you get from traditional blogging platforms.

I use a Tumblr account to track certain items for future reference but I have at least two other bookmarking means to do that:

• StumbleUpon
• Deli.cio.us

This week I thought of a different idea for using a tumblelog and I thought I’d share it with you.

I’m using this tumblelog (powered by Soup.io) to act as a portfolio of guest posts that I’ve written for other blogs. It took me less than one hour to set up the tumblelog with links to my guest posts, as well as some formatting of the basic tumblelog template to get the look that I wanted.

I’ve changed the My Writing page of my blog to refer to the tumblelog and removed the original text entries.

Now that I’ve set it up, here are the possible benefits and disadvantages of using a tumblelog for this job:

Pros of using the tumblelog for my portfolio:

• I don’t have to update my own blog anymore whenever I write a guest post; I just add it to the tumblelog.
• It’s very easy to add the links to the tumblelog.
• If a potential employer wants to see samples of my blog writing, I can just give them the link to the tumblelog.

Cons of using the tumblelog for my portfolio:

• The tumblelog template isn’t as flexible or powerful as I might like.
• It encourages readers to click out of my blog when, ideally, I’d like to keep them there.

Next steps

I’m going to try using the tumblelog as my portolio for one month and see how it goes. If the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, I’ll expand the concept to some other writing.

What do you think? Do you have any innovative uses for tumblelogs? Why not share them with the rest of us?

And, while you’re here, please subscribe to Broadcasting Brain (either with an RSS reader or by E-Mail) so you can stay up to date on other good ideas from this blog.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the topics of yesterday’s blog post, where I fretted about actions and reactions, and a whole bunch of other dichotemies. In the end, however, the thing that bothered me the most was from one of tech blogger Corvida’s recent posts:

Disappointments

To the people who agree with this bulls*** that [Loren Feldman's] doing, I feel sorry for you. However, I feel even worse for those that won’t take a stand against him. I’m disappointed with some parts of the tech community that have let him get this far [by publishing potentially offensive videos] let alone this popular without saying something intelligent to this moron to stop his progress thus far. It’s making me feel some sort of way about the tech community that sits in silence rather than speaking out because of fear. It’s saddening and disappointing on so many levels.

The thing I don’t like about this paragraph is that it creates a dichotomy (or trichotomy, I suppose):

1. The people who chose to speak out against things that they find offensive
2. The people who don’t find these things offensive, whether or not they chose to speak up
3. The people who find these things offensive but are afraid to speak up.

Are these the only scenarios? Or is there a fourth:

4. The people who find these things offensive, but are practical or pragmatic enough to realize that best way to quiet some people is to ignore them.

Is group 4 brave? Afraid? Insensitive? Pragmatic? Callous? Smart? Ignorant? I guess that’s open to interpretation. Maybe 3 and 4 can coexist.

But here’s another thought to consider: where does it end? Are we now obligated to call out every person who makes objectionable material? Do we just focus on those people who criticize our own religion, ethnic groups, orientation, economic class, gender, or nationality? Do we take on the battles for those groups who are disadvantaged but that we don’t belong to? Do we take on some or all?

Personally, I’m just not geared up for that. I would not know where to draw the lines.

I will settle for trying to be civil and respectful towards the people that I encounter. Even that can be a challenge on some days. But it’s something within my power and sphere of influence. Otherwise, I can only handle those situations of which I have a good, detailed knowledge of the facts on all sides. It’s just too easy to make a mistake.

Sorry, readers, but that’s the way I see it. I mean no offense to anyone, especially Corvida, who followed her heart and logic and did what she thought was right in a given situation. But, again, where do we draw the lines?

In the face of all of the navel-gazing drama and headlines from the past few days, how’s a little guy to compete, even if he does have a green glowing brain?

Enter the following:

Jason Calacanis is giving up blogging (or so he says) Read the rest of this entry »

Blogging is a way to promote yourself and your ideas. By regularly publishing creative output, you put yourself out for ongoing scrutiny. But what if you aren’t the type of person who likes to do that? Is there an inherent contradiction between the practice of blogging, and social media in general, and introversion? Does it make sense to put yourself into the public eye? What’s the benefit? Read the rest of this entry »

If I’d been smart or otherwise had some insight I would have gotten into blogging at least five years earlier. Instead, I start with an unfocused personal blog in mid 2007 and don’t really go whole hog into somewhat serious blogging until early 2008.

I’m a relative latecomer to the blogging game. Shrug. So be it.

However, these do seem to be interesting times, again in relative terms, to be a blogger. Some would say that blogging is moving into a stage of maturity and slower growth. Meanwhile, microblogging and lifestreaming are offering new options for online communication that rival blogging for reach while making it easier to use mobile phones, digital pagers and PDAs for Web publishing. Blog comments and related conversations seem to be going anywhere the commentator wants to take them.

Steven Hodson predicts that we’ll see the great blog weeding of 2008 as content creators migrate to other platforms or else give up the ghost altogether. The growing set of social media tools (don’t forget Facebook and MySpace) make publishing easier, which may be encouraging some casual bloggers to pull up stake and move on. Meanwhile, conversation dispersion, scrapers, and current advertising models have been throwing uncertainty into the results of monetization for some time. At least, that’s what I assume Steven’s getting at and that’s what I’m going with.

In some ways it seems like I’ve gotten into this blogging game too late, like a kind of pyramid scheme where the spoils go to the earliest adopters. In this case, the spoils are attention, reputation, and income.

On the other hand, if a lot of people are going to drop out of the blogging game, it could also be a great opportunity for many newer bloggers to establish ourselves as authoritative, respected bloggers. So maybe some of the spoils will go back in play.

But, if some people do pull out, could it be an indication that the wells of riches are drying up? It depends on what riches you’re looking for, I think. I’d say traditional monetization through ads certainly isn’t a piece of cake and it’s probably getting harder as the total pool of advertising capital, while still growing overall, is atomized and dispersed into many, many buckets of various sizes.

Attention and reputation are still in play but they may be limited to tightly defined niches. Or not, who knows? Smart people who communicate well and network effectively usually find ways to get their voices heard. These kinds of people are usually worth hearing.

At any rate, none of these things are dissuading me. I’ll keep on writing here until I either run out of ideas or an audience. Is there a better way to talk to the world?

One thing that I think is worth discussing is how to continue to increase the size of the blogging and social media audience. I think that’s something I think would benefit everyone. That’s what I’ll discuss in my next post.

Photo by carbonnyc

Why is this man reacting in horror?

It’s because he’s learning that growing your blog subscribers can have a surprising effect!

And what is that effect?

Why does it happen?

What can you do about it?

Read the rest of this entry »

For all of the talk in the blogosphere about niches and focus, it’s almost undeniable that we all live in intersections. Don’t we all have more than one interest? (Yes, besides blogging or social media.) Aren’t we multi-dimensional beings?

I believe that we all live in intersections of interests, backgrounds, and knowledge. In fact, I think we are those intersections personified. And, for lack of a better term, that makes us interesting.

As an example, this is how I would visualize where I sit in the blogosphere.

First off, I don’t claim to be an expert in any one of these areas, but I do have an interest in all of them.

I started off as a personal blogger, although you could rightly argue that I didn’t get terribly personal in the original incarnation of my blog. Most of the people that I enjoyed interacting with in that segment of the blogosphere are in my Blogroll.

Before I dug deep into blogging, I spent a lot of time with social news, bookmarking, and so on. I was very active in Digg, StumbleUpon and other sites at different points in time. I met some interesting people in those communities and I learned a lot in the process.

Lately I’m more interested into the theory and applications of social media and I’ve been participating in more of those conversations. FriendFeed the comment nexus has been a real catalyst for this interest and I’ve been interacting with more cool people (and even more cool people).

I have continously been interested in geeky fun stuff, whether it’s technology or popular culture. This might be a future area of exploration for me. I’m actually hoping to have a guest post at an up and coming pop culture blog (geek culture? Movie/TV/comic books/gaming blog?) in the near future.

So this is the intersection where I lie, because somehow, over time, I manage to blend these interests into Broadcasting Brain.

If we are the sum of our experiences, then it’s inevitable that our interests will bleed into our main niche. Giving ourselves some wiggle room to explore multiple niches helps keep everything interesting, I think.

How about you? What roads meet at your intersection?

With passion, creativity, and hard work, no one can top your story.

You have to write it.  No one else can.

Everything else is process.

I’m very pleased to announce that I have a guest post at Problogger.net (the brainchild of blogger Darren Rowse) called Leaning Into The Blogging Dip.  This is definitely the highlight of my social media activities to date!

Please have a look and also check out Darren’s Problogger.net blog - it’s one of the best, most comprehensive blogging resources online today.

Many thanks to Darren for the opportunity and best wishes to him, his wife, and son as they prepare to enlarge their family!