Archive for April, 2007

My series on Discovering Blogs and my Beginners Guide talked about how to find blogs and navigate your way around the blogosphere, but how do you go about starting to write your own blog?

There are many blog hosts available on the internet which offer free blog publishing tools. I don’t recommend free blogging software for businesses and professionals - I will be discussing my reasons for saying this in a later post - but for now if you want to experiment with blogging or start a personal blog then these free blogging sites are an excellent place to begin.

Of the many free blog hosts, three come to mind - Blogger, Wordpress and Vox. There are many others out there besides the three mentioned and if you’d like to check those others out, the best thing is to type “free blog” into Google and see what comes up.

1. Blogger - www.blogger.com - is probably the easiest blogging tool to use. The set up is very easy and it’s also simple to change their templates and customise or personalise the look of your site if you know a little bit of HTML. However, of all the free bloghosts, Blogger’s range of templates is probably the most limited. Another downside of Blogger is that there is no single button facility to export posts if you decided to change blog hosts. You would need to copy and paste every single thing you had written into your new site.

2. Wordpress - www.wordpress.com - also offers free blog hosting. Like Blogger it is easy to use, but it is more restrictive if you want to be able to change the look and customise the template you have chosen. It is also more limited when it comes to adding multimedia links. You can link to YouTube, but that’s about it. Wordpress has the advantage over Blogger in that in that it does offer the facility to export all your posts to another host through a one-click process. Where Wordpress comes into its own is that you can download their templates, host it on your own server and use Wordpress as a basis for your own unique customised, personalised site. If you were to do this, Wordpress offers the highest functionality with the most accessories and tools that I’m aware of for professional and business blogging and I believe it is used the most widely for professional sites. If blogging for your business or professional career is what you’re interested in, then I will be covering the advantages of a self-hosted, personalised, unique blog in a separate post.

3. Vox - www.vox.com - is a great site if you want to start a personal blog. They offer a large range of ready-made templates. Vox offers password protection so that only friends and family can access your blog which is useful if you don’t want the general public to read your posts. The advantage of having a Vox blog is that it is unlikely to show up in a Google search so you won’t get any unwanted criticism and comments on your personal life from strangers.

One of the disadvantages of using the free software is that you end up with a domain name that reads www.yournamehere.blogspot.com . This is fine for personal sites but for businesses and professionals it can detract from your professional image to have Blogspot or Wordpress prominently and permanently part of your business domain name. In effect, you’re advertising your blog host’s name alongside your own business - it’s like your headed notepaper, business card or company brochures loudly proclaiming the name of your stationery supply company right up there alongside your own logo and brand name. I will be exploring this issue of branding and your online image in a separate post.

Free blog hosts are great for getting started - but if you are thinking of using a blog for professional purposes, use the free blog to get a feel for what blogging is about but don’t get too attached to it just ‘cos it’s free.

Social media and blogs are becoming acceptable communications platforms in the same way as websites - that’s what 89% of the respondents to the Euroblog 2007 Survey confirmed. The survey was published last month to investigate the use of blogs in professional communications. It was co-ordinated by the European Public Relation Education and Research Association (Euprera) and involved the Universities of Sunderland and Leipzig.

The key findings I’d like to highlight are:

• Readership of blogs has doubled since 2006

• Running of blogs has also doubled

• Blogs “offer three clearly marked opportunities: Organisations engage in
  environmental scanning, receive feedback from their audience and have the chance to
  create authentic, personal communicative relationships with their stakeholders,
  which in turn can lead to faster reaction time to issues in crisis.”

• Many PR professionals now regard blogs as part of their daily routine as acceptance and usage rises

The Edelman Trust Barometer 2007, a survey on who and what the public trust, found that “A person like me is the most trusted spokesperson across the European Union, North America, and Latin America. In Asia, it is second to physicians.” In this light, it makes sense that bloggers have become increasingly influential. The hallmark of blogs is that the authentic, personal voice of their authors, speaking directly to their audience, not as a powerful and distant authority figure but as your peer or friend.

This is revolutionising the way that messages are perceived and delivered and what it says to me is that the form and medium of the message is as important as the message itself.

Blogs and social media are identified as “disruptive communication innovation” in the Euroblog survey in that they disrupt the established order of communications. They break down barriers to communication by bypassing journalists and the informaton channels controlled by the powerful and those in authority eg TV, radio, newspapers, magazines. Anyone can create a blog and discuss the hot topics of the day. Anyone can make an audio programme and post it up as a podcast without needing to persuade BBC Radio 4 to broadcast it. Anyone can make a movie and put it on YouTube. And anyone from anywhere in the world can access that information. How unnerving is that for governments and those who traditionally have had control of the media!

I think that these two surveys taken together point to an opportunity for businesses, associations, professionals and organisations to actually get in touch with their clients and stakeholders in an authentic, meaningful way. Incorporting blogging or social media into your marketing strategy can strengthen your business or organisational objectives through constructive conversation with the people who matter and by delivering your message in a direct and transparent way. In my work with a client last week, we looked at how their blog could showcase the mission statement of their business - that mission statement would the foundation of every thing they talked about in their blog. It was as if a light went on for them - they realised that not only could they showcase their expertise around the core value of their mission statement in the blog, they could also re-invigorate their business strategy through engagement with wider networks than their current stakeholder circle.

The Euroblog survey also reveals that there are issues for PR and marketing professionals and businesses around the lack of highly-skilled personnel to work with them in developing and implementing blog and social media strategies. These strategies need to be given the same time and commitment as you would your traditional marketing strategy especially because they require transparency and authenticity. There have been some blogs that have been roundly ridiculed and criticised in the blogosphere for being condescending, false, even racist, and in some cases not really blogs at all.

The blogosphere is a whole new frontier that is exciting and full of opportunities but also can be fraught with difficulties for the unwary and dotted with pitfalls. To help you navigate through this landscape akin to the Wild West, I’ll be exploring over the next little while on ZenGuide some of the do’s and don’ts of blogging and social media and highlighting the good, the bad and yes, the sometimes ugly. If you have any particular queries you’d like me to explore, do add a comment or email me.

Photo: thanks to doctormacro.com

A senior in Oz, Olive Riley, is is blogging at age 107. She blogs at The Life of Riley (what a great title!) Blogging is a great way for seniors to share their life stories and experiences through what is called “legacy blogging” .

It makes me think of my great-aunt who migrated to Australia from Malaysia when she retired from teaching school. She is now in her late 70s and lives with one of her children Every morning she walks down to the local library and logs on to check emails and keep in touch with our extended family who live all over the world. We have a family group site on Yahoo and she takes part in the conversation and news in that group site as well.

My grandfather told us the story of our ancestor who migrated to Malaysia from China, one Xmas thirty years ago and I captured that on an old hissy cassette. He died a year later and that is the only recording of his voice and our family story. It is very precious to us and to preserve it for posterity, I’ve uploaded it as a podcast on my other blog, Fusion View.

My father has also featured as a Guest Blogger on Fusion View with his Memories of Malaya series. He’s 70 today and he writes out his posts by hand and has his secretary type them up!

In Singapore, the oldest blogger in the nation conducted a talk for seniors about how to blog late last year. I’d really like to know the outcome of that event and see some of the blogs that he inspired.

I hope that many other families will be inspired by Olive to encourage their seniors to blog or to record and share their stories in some way through interviews that are then uploaded to social networks like blogs or podcast sites.

In the first week or so of launching this blog, I had one of my first visitors, Michael Beck, who also goes by the moniker digitalnomad. He has been a great resource, showing me a number of social networking sites. These are sites where bloggers can register and join a community of other bloggers with shared interests or themes. You can click on a community to join it and also add another member as a contact or friend. This links you into a diverse and international group of people that you can exchange messages with. It’s like joining a club or society or network in the real world - you all come from your different backgrounds and hook up at the club etc to share your knowledge and experiences.

Here are some that Michael introduced me to:

MyBlogLog.com - you can add some code to your blog and when other community members visit your site, their picture appears on your MyBlogLog roll. Take a look at the roll at the bottom of the far right side bar below.

Ziki.com - a similar site but without the picture roll facility.

Zimbio.com - a similar community site again. Here, you can create a page that showcases all your different blogs (if, like me, you have more than one), photos, videos and music all in one page.

Michael is based in Atlanta, USA andmaintains a series of blogs that review and report on trends specific to working and living in a mobile society. He blogs at The SOHO Quest (SOHO stands for small office - home office) and - his Ziki entry says: “Work and Live Where You Want/ Freedom Through Knowledge”. His interests include travel, photography, art, and anything involving e-commerce and nascent technology in the support of personal and financial freedom. Michael’s other blog The Sovereign Journey deals with the issues of personal privacy, natural law, self ownership and self determination.

Did I know him before this? No. Did he know me? No. Here is a great example of how web communities can work - people helping each other because they enjoy sharing knowledge and information. So, thanks, Michael, for being my guide to some new social networks!

I joined the networks out of curiosity and I’ve found that they’ve been a great way to find new and interesting blogs - especially grouped by themes. You can explore - and join - different subgroups eg about art, photography, technology, business, politics etc. It’s also a good way to connect your blog to a wider audience. Zimbio.com, for example, has a feature where you can capture the feed from your current blog and display its contents on the Zimbio site as well as on your own blog. I like MyBlogLog the most at the moment because the communities and contacts are laid out in an easy to follow, intuitive way and its easy to get the concept of what its all about very quickly. I also like the clever little “widget” that you can put in your sidebar that displays which other members of MyBlogLog have visited your site - see the bottom of the far right sidebar for pics of who has visited ZenGuide recently. You can click through via their pics and discover a new blog - and friend.

Update: Ian Delaney, editor of New Media Knowledge (www.nmk.co.uk)told me: “Why I joined (MyBlogLog)? Because I’ll sign up for almost any new web service going! I actually have some misgivings about the loss of privacy that is created by MBL, but not serious enough to close my account, obviously.” Ian blogs at http://twopointouch.com/.

If you’re part of any of the networks I’ve mentioned and would like to share your views/ experiences about them, please do add a comment or email me. Or if you’re part of another network, please do tell me about it via a comment or email.

Twitter is the relatively new craze that lets you post mini-blog entries via your mobile phone or your PC. The length is limited to 140 characters and your entries appear on the twitter page online that you’ve signed up for. You can add your “friends” to your twitter circle - they have to be signed up to twitter first. You can also opt to receive your “friends” updates on your mobile phone or on the webpage only. You can set it so that only your “friends” see your posts or so that it is public and anyone can see them - or receive them on their phones.

It seems to have taken the world by storm and different groups of people are using it in different ways. The main excitement about it is that it is immediate and brief and you can send and receive texts via your mobile phone.

# The top tech and marketing experts and commentators like Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble, and others are using it mainly to exchange “hot off the press” information about breaking news and new products within their industries. By linking to blog posts where an issue is explored more deeply, their use of twitter gives their readers an early heads-up on issues which can be followed up by going along to the longer blog piece for more detail and analysis.

# News companies like the BBC are posting minute by minute updates of news flashes.

# Monster.com, the recruitment website, is using to send out instant messages about new jobs.

# Professionals and consultants are updating their “friends” about their business activities and also offering a glimpse into their personal activities. You might find a tech consultant texting to say he is working on a software issue, heading off to an IT conference, meeting others in his business for a drink, chilling out in front of a DVD.

# Ordinary folks are sharing glimpses into their lives eg working in their gardens, seeing their friends and keeping each other updated about their daily lives.

# It is also a lively community for exchanging ideas, raising queries, sharing advice. So far it seems to be mainly the tech types (as you might expect) but as it’s use spreads, there should be more non-tech participants finding uses for it to suit their particular interests. In particular, its potential in developing countries like Africa where there are a lot of mobile phones but problems with broadband/ landline communications could be potentially empowering.

For me, I have a public twitter page at www.twitter.com/fusionview - in the context of my arts and culture blog Fusion View. Anyone can see my “tweets” and those of my “friends” on that page. (I also have a private one for my family and personal friends - only they can see what I text on that account: usually to do with what I had for dinner and what I’m up to at the weekend, the sort of thing that’s fun for a personal circle to know but banal in the wider context!)

I think the value in Twitter for business use could be as a brief heads-up on breaking news either within their sector or within their organisation and it might be useful for a team working in different physical locations to keep each other updated on time-critical tasks. For personal use, it can be fun especially if you want to keep friends and family quickly updated while you’re travelling or on holiday. For organisations, it can be used for disseminating information, advice and news eg for those networked only via mobile phones in developing countries, or organising events within a short time-scale and in real time.

You can read my further thoughts on Twitter on my other blog, Fusion View:

Twittering Away

Fusion View Tweets on Twitter

Mind Map

Here are some other commentators on Twitter:

A list of ways to optimise Twitter - http://slackermanager.com/2007/03/the-several-habits-of-wildly-successful-twitter-users.html

Top Twitterers list - http://www.twitterholic.com/

Someone may have been hired via Twitter : Justin.tv sent out call for someone to help and got 100 responses in a few hours - http://www.mdoeff.com/blog/2007/03/27/was-someone-just-hired-on-twitter/

Why Twitter is so successful - http://millionsofus.com/blog/archives/188

A real time world map of who is twittering where - http://www.twittervision.com

Here is someone who’s not so keen on Twitter (who’s picked up my posts on it on my other blog Fusion View - small world!) - http://digital-nomads.blogspot.com/2007/03/tumblr-online-usalbility-or-just.html

Neville Hobson, ABC, is a communicator, blogger, podcaster and Second Life explorer, one of the leading European early adopters and influencers in social media communication for business. He blogs at NevilleHobson.com with commentary and opinion on business, communication and technology, and co-presents “For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report” (www.forimmediaterelease.biz), a twice-weekly business podcast at the intersection of online communication, business and technology, which he began in January 2005. He blogs at NevilleHobson.com

I met Neville at a talk at the City Womens Network earlier this year. The subject was Managing Your Image and he was one of the panellists - speaking about managing your image online. I’d been following his podcast for awhile and you know how you form a view of someone from their voice. Well, he was how I imagined he would be - he is approachable and friendly while having an aura of quiet authority. And he’s very tall. I took that photo of him and made him bend his knees so it could be a face shot and not one looking up his nostrils…

His podcast is a great insiders look into marketing and technology but a bit tecchy in places. He’s also a keen Second Lifer with an “island” in Second Life where his marketing company Crayon has a presence.

This is a cross post from my other blog, Fusion View

In Big Brother and other reality TV shows, participants and put in a house or on a desert island by TV companies and made to do weird and wonderful things for the entertainment of a global audience. We’ve had the fictionalised movie versions of the extension of this idea in The Truman Show and Ed TV where someone’s life is played out in front of cameras all day and all night. We can now watch someone’s life unfold in the real world in real time for real.

Justin Kan started wearing a mobile webcam on his head two weeks ago and it streams everything he sees, hears and does. It’s becoming a huge cult streaming video thing that people are tuning into on the web. You can find out more at http://www.justin.tv/ or watch it below:

There’s some background info and tech industry commentary about Justin and also live mobile streaming at Techcrunch.com.

It’s not a terribly exciting footage and the streaming can be a bit slow at times. Still, 126 people logged on at one point to watch Justin sleep, according to Techcrunch. We are probably seeing the early days of the next level in blogging. At the moment, the technology allows us to post written posts very easily so everyone’s doing that. Podcasting is the next level up in terms of portability (you can download the MP3 and take it with you wherever you’re off to) and also in terms of getting that one step closer to real reality - hearing the content creator’s voice. Video blogging is the next natural step to getting as close as you can to the author. Soon anyone will be able to author or narrate their lives and live in their own movie. And everyone can be permanently watching everyone else’s lives.

Will those people with the cameras on their heads feel compelled to make their lives more interesting to their viewers, to increase their ratings?

If they act up or hype up what they are doing or feeling or living at that moment, will that be their real lives or will they just be pretending for the camera?

Will they create dramas, start arguments, cause accidents / fights/ havoc just to get the viewers in? Will their lives be an action movie, a noir, an indie movie, a French arthouse flick?

Will their lives be more real merely for being more watchable? If so, for whom - them? Their viewers?

And what of those who don’t video their lives? Will they exist at all?

Here is a quick tour of how to find your way round a blog. Most of you will be comfortable browsing through a blog but some may not know that there are useful tools in the sidebars to help you explore other parts of the blog beyond the front page and also that can take you to other interesting communities of blogs.

The content of blogs are laid out in reverse date order with the most recent post (or article) at the top of the main page.

Posts - the main posts are set out in the main body of a blog. There’ll be a heading or title and then you will be able to see who wrote them either just under that or at the end of the post. You’ll also usually be able to see the date and time when they were uploaded. You may sometimes see “permalink” at the bottom of the post - clicking on that takes you to the specific page of that particular post.

Comments - you can add your comment or response to a post by clicking on “Comments” at the bottom of that particular post. You’ll be taken to the permalink page ie the page of that particular post and there’ll be a box for you to write your comment. I find that some comments can be as interesting as the post itself, especially if there’s a good discussion going amongst the commenters.

Sidebar(s) - the sidebar is where you will find opportunities to explore other parts of the blog and also links to other websites. Sometimes, there’ll be additional information about what books the author is reading or what music they are listening to. Sometimes, there are interactive “widgets” ie little applications that allow you to leave voice messages or view photographs or see who else is browsing the blog at the same time etc.

Categories - these can be found on the sidebar. They collect together posts on the same theme. Sometimes, they are called labels or tags.

Archives - this section takes you to the archived posts, sorted by date. I like to look back at the very first few posts of a blog to see when the author started and what their hopes and objectives were when they first started out blogging.

Links - this section in the sidebar sets out links to other blogs or websites that the author likes. Sometimes, also called a “blogroll”.

Search - there’s usually a blank box for searching the blog. Just type in a keyword and click on “search” - it’ll bring up all the posts that contain those keywords.

Subscribe - this section tell you how you can subscribe to the blog. (See Keeping Track of the Blogs You Like for more details about subscribing to blogs)

Networks & Communities - this section is usually at the end of the sidebar and shows the communities and networks that the author is linked to. Clicking on the “badges” ie the small icons and pictures in that section can take you to those wider communities where you can find other blogs eg Britblogs is a directory of UK based blogs.

Further reading

Beginners Guide

Photo: thanks to nalilo at flickr.com