I’d Rather Be Writing – Tom Johnson

Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As)
Length: 14 min.

At the STC Summit, I ran into someone from Australia who follows my wife’s blog fairly regularly and had even brought gifts for her and the kids. It made me reflect on blog subscribers, and how you convert readers from being occasional readers to devoted fans.

In this podcast, Kirsty Taylor talks about what she finds appealing about Seagull Fountain (my wife’s blog) and other blogs she follows. Kirsty explains that, for her, blogs become powerful when they speak to her heart, make her reflect, and reveal authentically from the blogger’s life in an appropriate way. We also talk about transparency, authenticity, the use of pseudonyms, the portrayal of reality, and the importance of making personal connections.

Last week I gave a webinar on WordPress to the STC-Suncoast chapter. I recorded the webinar using Camtasia Studio. If you have some time on your hands (for example, if you’re going on a plane ride to Atlanta and you have a few layovers), you can watch the webinar on your computer.

A few notes about the webinar. First, your computer’s resolution needs to be at least 1280px wide, because this is how I recorded it. Also, to watch it online, you need to have high bandwidth. I also made a version you can download for this very reason. Third, ideally I would break this presentation into smaller sections, tagging each section with labels in a table of contents. But that would require my whole evening, so I decided to pass on doing that.

The file is about 275 MB, which is quite large. If your bandwidth is restrictive, try downloading the zip version. After downloading and extracting the zip file, click the .html file in the folder.

Download WordPress Video in a Zip File

Watch MPEG4 WordPress Webinar Video (it has to load 10% before it starts to play)

I constantly receive questions about Google Adsense from people who just start blogging. They say things like, I want to start making some money from my blog and would like to know how to integrate Google Adsense.

For anyone with the same questions, I recommend that you read Penelope Trunk’s latest post, “Reality Check: You’re not going to make money from your blog.” She writes,

Almost everyone should forget about making money directly from blogging. It’s so unlikely that it’s a total waste of your time trying. I am actually shocked at how ubiquitous the idea is that blogging is a get-rich-quick scheme. Or even a get-rich-slowly scheme. It’s not.

Given the time that blogging requires, and the near complete lack of monetary return, it’s amazing to me that so many people blog. I have never known anyone who earned substantial money from his or her blog. Read the rest of this entry »

The online transition to web 2.0, with its proliferation of blogs, wikis, podcasts, tweets, and other user-generated content, has posed a question for the state of help content. Should help material concern itself with web 2.0? Do users want to interact and contribute to help content in the same way they contribute and interact with web content? What is the technical writer’s role in relation to new media?

Although it may be early to tell, surely some keeping up with web trends is in order. As such, technical writers have somewhat of a new role to play (or at least to reconcile) in the realm of web 2.0. Of the various new media technologies writers could enter, perhaps none fits so well as the blog, since it consists mainly of writing.

A blog is merely journal-like content that readers can comment on and subscribe to through RSS. Whether marketed as a “blog” or not, the format of the blog is fairly pervasive. At least six types of blogs can be found online: Read the rest of this entry »

I was surprised to read Lars Trieloff’s announcement today that he is quitting his personal blog. He explains,

Personal blogging is dead. It has been succeeded by microblogging and lifestreaming on one end and corporate and professional blogging on the other end. …  The world has changed, personal blogging is dead and so is this blog.

He’s not quitting blogging altogether, just refocusing his efforts on a corporate blog and a twitter-like site. His decision to turn from the personal blog to the corporate blog surprises me because corporate blogs have a much tighter restriction and limitation against the free, transparent voice — which is the whole appeal of blogging in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

April 2009 Update: You can watch a recording of the webinar here.

I’m giving a webinar to the STC Suncoast chapter on WordPress on April 14, if you’re interested. The title of the webinar is “Introduction to WordPress.”  Here’s the description:

If you’re a writer, chances are you already have a blog or are thinking of starting one. And if you work in technology, most likely you’re thinking of using WordPress, the preferred blogging platform for most techy geeks. Starting a WordPress blog and posting content is fairly easy, but the realm of possibilities in WordPress extends far beyond this. Read the rest of this entry »

Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As)
Length: 20 min.

Last week Jane presented on Twitter to a group of business students at Brigham Young University — Provo. This podcast is a recording of her presentation. For more information (beyond the podcast), see her online handout. Read the rest of this entry »

The other night Jane and I saw Twilight. It wasn’t my first choice, but it’s not bad, especially for a vampire movie. Actually, Edward Cullen’s phrase, “You’re like my own personal brand of heroin,” which he uses to describe Bella (who isn’t a vampire), stuck in my mind. Here’s the scene:

Read the rest of this entry »

Each social media site has its own badge. If you participate in a handful of them — Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Tripit, etc — it can be cumbersome to manage all your social media profiles and badges. DandyID.org is a site that helps you manage your social identities. It contains a list of 300+ social media services with profile fields for each. Read the rest of this entry »

This rotating flash tag cloud provides a curious approach to tags, no doubt more novel than useful, but still interesting and somewhat worthwhile. The flash cloud shows only 80 tags (any more and it’s unreadable).

My rotating WordPress tag cloud (click to view the flash version)

For a comprehensive list of site tags, see my tag index. Both arrangements lack usability. I’m never quite sure what to do with tags. My approach has been to treat them like index keywords, so I often tag each post with a handful of freeform tags that come to mind.

However you approach the organization of your content, making 697 posts (the number of posts on my blog) findable on a website that people don’t spend more than 5 minutes browsing is a formidable challenge. Common organization schemes, beyond tag clouds (whether “cumulus” or flat, list or other), include category lists, date-based archives, related posts, random posts, most popular posts, most popular posts by category, indexes, category indexes, top 10, article series links, manual arrangements of links, and a search box.

Despite all of these methods, none seems to be especially compelling. Ninety percent of users arrive at the from search or feed, scan the posts on the home page, perhaps the related links on the post they landed on, and then click away. They see less than 5% of the total site content. What do you feel is the best method for organizing blog content?