Category Archives: Blogging

Celebrating my 10th year of blogging!

Ten years ago today, I entered the world of “blogging”, although that term wasn’t widely used yet.

On May 10, 2000, I was out visiting Linuxcare’s office (my employer at the time) in San Francisco and was just hanging out in the evening at the office. After hearing about and reading a site called Advogato.org for a while, I went that night and created my account. Advogato was and is a site whose mission is to be a community for free software developers. It was created by Raph Levien not only to help connect developers but also as a testbed for his research into trust metrics. From my point-of-view at the time, the key thing was that a significant number of the main Linux and other open source developers were starting to write at the site. By reading the “recentlog” (list of new blog posts) you could easily stay up on what was happening with many of the projects out there. Since I was the President of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) and active with Linux International at the time, it seemed a good place to start writing.

It’s somewhat amusing to read that very first entry I wrote. I had just picked up a print version of the Cluetrain Manifesto, was just learning about DocBook and CVS and was working on some other projects. I was amused to read this:

In any event, since it’s after 9pm and I’m still here in the Linuxcare office in SF, I decided to join this experiment… let’s see if I actually keep up with it.

I did keep up with it… writing there at Advogato for four years until the spring of 2004 when a server outage took the site offline for 5+ weeks. By that time, blogging was in my blood and part of my daily routine and so I had to find some outlet for the writing. I had previously started up a ‘dyork’ account on LiveJournal and so I moved my main writing there even after Advogato came back online. The major reasons I stayed at LiveJournal were:

I could use an “offline blog editor” to write my posts on my local computer and then publish them to LJ. (I continue to this day to use an offline editor for almost all my posting.)
LiveJournal had the ability for people to leave comments on a post, something Advogato lacked (and still lacks).

I continued with LiveJournal as my main blog site for a while, but around 2005 found myself struggling with a couple of issues:

I found my writing was really about two main areas: telecommunications/VoIP and PR/marketing/communications/social media – and that the people interested in one topic weren’t really interested in the other.
The comment facility was nice, but at the time it was limited to only other LJ users or “Anonymous”. There was no way for people to leave their URL as people could on other blogs.
LJ didn’t support TrackBacks and some of the other newer features that were emerging in the new world of “blogging” and “social media”.

Given all that I went looking at various other options and wound up on TypePad where I set up two new blogs in 2006:

Disruptive Conversations – how the
"social media" of blogs, podcasts, wikis, virtual worlds, etc. are changing the
way we communicate
Disruptive Telephony – how
Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is fundamentally changing the technology we use to communicate

I went on to become a paid TypePad member, set up the Blue Box Podcast there and a range of other blogs.

Today, 10 years after that first Advogato post, I’m writing these days on something like 10 different blogs … some of which I list on my ‘blogs’ page and others are listed on Voxeo’s list of blogs – posts across all of them I am now aggregating into my Friendfeed account (along with tweets, bookmarks and more). I still use TypePad and while I have a number of issues with the site, the work to move at this point would be more than I feel like undertaking right now. Most of the new work I’m creating these days is with WordPress (or WordPress MU) which I’m using both on the VOIPSA weblog and the Voxeo blog site as well as some other projects in development.

As I sit here and write all this, it’s really incredible to think about all the changes we’ve seen over the past 10 years both with regard to “blogging” and also to all the other tools and services that make up this larger space we’ve called “social media”, but is even now morphing into more of just plain old… “media”!

Some things don’t change, though… if I go back to the end of that first Advogato post:

Okay… my first diary entry… and a long one… typical… no one has ever praised me for my brevity!

Ten years later, I’m still working on that “brevity” thing… and using my Twitter account as a daily exercise in just that topic 😉

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or subscribing to my email newsletter.

5 Ways To Conquer Writer’s Block

1 Reply

When people find out that I’m a writer, one of the questions that I often get is “so what do you do when you get stuck writing?” or “how do get over writer’s block? When I answer “crank loud hard rock” they usually look at me funny… and then I of course say that what works for me may not work for them, etc., etc.

Since I’ve been asked, here is what works for me… perhaps it will help you as well.

NOTE: I am not talking here about a block in “coming up with ideas to write about”. I have NO PROBLEM with that… every day I wake up with my head exploding with stories to tell. What I’m talking about here is the “Chapter-1-rocks-and-Chapter-3-will-be-awesome-but-to-get-there-I-have-to-somehow-make-it-through-the-dreck-of-Chapter-2” kind of block. When you *have* to write something and the text is just not flowing.

These steps below are also after you do the obvious steps to eliminate distractions like… shut down your email, sign off from Twitter, get rid of the Facebook window, sign off from Skype and all your other IM clients…

So here’s my list:

1. IMAGINE YOURSELF SITTING ACROSS THE TABLE FROM SOMEONE – You are in a cafe… or an office… or your living room… and someone asks you about the topic you are trying to write on. You explain it to them in a natural conversation… think about how the flow would be if you were just talking one-to-one about whatever the topic is. Then try to capture that flow in your text.

2. CRANK LOUD HARD ROCK – I’m serious! Turn your music up very loud. And I mean “peel-the-paint-off-the-walls” loud! Crank something loud and hard. No quiet ballads here… just crashing guitars, screaming vocals, etc. Being a child of the 70’s and 80’s I’m partial to that era… in particular some of the harder songs of the Scorpions, AC/DC, etc. And I find it works best for me without headphones… just letting it echo off the walls in my home office. (Sadly, with young children around this is no longer quite as possible as it was before.) I can’t explain why this works… maybe it’s the blocking out of everything else? I just know it works for me.

3. STEP AWAYYYY FROM THE KEYBOARD – Leave the computer. Go outside. Breathe the fresh air. Walk around the block. Go for a bike ride. Go for a swim. Go for a ski. Go for a sail. Whatever works for you…. just leave the electronic world, get some physical exercise, get the heart pumping and the blood flowing.

4. FIND ANOTHER PLACE TO WORK – Sometimes you just need a change of location to unblock the writing flow. In the era of laptops, this is easy to do. Go to another part of your office. Go home if you work in an office. Go find an “office” if you work at home. Find a cafe (just don’t get distracted by people streaming through). Go sit in a park. Go outside and sit under a tree. Or alternatively go find a room you can shut yourself in. Just change from where you normally write.

5. DO SOMETHING ELSE MENTALLY CHALLENGING – Perhaps what is needed is just to fully engage and focus your brain in some other activity for a short period of time. For me this may take forms like:

Programming/coding – Outside all my PR/marketing work, I enjoy the occasional bit of programming. So I’ll take a break to play with some new language… or play with a bit of code in some way. These days, odds are I’d toy with tweaking WordPress, building a Tropo app, or playing with Clojure (with which I have a bizarre fascination probably dating back to my extensive Emacs LISP use 20+ years ago). I’ll go off and try something for a half-hour, maybe, and then return to the writing.
Writing somewhere else – Writing to overcome a writer’s block? Sure… I’ll go off and write something on a completely different topic. (Kind of like writing this article!) Focus on writing some solid blog post or article. Something that engages the brain.
Wood working – I have a tiny “micro-lathe” down in the basement where I very occasionally turn wood to make pens or other small objects. It demands intense focus so you don’t mess up the wood… and it goes along with #3 above of getting away from the keyboard.

Whatever the activity is… for some of you it might be video games… or photography… whatever it is, the key point is that you are completely focused and, for that short time, you completely forget about that huge writing task that is dragging you down.

The goal with all of these is to shift your brain in some way so that you can move through whatever block you are suffering and start the text flowing again. And if none of them work… well… sometimes you just have to start typing and typing and typing… and slog through it somehow.

Do any of those resonate with you? What do you do to get past “writer’s block”?

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Using TypePad Connect now to let you comment with your accts from Twitter, Facebook, OpenID or more

Leave a reply

Earlier this week I enabled “TypePad Connect” for this blog and my Disruptive Telephony blog so that you can now sign in when commenting using your “identity” from TypePad, Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, or many others. Nicely, you can also, of course, simply enter in your name, URL, etc. like you always could before on this blog. The difference is that now down above the comment field you should see this:

If you click on the “more…” link, you will be taken to a site to choose the account you want to use:

I’m particularly pleased about the ability to support OpenID, something I’ve written about both here and over on Disruptive Telephony, although that’s not particularly surprising given Six Apart’s support for OpenID in the past.

There’s a larger story to be written here about TypePad Connect and how it is part of the greater battle going on both with regard to your “identity” across blogs and also where your comments are stored. The Read/Write Web had a great article on the topic a year ago when TypePad Connect first came out. For me, since both this blog and DisTel are already hosted on TypePad, the issue about having your comments reside on TypePad’s servers is irrelevant, really, since they already are. Another time, though, I’ll write more on the larger story.

In the meantime, feel free to leave comments through being logged into those services (and saving yourself filling out the form).

For those wanting to know more about TypePad Connect, there is a video on the main page and also previous TypePad blog posts in November 2008 and January 2009 that go into more detail.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

What I need is the “Brain-To-Blog” interface!

2 Replies

As I see in the Twitter stream, many good friends of mine are attending and speaking at Blog World Expo right now out in Las Vegas. I’m not there, nor was I at last year’s BWE, but I was a huge fan of and attendee at the “Podcast and New Media Expos” that proceeded it. There are some REALLY great sessions going on out there right now.

The one thing I don’t see being discussed there is this:

I need a Brain -> Blog interface!

I need something that can take all the article ideas in my brain and just mystically make them appear on my various blogs. My problem is not a lack of ideas. No way! I have the opposite problem.

Every day I wake up with my head exploding with stories to be told … and every night I find myself going to bed with so many of those stories left untold.

I have an article queue miles long… and I find myself thinking through stories at all sorts of times… but finding the time to actually write and post those stories is so incredibly difficult. Between crazy work hours, a family I love to be with (including an extremely cute but demanding 5-month-old) and, well, the need to sleep and eat… the time to convert those articles from thoughts in the brain to words on a blog site seems incredibly hard to get.

I want the interface that’s in many cyberpunk/sci-fi stories… where I can just think the text that I want to post and… ta da.. it magically gets created! Sadly, such things are right now only in stories and research labs… but it sure would be nice to have.

Meanwhile, back in the reality of 2009, I guess I’ll just have to figure out how to carve out some more time… 😉

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Creating an Attention Wave – A Case Study in how multiple corporate blogs can deliver different perspectives

1 Reply

What is the value in having multiple corporate blogs? How can they help you tell multiple sides to a story?

When I wrote my original “Creating an Attention Wave” story, I mentioned in the “Package Components” section about creating multiple posts in different corporate blogs to go out as part of the overall “package”. Commenter Tamara Gruber liked this emphasis and relayed her own story:

A client of mine just did an announcement through a blog post from the CEO that talked about the new features and business benefits. That was followed on by a post from the CTO that got into the nitty gritty details. All of these pieces help tell the story. We always need to remember to step outside and take an outsiders view and guide them through the news with multiple forms of content to make sure they “get it.”

I thought it might be illustrative to provide a specific example of how I and my team used this concept with a recent announcement we made at Voxeo.

THE EXAMPLE

Back in August at the SpeechTEK conference in New York City, we put out this news release on August 25, 2009, announcing the newest version of our software, Prophecy 10:

Voxeo Announces Prophecy 10: The Unlocked Communications™ Platform

We followed that with a series of blog posts and a video podcast across several blogs:

Voxeo Talks (our main corporate blog)

Unlocking Communications with Voxeo’s Prophecy 10
(8/25/09 – re-telling of news release in a more human voice)

Voxeo Developer’s Corner (technical topics for developers)

Make your existing VoiceXML (and CCXML and CallXML) apps multi-channel: add SMS and IM today…
(8/25/09 – includes screenshots)
How to: IM and Text/SMS Your VoiceXML Applications!
(8/27/09 – includes screenshots and code samples)

The Tropo Blog (posts about our Tropo.com platform)

Add SMS and IM to any existing Tropo application in Ruby, python, PHP, JavaScript or Groovy… today!
(8/25/09 – brief post with a screenshot)

Messaging with Tropo
(8/27/09 – longer technical post with screenshots and code samples)

IMified Blog (posts about our IMified platform)

SMSify your apps
(8/25/09 – brief post with a screenshot)

VoiceObjects Developer Blog (posts for developers using our VoiceObjects tool)

How to IMify your voice application
(8/25/09 – longer post with step-by-step instructions)

Emerging Tech Talk (video podcast)

Emerging Tech Talk #34 – Jose de Castro about Voxeo’s SpeechTEK booth and the 2,000 node telephony cluster built on netbooks
(8/27/09 – video interview with one of our developers about the demo we had at SpeechTEK)

Altogether we had 5 supporting blog posts on the day of the launch and a total of 7 blog posts and 1 video podcast within 48 hours of the launch.

All of these blog posts, once posted to our blog sites, also were distributed to readers via:

our Twitter stream
our Facebook page
our Friendfeed stream
RSS feeds, both for the individual feeds and an overall “All Voxeo Blogs” feed
email to subscribers to our “All Voxeo Blogs” email list

All of this distribution happened automatically through our platform.

A FEW COMMENTS

As I look down the list of posts, several points pop into my mind:

MULTIPLE AUDIENCES – As you look through the different posts, you can see that they are written to cater to the different users of our various platforms and tools. They get specifically into how the announcement matters to the specific audience.
DIFFERENT DEPTHS – The posts vary in technical detail. Both the Voxeo Talks post and the ETT video focus on the overall message. Some of the other posts touch on the very basics of how someone can get going – and then a few dive into technical details and even include code samples.
VARIED HEADLINES – The headlines… the titles of the posts, vary widely. There is the Voxeo Talks post title that uses the “Unlocked Communications” theme we were announcing in the release. There are longer, more descriptive headlines. There are shorter headlines. You can easily tell which are my titles… they are the longer ones (outside of Voxeo Talks). I tend to write my headlines for Twitter. I literally do copy/paste my title over into Tweetdeck to see: 1) will it fit into 140 characters with enough room for a retweet and for a link; and 2) how does it look in Twitter. The goal is of course to get people to open your link. But I do also like having the shorter titles mixed in there as well. Some of them are short and succinct… I might have changed a couple but overall it’s a good mixture.
DEVELOPER-CENTRIC – In looking over the posts in hindsight, outside of the Voxeo Talks post and the ETT video, they are all focused on developers who use our various platforms and tools. While that is great to reach out to folks working on our platforms, developers are only one of our audiences. What’s clearly missing as I look at this is anything related to more of a business focus, outside of the VT and ETT posts. The opportunity was here to put up, for instance, a post like “Prophecy 10 Brings SMS and IM To Your Contact Center” or “Want to move your customer interaction beyond voice?“… you get the idea… something that addressed the business impact of the announcement. (Next time…)

There were also different authors of the posts which provided different wording, different writing styles, etc.

THE CAVEAT

So the good news was that we had multiple posts across multiple blogs addressing multiple audiences and using multiple headlines.

Going back to my Attention Wave post, though, for a variety of reasons we didn’t package all of this content as a “wave”. Even on the first day, the 5 blog posts streamed out over the course of the day, and the other 3 streamed out two days later. Largely the major issue was that we were simultaneously involved in the largest trade show presence we have all year… so our own internal attention wasn’t able to focus on preparing the package of content.

Now I don’t know that this was necessarily a bad thing. The upside of streaming the content out over the course of several days is that you kept the mention of the announcement flowing out through the distribution channels. There is a case to be made to have an initial wave of posts – and then follow that with subsequent posts to keep the attention. (Wait! Shall I call those “attention ripples”? 🙂 )

IN THE END

So in the end, what kind of coverage did we get? how effective were the multiple posts, etc.? That will have to be the subject of another post at some point because this one is already way too long…

What I wanted to do here in this post was illustrate how I/we used multiple blogs to tell different sides of the story. I hope this was helpful and if any of you have pointers to other posts where people have similarly outlined how they used multiple blogs to tell multiple sides of a story, please do leave links in the comments. Thanks.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Technorati Tags:
attention, attentionwave, pr, socialmedia, blogging, business

OSCON WordPress MU slides online – video coming soon

Leave a reply

Last week out at O’Reilly’s OSCON, I gave a talk “Creating a Corporate Blog Portal Using WordPress MU“. As I mentioned on Voxeo’s Behind The Blog, I have now put the slides for the talk online. I did record the talk on video – and aim to get that video up online next week. Meanwhile, here are the slides:

OSCON 2009: Building a Corporate Blog Portal using WordPress MU (WPMU)

View more documents from Voxeo Corp.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Technorati Tags:
oscon, wordpress, wordpressmu, wpmu

blo.gs to get new life with WordPress/Automattic team

Leave a reply

blo.gs-logo.jpg For those of us who have been around blogging for a while (crossing over the 9-year-mark myself in a few weeks), blo.gs was a site we all knew not only as a very creative domain name but also as one of the earliest “ping servers”. (Courtesy of today’s announcement, I learned of this great post that gives some of the early history of ping servers and services.)

Then blo.gs was purchased in 2005 and nothing much seemed to be done with it. Other ping services emerged. Many of us just started using Ping-o-matic rather than trying to keep up with all the various services. And over time blo.gs didn’t seem to get any mentions anywhere, really.

So today it was rather cool to learn that Yahoo is transferring blo.gs over to Automattic for “safekeeping and further development”. Automattic, if you aren’t aware, are the folks behind the hugely successful WordPress blogging platform/software, as well as the Akismet blog comment anti-spam service and other tools.

It’s great that Yahoo did transfer the service and thus one of the older domains can live on. Now it will be interesting to see what Matt Mullenweg and the rest of the Automattic crew do with blo.gs….

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.

Technorati Tags:
blogging, ping servers, social media, tools, wordpress, automattic, blo.gs