Tag Archives: Blogging

Communicate

More and more we are all writers. Social media, personal blogs, and email mean we are all writing more and more everyday.

The Internet gives us all access to a global audience, but it’s still up to us to make the connections, and our best chance of doing that is by telling compelling stories that people can connect to. Too many writer’s write about writer’s block or post about their lack of posts. Don’t expect people to care because you wrote something, write something that will make people care.

Seth Godin describes marketing as:

The act of telling stories about the things we make.

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Updates to Clockwork Samurai

I’ve been moving the blog around a bit lately, trying different platforms to see if WordPress is still top dog (I think it is), but as a result of importing and exporting the content, the site is a little screwy, but I’m slowly fixing it. I’ve lost most of the images but I can easily import those again (when I get a chance), the date on some posts was changed to 1970 (which resulted in the post date showing up as today’s date – apologies to anybody who has been RSS bombed as a result of this). The commenting system has taken the biggest hit. I’ve been using disqus because it saves me from wordpress comment spam and it is supposed to be portable (if you move your blog to a different platform you can take your comments with you), unfortunately that’s turning out not to be the case, at least for me. If I can’t fix it, I may need to delete the disqus account and create a new one, which means I will lose all the comments people have left in the past (apologies to everybody who has taken the time to comment on posts in the past), but people will be able to leave comments in the future.

Blogging: then and now

I built my first website in February 2003 with a primitive site builder from Godaddy, it was one of the ugliest things ever to grace the internet and I loved it. At the time I didn’t know what I wanted to say or why I needed a website, but I knew I wanted to say something.
Like any intrepid explorer in a foreign land, I peeked covertly at what the locals were up to and tried to blend in. I don’t remember the first time I heard (or more likely read) the word blog, but I do remember wondering why anybody would handicap such a cool way of sharing information with such a silly sounding name. Blog, Blogging, Bloggers! It sounded like something Swedish Chef would cook and I assured everybody who asked that the word came from web log. I was careful to insert the maximum possible pause between the two words, but it still sounded silly, possibly even sillier.

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Get to the point

Put the information up front where readers can see it.

Online there isn’t time for the slow reveal or sexy info striptease.

Content is king and if the content is buried three paragraphs into a blog post or 30 seconds into a YouTube clip, the odds of visitors sticking with it are sorely reduced.

Social media, blogs, email, and instant messaging make it possible for people to come across dozens, if not hundreds, of interesting links a day.

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