so I have three blogs now. some of you who know me as a taciturn individual are probably amazed. “when did he find so much to talk about?” they wonder. “and why on earth would I want to read it?” they continue, hopefully to themselves. then there’s the question of focus. given that my original blog still has that new car smell, is it disloyal to be test driving alternative transportation? allow me to explain.
it was a simple dream, really
my original blog started out as ‘inapropos’ a while ago. its anticipated focus was in its name: to examine the random and seemingly unrelated stuff I think about. like many creative efforts, however, it had ideas of its own and revealed a strong desire to be about something specific. that something was the world of social media. talk about following the herd. seems like everybody and their mom (or maybe dad) has a blog now about social media. something I noticed was that many of these blogs and media stories tended to talk about stuff as if they assumed that their readers already knew the basics. and no, I don’t mean the things like
“social media is a conversation” or
“social media presence is like a shark – it has to keep movng forward or it will die.”
wait, I think I just made that up. cool! but back to my point.
most people just hearing about social media are missing some of the really basic tools that I think the social media practitioners assume everyone has. most of my social media contacts probably stopped reading my stuff a while ago because it’s not cutting edge. it’s not the latest and greatest. that’s because I when talk to people outside the social media fishbowl, they have questions. like what a feedreader is, why they should use one and how to set it up (or this one). or how to control who sees what on their facebook account. yes, erin, I’m talking to you. so inapropos is now the qualified yes.
but what about all the random stuff kicking around my head? how was I going to keep it locked in the closet now that it had seen the light of day? those of you who’ve ever seen pretty much any horror movie know the answer – I couldn’t. web 2.0 to the rescue!
blogging for proletariats
the technical aspects of blog creation and maintenance have grown significantly less in recent years. new releases of the major platforms: typepad, wordpress, blogger et al. continue to lighten the know how burder for new bloggers. the technical hurdle dropped even lower recently with the introduction of posterous. posterous is a hosted blog, so no messing with domains and hosting. in fact, you don’t even need an account. if you can email, you can blog. seriously idiot-proof. send your latest rantings – posterous will create a post with the subject line of your email as the title. got a picture or pictures, a video, music, web page – posterous will format and provide a player if required right in the post. if you want to get fancy, you can go in and edit and tag to your heart’s content. posterous even makes it easier to stay up to date on your other social media outlets. facebook. twitter. blogs on other platforms. you can post to them all with the one email.
and then there was
quick as a wink I had another new blog, btodd. if I saw something I thought was funny or thought provoking on the web, all I had to do was click on my toolbar to pop up a window with a link to the web page, an image and/or an excerpt from the page. if I was feeling the urge, I could add my own witty observations. or I cold just post it as it was. and then there was indeed.
within a few days, however, I noticed a problem. too many of the interesting things I was putting up on btodd were about social media. but I already had a social media blog. I tried to explain it away by saying the posterous blog was merely a staging area to put stuff I might write about later.
beyond all recognition
“wtf!?” btodd exploded. “I’m no second class citizen! use your goddam delicious account for that sh*t.” fortunately, its nascent self-awareness didn’t extend to an ability to change its access information and lock me out. nonetheless, something had to give. as I was disconsolately tweaking my settings in posterous late one night, the answer came to me. or rather, I read it on the settings page: “start another posterous blog.” and so was born social media beyond all recognition.
and there you have it. why do I have three blogs? why do dogs lick themselves? the great big beautiful web lets me compartmentalize in a way my therapist and girlfriend no longer allow. I even found a cool widget-maker that lets me include content from each in the sidebar of the qualified yes! how cool is that?
do you think it makes sense to have separate blogs, or just batch them in categories on a single blog? would you be interested in having some posts on using posterous? how about one linking to the plethora of great wordpress resources?
What’s wrong with just plain, old email to say something meaningful, or, in most cases, not. Am I such a Luddite? Guess so….
thanks for your note, trudy. there is nothing at all wrong with using plain, old email to say something. generally, however, email is intended for a specific audience of one or more recipients. in addition, it is sent _to_ people. a blog represents a different kind of communication. ideally, it will serve as a conversation starter, and the resulting interaction(s) can be as informative or instructive or entertaining as the original article – or more so.
the significance of the content in the blog is determined by readers “voting with their feet:” if readers find the material interesting and/or useful, they subscribe or leave comments as you have. if not, the subscriber lists and hit counts stay flat and we get to ascertain what really happens when a tree falls in the woods with no one to hear it.
I hope that you find some useful information here or elsewhere –
Todd
great. I didn’t ask which platform you were using, but I figured it was established enough to include the functionality I described. I hope this fixes your issue – the only caution is that if anyone can post to the blog, you may run into “notification overload” I guess in those cases, the solution would be a digest the way newsgroups used to run.
Ah…not exactly simple, but doable now that I know what to look for. Here’s what I found from Google using your tip: http://www.bloggertipsandtricks.com/2006/05/how-to-get-comment-and-post.html
Jane,
I think what you are describing can be addressed with “subscribe via email” functionality. all readers would need to do would be to enter their email address in order to get notifications when new content was available with a link to access said content. that way they wouldn’t need to be checking rss readers to see if something new was up. wordpess has a plugin for this http://subscribe2.wordpress.com/plugin/; check with your blog documentation to see what is avail on your platform.
another option is one that I have for my facebook friends. a service called networked blogs (see widget at right for link) lets me post new articles right into subscriber’s streams. this is another non-techie way to alert people that new content is available – and avid facebook users don’t have to do anything to see it after they subscribe!
hope this helps
Todd
Sort of. I used to post a digest email to all my students about once a week or so…a compilation of congratulatory messages, announcements, etc. but putting it together took a lot of time and it wasn’t archival. So we’ve moved the communication to a blog which has the same content, but I just post info as I get it. In doing this, we’ve lost the immediacy of having the digest come into our departmental community’s e-mailboxes…they have to go to the blog or actively use their own rss readers which isn’t generally the norm. My straw poll of the community tells me that the active Web 2.0 resident is rare. So here we are:
Old old system…email messages whenever there was something to report (too many emails and often info got left out or became dated…bad email list made it worse)
Old system: email digest of information to clean list (pros…already digested; cons…took a lot of time)
New system: blog (to which most key members of the community can post) in which information is posted as it comes in and the blog archive takes care of the digest element. (pros…quick and easy and shares the task; cons…can’t assure delivery of the message into the user’s inbox.)
Is it possible to feed right into email?
jane – thanks for your question (and for not using your full name and revealing that we’re related)
not sure if you are talking about your own blog or if you want to email a post you find interesting to someone. there’s the brute force method, where you copy and paste a link into the email. the more subtle approach is by way of ‘sharing’ links. for example, at the bottom of my posts, you see a set of icons of popular social networks and email services. clicking on one of these icons will lets you share that post via that service. all the hype now is about social media, but email is still the most popular content sharing mechanism (by a ton). I use wordpress for my blog and incorporate sharing through a plug in. other blogging services offer sharing capabilities either baked in or with plugins. let me know if I have missed your point or if you have other questions.
Todd
Hi,
I know how to forward a blog to my google reader or invite readers to use an RSS feed to forward a blog to their reader, but is there a way to forward (or invite to forward) blog postings to an email account? Easily? In simple steps that anyone can do?