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Making Sense of Why I Blog

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delaware riverAt times its a bit mind blowing to come up with creative ideas for blog posts. I have a book of ideas that I keep close by to come up with killer ideas for award winning posts. I spent the last 3 days in New York City largely the joy of not blogging was huge inspiration to get back on the saddle and continue again. Last night I was on the train heading out of New York and returning to the wild woods of Eastern Pennsylvania. I was intrigued by a book a friend had given me to read entitled Ishmael.

6+ Years ago I came to blogging as a way to express my spiritual journey. Lately I’ve revisted this process in different ways through social outreach, and finding new ways to interact. This book Ishmael shakes all fundamental systems of belief, systems, human ecosystems and forces you to reconsider Man’s basic purpose in life.

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Originally posted on December 15, 2006 @ 6:49 am

How To Build Your Audience

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Every site builder seems to ask me how I build sites that seemingly get traffic. The steps are simple but it takes time. Audiences arent built overnight. Or are they?

One of the secret weapons of building your audience is strong and compelling copy. Brian Clark is the uber-wordsmith. I won’t even pretend to act like I know what I’m doing. I got a C- my last year at any level of english and have often been accused of using English as my second language. I don’t even know what my first would be other than possibly AIMspeak.

Lessons learned here:

Another Tool In my Audience Growth Tool Bag is Social News Sites. You might be thinking well isn’t their just to much crap on these social news sites and its pointless to use them? Well you aren’t even close to being right if you think this way. The uber secret is to build a powerful profile on Netscape.com or Reddit and being generous in voting on other sites other sites.

Heres A Kickass Tutorial to Build Super Profiles

The same methodology works on Reddit and Digg just be careful in sending out sitemail. It’s a pain in the arse to deal with.

In no time flat you will have a good sized audience fluttering around 250-350 daily readers. If you keep your site focused on a narrow niche guaranteed.

Originally posted on December 15, 2006 @ 2:30 pm

John McCain Is Waging War on New Media

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john mccainJohn Mccain has introduced legislation that would make blogs come under the same legislation as Internet Service Providers. Here’s a powerful summary of how that would affect blogs and other new media, socially-driven sites:

  • Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”
  • ISPs are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs.
  • Social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures” — such as deleting user profiles — to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries.

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Originally posted on December 15, 2006 @ 7:27 am

Can Blogging Create World Peace?

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World Peace FlameThe people over at Touchstone are doing some cool things. I’m always into tech companies that also double as socially conscious creators. Today they ask if Blogging Can Create World Peace

My favorite quote of this peace follows:

War is based on fear, fear is based on ignorance, ignorance is based on a lack of information, lack of information is based on bad/biased editorializing and/or audience apathy.

~ The Muppets

For more information about Touchstone check out their manifesto. I’m in love with it.

Originally posted on December 16, 2006 @ 3:44 pm

Why blogging hasn’t peaked and measurements don’t matter

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steve rubelNotable Public Relations Representative Steve Rubel believes blogging has peaked. Guess what? He doesn’t know how to count. He’s using services that just dont take into consideration international numbers. Yes, blogging may have hit a plateau among white middle class Americans, but it hasn’t truly peaked around the global markets.

Let’s take for instance, the ever-rising Chinese blog scene, the growing Indian Blogosphere, and well what happens when Africa gets connected, and more of South America? Then we can start talking about the blogosphere peaking. Until then, quoting Google Trends on unreliable search data, and the ever unreliable Technorati (which is in Edelman’s playpen) is like saying Walmart has peaked. It might be some newsworthy pr, but it’s just that. Folly.

One thing to really consider is that Americans might just be a tad bit insulated from the web reality.

According to statistics 46% of Asian Internet users have their own blog (the Korean embracement of personal “MySpace” type sites is off the charts) while only 8% of American Internet users do. When you consider the ratio of population as well that divide can get pretty big.

It’s also another great example about how language actually insulates us from so much of what is out there on the web.

Just something to consider.

Originally posted on December 12, 2006 @ 4:33 am