Posts tagged as:

blogging

Making WordPress act like Posterous

2010.03.06

I think Posterous is a great platform, and a really simple and flexible way to start (or reinvigorate) a blog. I started using it because it lets you post by email, and tell it where you want your text and photos to go. So if I take a picture of The Boy and want to put it on Facebook and Flickr, I email it to facebook+flickr@posterous.com. Posterous knows my email address and thus knows how to find my particular Posterous site.

Here’s the only thing I don’t like: If I post a photo via Posterous to my (this) blog, the photo doesn’t live here, it lives at Posterous and links from here to there. Now I wish the Posterous folks a long and prosperous career, and from what I’ve seen (and the support I’ve gotten when asking questions) they deserve it.

But if they go away, I don’t want my photos to go with them. Even if they don’t go away, I want control of my own photos. I’ve had a blog on Typepad since 2003 and the only reason I’m still paying the $8.95 a month is because all my images are there. I don’t want that to happen again.

So here’s what I want. I want to be able to use this blog just like Posterous. I want to be able to post a photo or text via email and/or a Web and iPhone app and tell it where I want it to go: blog, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, or some combination of the above.

I want to be able to tag the post and decide what category it goes in.

If it’s a photo, I want it to come in full size in Facebook, because I’ve noticed that people don’t comment so much on the smaller photos.

If it’s text, I want it to come into Facebook and look the same way a status update does, because I’ve noticed I get far fewer Facebook comments on my Networked Blogs posts than on a status update or Facebook note. I think as Facebook traffic builds, people are less likely to click on something that takes them out of their stream and away from Facebook.

All of these services have “post here and have it go somewhere else” features or plug-ins. You can post to Flickr and have it post automatically to Twitter. You can post to a WordPress blog and have it automatically tweeted. You can pull your tweets in as your status updates.

I think what I need to do is sit down and map out all the content I share and where I’d like it to go, and see what paths are available. My, doesn’t that sound like fun? Of course, if someone out there has this all figured out, let me know.

photo by phill.d / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Tagged as: blogging, obsession, posterous, wordpress

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Refocusing on my blog and trying new tools

2010.01.31

When I spent some time with Chris Brogan in December, we talked about blogs and sharing tools like Posterous, and the different ways people use them. Chris thinks people are diluting their web presences by posting in too many places. (You can watch him say this yourself.) “Home is where the web page is,” he summed up nicely.

I had a blog on Typepad for many years. When I finally decided to move to this self-hosted Wordpress blog you’re looking at, I realized I could import all my old posts, but all my photos were stuck. I looked into methods for bringing them over and found one small company that will do it for you, but admits it’s such a massive pain that they charge a lot, since they don’t really want to do it. (They even provide the step-by-step instructions, which run to about 50 steps.)

I really like Posterous, its simple interface, the web-based tools that allow you to share pictures and videos quickly, and the ability to post by email to multiple places. But I’m afraid that if I get too tied in to Posterous, one day I might have the same issue that I had with Typepad.

So here I am once again, using precious toddler napping time to mess with my blog. I just installed the TweetMe plugin, which should send out a tweet announcing this post once it goes up. (This whole post started out as a test of that function, but I got carried away.)

I like this blog. I like the idea that it will continue to grow, and that it will continue to be my home base as new tools emerge, rather than just another outpost I used for a while and abandoned when something more exciting came along.

By the way, my thanks once again to my friend Jeff Cohen from socialmediaB2B.com. I posted on Twitter that I was looking for the right tools to do this, and he called me within a few minutes to talk me through it. Good man.

Tagged as: blogging, chris brogan, jeff cohen, posterous, tweetme, wordpress

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Developing your social media muscle

2009.09.23

I wrote a lot of poetry in college. (Don’t worry, that was pre-web so I have no links to subject you to). When I was doing it regularly, thoughts would come to me in poetic terms, or a snippet of conversation would spur an idea. The more I wrote, the more that happened.

My love of photography also began in college, and carried through to a job as a professional photographer for The Chapel Hill (N.C.) News (which nearly killed my love of photography, but that’s a different story). The more photos I took, the more I saw things in photographic terms. My eyes sought out angles and patterns and juxtapositions and I would mentally compose the photo before I ever brought the camera to my eye.

The same principle holds true in social media. The more you participate, the easier it gets. I’ve been referring to it as “developing your social media muscle.”

Blogging isn’t always easy. Sometimes it’s downright difficult to come up with an idea worth sharing, find the time to write it, find a photo to illustrate the post and do all the little logistical things that go along with it.

But you know what? The more you do it, the easier it gets. That’s why bloggers like Chris Brogan and Wayne Sutton can be so prolific. They’ve developed their blog muscles. Thoughts and ideas come to them more often because they are receptive to them.

When I was blogging every day in the early 2000s, I nearly always had an idea I wanted to work up and one or two in the queue. And I’ve found that to be true in the last couple of weeks as I’ve tried to notch up my blogging to where it should be for someone with a job like mine. I have three ideas on a note stuck to my monitor.

It works for Twitter as well. The more you do it, the easier it is to digest ideas into 140 characters. When you see something that interests you, you’re more likely to think, “I should tweet this because other people might find it useful.”

The more you develop your social media muscle, the easier the heavy lifting becomes.

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

Tagged as: blogging, social media, tweets

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Nine easy ways to write a blog post

2009.09.09

My colleague Alison Bolen, editor of sascom magazine and the sascom voices blog, does a great job coaching our bloggers here at SAS. We had a meeting last week with a group of bloggers to help them deal with some of the issues involved in blogging regularly while at the same balancing the pesky demands of having a job. One piece of advice we both find ourselves giving people is, “Not every blog post has to be a white paper.”

So in honor of 09/09/09, here’s Alison’s list (with one or two additions from me) of nine easy ways to write a blog post.

Go through your sent items on Friday. Pull out anything that’s more than five paragraphs long and polish it into a blog post.
Go to search.twitter.com and search for two key words. Write a three-paragraph post that responds to one or more of these tweets.
What are you consuming? Business books, other blogs, podcasts, TV shows – anything that you’re finding especially useful and interesting? Tell people about it in two or three paragraphs.
Take 20 minutes at the end of the day and think about who you’ve talked to today and what you’ve learned. How can you summarize that into a 200-word post that others can learn from as well?
What did you explain to someone today that you’ve explained at least three times before? If you get asked often enough, others would probably love to hear the explanation too. Give it to them in a blog post.
What cool things are your customers doing? What have you learned from them lately? What innovative ways are they using your product or service? Can’t talk about customers without approval? Maybe you can mention them anonymously. Give details, just not names.
What documents or presentations are you working on right now? Can you excerpt two or three paragraphs into a quick blog post to give readers a sneak peak?
What are you researching? What would you like to learn more about? Ask your readers to explain it to you. Or do a Twitter search on the topic and see what you find. Link to results and share your thoughts.
Read the blogs on your blog roll. Find at least one to comment on. Then copy your comment on your blog and expand on it slightly. Link back to original post.

Is it bothering you that it’s nine, and not Top Ten? Okay, then:

10. Write a top 10 list.

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

Tagged as: blogging, socialmedia

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My name is David B. Thomas

2008.11.09

For most of my adult life, I’ve used David B. Thomas as my name. My father is David Thomas, without a middle name, so for one thing it helped distinguish us. (He was David NMI Thomas in the Army, for “No Middle Initial.”) Using my middle initial felt a bit stilted at times, because I introduce myself as Dave Thomas, and that’s generally how people refer to me.

Online I was usually dbt001, because with a name like mine, it’s hard to get an email address or username other than something like DavidBThomas3369.

When I started working at SAS in May of 2007, I arrived to find a nameplate on my door reading “Dave Thomas” and an email address to match. What the heck, I thought. I’ll just go with that.

Then I heard John T. Mims speak at the Ragan Communications Web 2.0 conference held on campus at SAS. One of John’s tips for participating in social media was to build your name as your brand. People with a common name need to do something to stand out in Web searches, John suggested. That’s why he started using his middle initial.

That got me thinking. If you search for “Dave Thomas,” you’re going to get an awful lot of search results, almost all of them not me, and many about the late hamburger pitchman. (People still insist on reminding me we share a name – I know, thanks). If you Google “David B. Thomas,” you’ll still find a lot of people, but you’ll also find me – three times on the first page of results. So now I’ve started using my B again. Where possible, on Twitter for instance, I’ve changed my username from dbt001 to DavidBThomas. It was either that, or change my name to Marmalade P. Vestibule.

When I first started blogging in 2003, along with a small cadre of friends, we all sought to be anonymous on the Web. It just seemed like the thing to do. My blogroll included Adda, Rebecky, Mykull and Pinky. You would need to scour their sites with the acuity of a Federal corruption investigator to figure out what town we even lived in. What were we worried about, exactly?

Five years later, not only am I writing a post about my name, but I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Orkut (I think), Flickr and Friendfeed. If you want, you can find out what’s in my Netflix queue. I take care not to post anything potentially controversial or damaging to any of those outlets, but I don’t really do anything potentially controversial or damaging these days, publicly or privately.

Things have gone so far in the opposite direction that we’re now seeing public service announcements aimed at teenagers reminding them that anything they post online lives forever. As for my generation (X) social media seems to be teaching us it’s okay to be online and open and honest about your life and who you are. That knowledge is seeping through to the companies we work for. I’m still holding my breath for the first big “social media crisis” I may have to face. But maybe by the time it happens, I’ll be able to spend my time addressing it rather than defending our participation in those channels.

What’s the opposite of anonymity? Nymity?

Tagged as: blogging, social media, Web 2.0

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Would you rather read this, or 37 tweets?

2008.10.25

I started this blog in 2003. I was looking for work and it gave me a creative outlet – something to do other than check Monster every hour hoping that companies in the Raleigh-Durham area had suddenly started hiring marcomm managers again. Most – no, all – of the blogs I read at the time were personal journals: mainly of a small group of friends, but the circle eventually broadened, as it does, to include people who stumbled across one of us and started reading, commenting on and blogrolling all of us. Plooble’s apex came when Wendy McClure added me to her blogroll at Pound and my hit count went north of 1,500 per day.

Eventually, inevitably, I got a full-time job and no longer had the time to write carefully-crafted posts with a thesis and conclusion and a photo to go with it. The problem was I had set myself a standard for the blog and had a very difficult time making the shift to blogging sporadically and about whatever popped into my head. One by one, Plooble started dropping off those blogrolls, and understandably so. Who wants to direct someone to a blog with a year-old post at the top?

After a few years hiatus, I’ve revivified this blog, even if I’m not quite sure what to do with it. I’m struck by how much blogging has changed since 2003. For one thing, quite a few people who started blogging when I did kept it up, and as a result some of them are making a living at it. That never occurred to me. Or I should say that it did, but I had no concept of how that would actually happen. I remember a friend at the time saying, no doubt in an email or possibly an IM: “blog + PayPal = $.” I didn’t quite know what she meant by that.

The biggest change is that blogs have become a new form of journalism, whereas a scant five years ago they were, depending on your perspective, personal journals shared with friends or outlets for poorly-punctuated self-indulgent whining.

This change is so profound that Paul Boutin, writing in Wired, has declared blogs dead and advised all bloggers to pull the plug and move to Twitter. Obviously he’s not the first writer to try to attract attention by proclaiming the death of a popular trend. But in this case I think he’s completely wrong. It makes no more sense to say that blogs are dead than it does to say that television is dead. Yes, broadcast TV is going through tremendous changes and being challenged by YouTube and Hulu and Netflix and the thing that just got created while I was typing that list, but how many times in the last few weeks have you seen or heard someone talking about Tina Fey’s portrayals of Sarah Palin? What’s important is that NBC is creating content people want to see. The medium in which they want to see it is secondary.

In 2003, when you said you were a blogger, it had meaning. It said you were among a smallish group of people who had embraced a new technology and were using it to tell people something, probably something about yourself. Or maybe your cat. These days saying you’re a blogger doesn’t carry any more meaning than saying you’re an emailer.

But that doesn’t mean blogging is dead. It means that the tools, technology and techniques pioneered by a few have spread to many, who are using them to do any number of things that have little or no correlation other than the medium. Far from making blogging dead, it makes it more vital than ever, even as the concept of being a “blogger” comes to mean almost nothing at all.

I will happily admit that I now use Twitter and Facebook to communicate with friends in more or less the same way I used to use this blog. And I do it far more often because it takes so little time and I don’t feel pressured to create a magnum opus every time.

On the other hand, I would have had a hard time saying all of this in 140 characters.

Tagged as: blogging, paul boutin, plooble, poundy, tweets, wendy mcclure, wired

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