Tag: blogging

Blogging irony

Dave

I decided to change the theme of this blog to the Thesis theme for WordPress, after hearing so many good things about it, and watching a demo. So far, I like it. It gives much more control over a lot of basic functions, and has a control panel front end for things that you would ordinarily have to do with .php or CSS or CSI Miami or blah blah blah I don’t know what I’m talking about.

I’ve stayed up late a couple of nights working on the blog, and I still have a lot of things I want to do. I imported our Blogger blog “not sure if that looks or sounds sillier” that is mostly a stream of photos of The Boy, and I want to exclude that category of posts from the homepage, so that not everyone who comes here has to look at photos of the cutest child in the world. That sounds awful, but you know what I mean.

Still figuring out how to make that happen. I just tried adding a piece of .php code that I found in a Thesis support forum using the “oh hell, I don’t know, maybe I’ll just stick it in this file and see what happens” method. Thanks to Jeff Cohen for helping me fix my blog, which immediately turned into a blank white page that said, “Idiot idiot idiot idiot” across the top, only written in code.

The irony, of course, is that I’ve been staying up late to work on the blog, which means I haven’t written anything for the blog. I hope to get back to writing again soon. Once I finish categorizing all the uncategorized posts.

Refocusing on my blog and trying new tools

Dave

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.

Developing your social media muscle

Dave

Jenny on the JobI 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

Nine easy ways to write a blog post

Dave

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.

  1. Go through your sent items on Friday. Pull out anything that’s more than five paragraphs long and polish it into a blog post.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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?
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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?
  8. 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.
  9. 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

My name is David B. Thomas

Dave

dbt-thumbnail-blacked-outFor 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?