Tag Archives: blogging

Missouri Reality Stars

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One of the (perhaps THE) most important elements of a successful blog is focus. The narrower the better, and it really should be something you are passionate about. Missouri Reality Stars is a good example. From the About page:

“So I’ve been paying attention to pop culture for a long long time. I happened to notice that a lot of people on reality TV are from my home state…the Show Me State of Missouri. Apparently it really is. Being from the same state makes me feel like I should root for them, home team spirit ya know. So that’s what this site is about, finding and promoting Missourians who’ve made it on reality TV.”

M.R.S is the love child of co-worker Amy. Droll is the way she roll.

Beyond the blog

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TwittergoogleshareLike a lot of bloggers, I’m spending more and more time feeding my Twitter page. My friend David describes his “tweets” as the same smart-ass remarks he blurted out in class that left his pals in stitches and earned him a trip to the principal’s office. Twitter can be a little more personal and real-time than a blog post (“I’m in caffeine extremis at Coffee Zone, listening to Amy Winehouse”).

I’m also “sharing” more stuff from my Google Reader. I can hundreds of stories (from blogs and news sites) every day and when I see one I think is interesting, I “share” it and a link shows up in a light blue box on the right side of this page. To see more than the last 5 items, click the “Read More” link at the bottom. I usually don’t add anything to these. I just post them. But I really believe I’m better at spotting interesting/amusing stuff than coming up with it myself.

So, if you drop in and don’t see anything of interest, check the Twitter feed (which you can “follow”) and the Google Shared page.

Baseball promos riff on blogging

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Picture_1Baseball’s playoff advertising push gets under way today, when the first spots of a $65 million campaign — the league’s largest ever — are broadcast. The spots will showcase blogging and feature Fox and TBS personalities like Jeff Foxworthy and Frank Caliendo. Separately they appear at a desk, tapping away on an Apple laptop, blogging about baseball and October memories.

In one of the spots, the scene is a desk placed at home plate, where Caliendo — an accomplished impersonator whose riffs on President Bush are hits on YouTube — sits, blogging in the voice of the president. “There’s Only One October.” (Mr. Caliendo, in his President Bush voice, closes by saying, “I’m pretty sure there’s only one.”) [Story at NYT.com]

I can’t find these on YouTube yet. If you spot them somewhere, please ping me.

Keep your Blackberry under your pillow

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Former Iowa Congressman Jim Leach — a Republican — endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Tuesday morning. I think my friend and co-worker Kay Henderson broke the story. It got a lot of national play and her blog post generated 3,000+ page views. I’m sure we got a bunch more at RadioIowa.com. I asked Kay how she got on the story so early:

“I sleep with my blackberry. I woke up at 6 o’clock, checked the ‘berry, and went back to sleep.  As I sort of floated out of dreamland I must have heard or sensed the vibration the ‘berry makes when there’s an incoming email. I pulled the ‘berry from underneath the pillow and read the email sent at 7:14 a.m. from a source in the Obama campaign, alerting me to the fact that former Iowa Congressman Jim Leach would be endorsing Obama in a few hours, during a telephone conference call being organized by the Obama campaign.

I called the newsroom and gave Matt – our morning anchor – the details for him to include in our next newscast, then roused myself from bed and walked into my home office.  I started blogging by feel, as I hadn’t found my glasses yet.  By 7:45 a.m. I had a fairly complete blog post up about the news.  It included text from a speech Vice President Dick Cheney gave at a Leach campaign fundraiser in 2003, explaining the Leach-Cheney-Rumsfeld connection.

I kept updating the post through the day.  An addition at the top – the opening Leach quote — came from a noontime interview.  The McCain folks emailed responses, which got to my email box by 1:50 p.m.”

A couple of things in Kay’s account stand out for me. If she had waited until she got to the office to check her email, she might not have had the jump on the story. Should all reporters sleep with their Blackberry under their pillow? Well, yeah, if you expect to beat Kay on a story.

And that she blogged the story before having her Cheerios. A whole bunch of political reporters follow Kay’s blog.

And while the technology is cool, there’s no substitute for having the contact in the Obama campaign.

High Street Beat

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Bloggers love few things as much as help a new blogger get started. George and I spent the morning with Jefferson City Mayor John Landwehr (and his wife Peggy) helping him get a blog set up. By the time you read this, HighStreetBeat.com should get you there. If not, this link will.

Hizhonor envisions the blog as a place to share news about Jefferson City…with the world. People, places, events, etc. And he’s armed with a Flip Video camera and a YouTube account so look for lots of video. The site just went up today so it’s “under construction” as we used to say.

He has a page on the official Jeff City website, called “Mayor’s Monthly Memo.” But a month is a lifetime in Internet years and memos are waaay too last century. He’s looking for ideas and feedback so hit the comment links or the Gmail link on the left side of his page.

Big Time Blogger Hangs Up (spikes/clubs/gloves)

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Every now and then a super-star blogger “retires” from blogging. Or threatens to. One of the more recent is Jason Calacanis. From his farewell post:

“Starting today all of my thoughts will be reserved for a new medium. Something smaller, something more intimate, and something very personal: an email list. Today the email list has about 600 members, I’m going to cut it off when it reaches 750. Frankly, that’s enough more than enough people to have a conversation with. I’m going to try and build a deeper relationship with fewer people–try to get back to my roots.”

Huh. I think this is where I came in on the Internet movie. Yeah, I’d say 750 people might be enough to keep the old conversation ball in the air.

Chris Pirillo wonders if we’re getting “too big for our niches?”

“Perhaps it is time to step back and figure out what’s possible in this new landscape. Can we maintain conversation and community at a large scale without things devolving into chaos? Is beating the CNNs and CNETs at their own mass-market game what we really want, or do we need to go back to the idea of finding our niche?”

I don’t know anything about A-List bloggers but my buddy Chuck blogs (among other things) for a living and he and his wife work their asses off. I can see why someone might run out of steam if it all got too big.

I find blogging fun and relaxing. I know –or know of– many of the 250-300 people that visit here. Blogging for bucks? Not for me.

“Freedom is a shitty business model”

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“(Blogging is) headed everywhere, because the underlying pattern of cheap amateur publishing is what’s important, not the current manifestations. The word blog itself is going to fade into the middle distance, in the same way words like home page and portal did. Those words used to mean something relatively crisp and specific, but became so overloaded as to be meaningless.

So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this — the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.

The thing that will change the future in the future is the same thing that changed the future in the past — freedom, in both its grand and narrow senses.

A lot of the fights in the next 5 years are going to be between people who want this kind of freedom in their technologies vs. business people who think freedom is a shitty business model compared with control.

The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone that something is a good idea before trying it, and that in turn means that you don’t need to be a huge company to change the world.”

From Clay Shirky’s  Here Comes Everybody: The
Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Let’s hold the first meet-up in Montfoort

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Last week I started using SiteMeter to get a better sense of who’s
visiting smays.com. There’s a wealth of data that I haven’t taken time
to explore but I did come across a section that lists where people are
"coming from."

Location

Most of these are the result of some bizarre Google search and never come back but it illustrates how connected –if only in this small way– the world has become.

And for any international visitor who might be reading this… I am very sorry about George W. Bush. I hope we can make it up to the world.

“Anonymity encourages irresponsibility”

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“The blogs… the good news and bad news about blogs. First the bad news. The bad news is anybody can say anything about someone and they don’t even have to put their name on it. In fact, the anonymity encourages irresponsibility. And it is pretty frustrating, I’ll be honest with you, that’s why I just stopped reading this stuff a long time ago.

“The good is, when there are allegations made, in any variety of formats, there are people who know the facts, and step forward, and correct the facts. People who put their name on it and correct.”

— Sen. James Webb on bloggers

Immortal Blog

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I’m on track reach 4,000 posts by the end of the year. An average of 666 posts a year (yeah, I know). Let’s round it down to 600 and assume I can maintain that pace for the next 20 years. 12,000 additional entries for a grand total of 16,000.

Blogging really isn’t a numbers game for most of us. The point I want to make is the investment in time and energy.

I’ve mentioned a few times my interest in finding a way to keep smays.com “alive” after smays is not. I can leave some money to a friend and ask her to pay the hosting bills. But the blog would be dead for all practical purposes.

But maybe not.

In twenty years, we’ll have AI’s (artificial intelligence). For a fee, mine will read those 16, 000 posts to get a feel for what I wrote about and linked to, picking up a sense of my interests and writing styles in the process.

It will have access to all the books in My Library Thing, my iTunes and iPhoto, flickr, YouTube, etc.

The AI will continuously scour the web of the future, snatching bits and pieces and posting them here. Surviving friends will be able to correspond with smays.com who/which will reply. You might find him/her/it more interesting. Certainly better informed.

There’s plenty of video and audio of smays.com and I fully expect my AI will be capable of reproducing an acceptable version. So you can talk or iChat with me as well.

Will this be the next evolutionary leap. I don’t see why not. Reminds me of my favorite line from Blade Runner.