Sky’s Blog

At this rate, pretty soon it’s going to be a regular ghost town in blog-ville. During Traveling Geeks/Paris in December I was faced with a challenge, which is that even some of the primo bloggers are deserting the blogosphere for other territory^[1]. Like many of them are almost exclusively twittering now, and their blogs are falling into disrepair. And normal folk are inhabiting Facebook rather than suffer the trouble of writing a long blog post even once in a while. Have you noticed this? Are you spending your time keeping up with tweets rather than reading blogs?

Here’s what I experienced with respect to the Traveling Geeks crew.

[1] My advice to clients is “Go where your clients and prospects are.” So if you’re a tech writer, and all your clients are spending their time on Facebook, you must be on Facebook. And if they’re tweeting about you, you’d better be on Twitter.

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I like OpenID^[1] although I think it’s more complex than most people can handle — and that’s a big hurdle. OpenID gives visitors to your blog or web site a chance to log in (create an account on your site) using their login information from a participating OpenID web site (like gmail). In other words, they don’t have to create a separate account at your blog – they just reuse their Yahoo (or gmail or other^[2]) account. In theory this should make it easier to remember account names and passwords because you just use one account to log in at many sites.Ever since OpenID was announced (2005) I’ve loved the idea. There are OpenID providers, and then there are other sites that allow users to utilize OpenID for the creation of accounts.

(continue reading…)

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Barbara Ehrenreich’s message to journalism school (j-school) graduates at UC Berekeley on May 16 2009 ^[1] is that they’re entering a dying industry.

Yeah, I guess that’s the case if you’re looking for a secure job in the newsroom of the 1950s, but I would actually encourage j-school graduates to look at this as an opportunity. In fact, I would encourage college Freshmen to consider specializing in journalism! Why? (continue reading…)

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It’s been a whole month since I wrote anything in my blog? What happened? (Or rather, what did not happen?)

Well, let’s just blame it on Twitter. Or on the new iPhone. Or on two clients wanting 70-hour weeks from me all month. Or on processing 4 hours of teacher training videos.

Nah, let’s just blame it on Twitter.

Twitter seems to have taken a big bite out of my blogging energy lately.

I primarily use Twitteriffic on my iPhone to both follow and to create new tweets, but I also love Twitterfox (a plug-in for the FIreFox browser) if I’m at a computer (it just pops up a little panel showing the most recents, and lets me quickly twipe a new tweet whenever I feel the need.

But why do I even bother with Twitter? – because I get stoked with a dozen new ideas every day! In the old days, “kids” used Twitter to vacuously and narcissistically communicate “I’m having breakfast” or “I’m on the bus” or “I’m at the coffee shop.” But somehow a large number of busy people realized that not only was this a waste of a good communication medium, but something better could actually be done with it – and now what we do is communicate concepts, places, activities and ideas of interest to our group. Someone might be experiencing writer’s block and need inspiration and put out a call for help that explains the concept she’s working on, and get back a half dozen interesting tangential ideas! Another might have returned from a trip and posted photos – and will put up a tweet pointing to the photos. Someone else will be at a conference and will tweet about each speaker’s primary concept.

You have to carefully pick who you “follow” (whose tweets you subscribe to) on Twitter, but once you have your list tuned well, you have constructed a channel that lets you really stay in touch with the ideas and activities that will surface as blog posts and news in the next 24 to 48 hours. And you get a real boost from knowing what your friends and colleagues are working on and thinking about.

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