Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: blogging (Page 1 of 3)

Blogging Gone Wild

TechSurfBlog-post1 People who've been reading this blog for a while may know I started it in 2005. That's a long time in blog years, and it's resulted in a monstrous archive of what people now call "long-form blogging" — at least it is for me, as one, lone writer.  My quick tally is about 400,000-500,000 words (several books' worth), and I can't even begin to guess the *time* I have into it. Let's just say it's been countless thousands of hours that I've spent filling this space — planning, thinking, writing, editing, covering events, managing comments, and, not the least, all the time spent in the behind-the-scenes (pain in the ass) administration of the site. That last part is especially a challenge with Typepad, the platform I chose way back when. Unfortunately, it hasn't kept up with bloggers' needs, especially from a UI/ease-of-use standpoint. (But the time to convert my blog to WordPress, as I might like, has just been way too much of a time hurdle to consider if I want to keep paying the bills with the income I have to generate in the non-blogging part of my business life.)

The whole notion of "micro" blogging wasn't even in our minds back in 2005. But, of course, those of you who follow me regularly know I've been posting the majority of my online content for the past few years on a certain site that starts with a "T"Twitter-logo With 11,000+ tweets there, at 140 characters each, that works out to some 200,000 words. And to say that's cut into my long-form blogging frequency here on this blog would be a gross understatement. Twitter, as it turned out, opened the floodgates on short-form, real-time blogging. But "blogging" almost seems like the wrong word these days, doesn't it?  Seems like it's really just about "content sharing" anymore, in the age we're in of never-ending "status updates." Speaking of which, yes, I'm of course on Facebook, too — here and here. Friend me at the first (my personal page) and fan me at the second (my company page). Or is it all about "Likes"? Whatever! Just click something there, will ya, and I'll be happy… :-)  [Note you can also now hit the little "Like" icon at the bottom of each of my blog posts here, as well as "Like" my blog overall in the sidebar to the right. We all *so* need to be liked these days…]

Where does it all end? Well, it doesn't. Which is the reason for this post. It's not to bore you with stats about my huge trove of blog content (which, along with $3.00, will get me a nice cup of coffee anywhere), but to tell you about other places where I'm now doing even more of that shorter-form blogging thing, in case you haven't run into me there yet. Flickr-GraemeAt least I'm having fun (I think). Just gotta keep sharing! These other domains of mine are more for my personal, random thoughts — and for sharing photos when I have some text to go along with them. Sure, I can share photos on Twitter (and I do, often, from my iPhone, with various Twitter apps) — but there are times when 140 characters just won't do. And then I have my Flickr account, which I think I've had about as long as this blog, where I can share anything I shoot — and I've done that with some 4500+ images, all neatly organized into sets.

Medium-Form Blogging?

But I like to say these other blogging places I'm about to tell you about are "somewhere in the vast expanse between my long-form and short-form blogging."  Here's one of them: my Posterous blog, which I've actually had for several months now. PosterousBlog-GraemeOn a site like this, I put up all kinds of stuff — I don't think much about it (unlike this site, which is really all about my serious, professional life). I can even email something to Posterous that instantly becomes a post. So, you'll see a whole array of…stuff. And maybe you've heard of PicPlz? It has an iPhone app I've started to use to share photos. Well, I've set those pix to also show up on my Posterous blog as individual posts.

TumblrBlog-Graeme As opposed to Instagram, another iPhone photo-sharing app (which I like even more). I have the pix I shoot with that app set to show up on my Tumblr blog, where I also post…other stuff. Just kinda started that one. Actually, there's no telling what posts will show up where, really. They just kinda happen, I guess, which I 'spose is the whole idea of real-time content sharing, right? I even did a kind of long post there recently (at least for Tumblr), a rarety — most people on it are just blogging a single photo, or maybe a video. But what is blogging, I say, without a little text, huh?  Words, baby! They make the world go round, don't they? (But, hey, that's a blogger talking.)

Like I say, blogging — it's gone wild.

My Talk on Blogging and Social Media at ‘Club Entrepreneur’

I gave a presentation on blogging and social media recently to the monthly lunch meeting of our local "Club Entrepreneur," which was launched within the past year by Rick Brimacomb. ClubEntrepreneur-logo About 60 people attended, more than they'd had at previous meetings, so we got to meet in the larger, main dining room of the Minneapolis Club — which is just awesome (quick iPhone photo included here, which I shot afterwards).

What a treat to present in such an historic place!  MplsClub The date was February 4, 2010.  After the event, I uploaded a pdf of my 64-slide deck to SlideShare: I titled the talk, Why Launch a Company Blog and Use Social Media.

I originally created the presentation in Keynote on my Mac, with lots of nice transitions and builds, which you can't see on the SlideShare pdf, of course.  You can in the QuickTime movie of the Keynote file that I also created, but that's 238 megs, so I won't expect you to download that… 🙂

(Note: A shout-out to authors David Meerman Scott, Debbie Weil, Brian Solis, Ann Handley, and Tara Hunt, whose work I cited in parts of this presentation. They are all heroes of mine.)

Also, I audio-recorded myself making the presentation, with my little whiz-bang podcast machine — my Olympus LS-10. So, if you'd like to listen as you go through the SlideShare pdf, here's the MP3 file:

• Download or listen to Graeme's presentation at the Minneapolis Club, "Why Launch a Company Blog and Use Social Media (MP3)".

The talk was 45 minutes, with about 12 minutes additional of Q&A at the end. You can't hear some of the audience questions very well but, overall, the recording turned out better than I thought it would — I just tried it as an experiment, setting the device on the projector table (mounted on a mini-tripod), about 12-15 feet away from me.  It worked well, though next time I'll get closer to the LS-10, so the volume level will be a little better.

If you'd like to have me give this presentation, or a variation of it, at your company, or as part of a workshop for a group of employees, please hit my email link at the top right. Thanks!

What I’ve Been Doing for the Last Month and a Half…

…because I sure haven't been posting here.  Wow, I can't believe it's been 45 days!  My last post was soon after I got home from Defrag.  It's a long story.  First, I got sick right after I did that last post, coughing and hacking and generally feeling lousy, which went on for — I kid you not — four weeks!  Never had anything like that.  I think it was something I picked up on the plane.  Then, to top it off, I was really busy with new client work during this time … for BusinessCard2, VISI.com's ReliaCloud, three Skyya Communications clients, and others yet to be named — so, I was basically hunkered down at home, trying like mad to keep things moving forward. (We self-employed don't get no stinking sick days!)

Anyway, I just noticed that, although I didn't post here on my Typepad blog in those 45 days, I did post, count' em, 19 times on my Posterous blog! … pictured here in all its (semi)glorious splendor.

Posterous-GT


I remember doing a post about a year ago here explaining that I'd been gone so long because I was micro-blogging (Twittering).  You see, for us long-time bloggers, there's these huge guilt feelings we get for not blogging more often on our main blog.  So that was my excuse last year.  This year, it's Posterous that's to blame.  For me, it's a site I subtitle "somewhere in the vast expanse between his micro and macro blogging."  So, first it was short-form blogging (Twitter) that was taking me away from my long-form blogging.  Now it's, what, "medium-length" blogging?  Anyway, I find it pretty easy and non-time-consuming to post to Posterous (which I do fairly effortlessly via email). I actually use it more as a quick social-bookmarking service of sorts, when I find a valuable link — as I used to do with Delicious.

So, now you know I haven't been ignoring my contributions to the cause of online content and knowledge-sharing.  I just have too damn many places to do it!  And I've hardly backed down on my participation on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn, either.  Oh, and I wrote two posts and participated in four weekly podcasts on Minnov8, too, with my colleagues there.

So, please keep following me here, there… or how about everywhere?  :-) 

Thanks, and Happy 2010!

Defrag08: The Definitive Twitter Firehose

Well, it's over. Another great Defrag conference — the second annual, to be exact.  And what a great event it was, in downtown Denver on Monday and Tuesday of this week. Defrag08-sign
Aha moments running rampant… Here's my entire Twitter coverage, in convenient "last first" arrangement for your reading pleasure… :-)  That is, if you start by scrolling back to my last Defrag08 tweet on Tuesday 11/4 about 4:30 pm, when I left for the airport.  My coverage totaled some 200 tweets, but I lost count.

Another way to see the ENTIRE FREAKING FIREHOSE is to simply type "Defrag08" in the search box at search.twitter.com.  That will show everyone's tweets that had the hashtag "#defrag08" contained within the already-oh-so-short 140 character tweet length.

And a ton of tweets it was! One speaker did an informal survey of the approximately 300 in attendance, and found upwards of 60% were Twittering the event! That has to be a high point for the larger tech gatherings like this that I regularly attend. (I wonder how many were live-blogging it?  I didn't hear of a single person! Surely a few were. But then blogging is so 2004.)

Yet another feed was one set up by EventVue especially for Defrag. This is a community site that has conference producers sign up with them, allowing their attendees to each create a profile, then interact with other attendees — even in the days before the event begins, as well as during and after. A few months ago, they added a Twitter feature. The nice thing about EventVue's aggregated Defrag feed — which captured the tweets of everyone at the event who was Twittering (as long as they had set up a profile on EventVue) — is that each Twitterer's profile photo showed up next to their tweets, so you could really associate the name to the face. (Note one thing on both of these feeds: post-Defrag tweets started showing up today. Also, I see that EventVue, via the feed link above, isn't allowing me to scroll back very far, to all the tweets during the actual event, Monday and Tuesday. I suspect they may also shut off new entries to this feed soon, or take it down altogether.  However, they previously also created the "@Defrag08" account at Twitter, where you can see all the event's tweets, going all the way back.)

It was amazing the worldwide conversation that all of us Defrag tweeps managed to get going during this very jam-packed event! Here are a couple of screen shots of replies I was getting to my Twitter account.  My favorite?  The one from "johnsonLAB" in Berlin at 1:00 am…  🙂

TweetReplies-toGT-1 















TweetReplies-toGT-2


















UPDATE:  Oh, I almost forgot — photos!  Here's my Flickr set (tagged "Defrag08"), which includes many of the slides I found interesting.

Mixed Messages in The Blogging Landscape (ReadWriteWeb) – And I Weigh In, Too!

Here’s the RWW post. Excerpt: "There has been a lot of discussion recently about the changing face of the blogging landscape. On one hand many bloggers have turned to the likes of FriendFeed and Twitter to express themselves, instead of their blogs. On the other hand we have a group of professional blogs that are becoming more and more like ‘old media’."  See my lengthy comment (#7) — what do you think?

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