Neglected for NaNoWriMo

This blog is being neglected due to National Novel Writing Month. The normal level of neglect will resume after the month of November.

In the meantime, please enjoy this image of the Pages icon from Apple. I don't have a Mac at the moment (actually, I have a Mac Plus in the closet but even I don't think that counts), but tell myself that if I did it'd be easier to write a novel.

What Makes a Good Blog

I added a new post over at Where's Adam's iPod, it has been a while. Merlin Mann from 43Folders.com (and various other endevors) wrote about what makes a good blog. I applied his thoughts to Where's Adam's iPod and rated the site (no surprise- it scored low).

Regardless, I thought Mr. Mann's points were good, and worth repeating:

1. Good blogs have a voice
    
2. Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things.
    
3. Good blogs are the product of “Attention times Interest.” A blog shows me where someone’s attention tends to go...There’s a story here.
    
4. Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. Blog posts are written, not defecated.
    
5. Good “non-post” blogs have style and curation. Some of the best blogs use unusual formats, employ only photos and video, or utilize the list format to artistic effect.
    
6. Good blogs are weird. Blogs make fart noises and occasionally vex readers with the degree to which the blogger’s obsession will inevitably diverge from the reader’s.
    
7. Good blogs make you want to start your own blog.
    
8. Good blogs try...A good blog is written by a blogger who thinks longer, works harder, and obsesses more. Ultimately, a good blogger tries. That’s why “good” is getting rare.
    
9. Good blogs know when to break their own rules.
    

Charlie Rose on Why Bloggers Blog

In an interview with Jeff Bezos (founder and ceo of amazon.com), Charlie Rose mentioned a quote he (Mr. Rose) has apparently said several times on his show:

How do I know what I think until I see what I've written.

This could be the Blogger Mantra.

Neglected Blogger

Blogger has been neglected. All my recent posting has been going to Word Press (WheresAdamsIPod.com), LiveJournal, or Twitter. A good new years resolution for me would be to figure out exactly how best to use this blogger space.

Hard Question or Conversation Starter

Over on Live Journal they have a feature to inspire writing. The profile page that appears after logging in includes a note on the page called "What do you have to say?" with an open ended question or topic. The question that appeared recently was:

What makes you unique?

The first time I saw this I blew it off with a shrug and thought "who says everyone is unique?".

I have a theory that challenging questions that contain both the word 'you' and either 'who, what, why, when, where' tend to have a bit of a negative undertone. In this case the implication is that the person is supposed to defend that they are in fact unique. An alternative response is to attack the question as flawed, that was my first response.

Then I thought about conversation starters. Different settings have different thresholds of acceptablility. Imagine you are at a family Christmas party, shouting this question at your cousin across the dinner table probably isn't going to get a response. Maybe you'd get a response if you were having a little side conversation, just one or two other people. The question would almost certainly get a response as pillow talk. The more personal the setting the more likely the question will be recieved as a geniuine interested inquiry rather than as a challenge.

The question works well as a blog entry starter because the writing of a blog entry can be a very personal setting. The responses might be slanted based on the topic of the blog or the audience the blog is appealing to. This blog has (a) no topic and (b) appeals to an indeterminante demographic (aka whoever stumbles across it, and 'appeals' is almost certainly the wrong word in that case). It also works well on Live Journal because the entries tend to be, well, journals- not blogs.

The distinction between the two is a topic for another post.

Writer's Block...unblocked.

One of the cool features of Live Journal is a little promotion going on called the "Writer's Block". It is sponsored by HP, and appears as a question on each Live Journal user's home page (sort of like the Dashboard on Blogger, but with more options reflecting the variety of social networking tools within Live Journal).

These "Writer's Blocks" are simple questions that encourage a response, for example:
- What's been your biggest influence in making you a better writer?
- What's the best advice you've given or gotten for taking good photos?
- If you could travel back in time to spend a day with someone, who would it be and why?

Each statement is presented individually, with navigation buttons to move through the question. There is also an "Answer" button, clicking it lauches the editor with the question filled in and ready to take your response. The entry is also automatically tagged and, presumably, writing a response enters the author in a contest for HP stuff.

Blog in search of a topic

I've come to the conclusion that all great blogs have a topic, a unifying theme that ties the entries together and establishes an expectation amongst the readers of the blog. This blog is lacking in that category. The unifying theme? Things that I was thinking about when the post was written. Sure, that is technically a theme, but not very good for establishing an expectation amongst readers.

With that shortcoming in this blog in mind, I've launched an eight month initiative to identify a topic. Why eight months? Because I've got another long-term project I'm currently working on that should wrap up in eight months. In the meantime, I'm planning on trying out various blog topics. Today's topic: State Constitutions and their relationship to the US Federal Constitution. Yep, sounds nuts. In other words, 'and now for something completely different'. Speaking of other words, here's a quote:

"An important distinction exists between the federal and state constitutions. The U.S. Constitution contains grants of authority from the states to the federal government. All powers not specified in the federal constitution are retained by the states. This means that the U.S. Constitution identifies what the federal government can do, but the state constitutions tell the state governments what they cannot do."

- Reed, Shedd, Morehead, & Corley, 2005, The legal and regulatory environment of business

Mobile Blogging

It's been a while since i tried mobile blogging.

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That was sent from my phone. Apparently it had been too long since I tried mobile blogging, because blogger sent me anther new blog name and claim token. The random blog name (sawfob327) was no where near as good as my previous randomly generated blog name (elfbug266), so I didn't hesitate in merging it with this blog.

Anyway, mobile blogging is alive and well. A bit like twitter, but without the social networking hooks.

Blogging from Live Mail - Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary

I just got done noodling with the Microsoft Mail Live Beta's integration with Spaces.live.com. The new 'outlook express replacement' has an option to write a blog post (or simply blog an email) directly from the mail client. Google docs offers similar functionality so I thought I'd give that a test drive too (this post was made using Google docs).

The Live Mail (beta 12.0.1184) to Live Spaces integration had a couple quirks:

(1) The title of the blog entry is changed on publication from whatever was typed (like 'thoughts on dogs') to be prefixed with the phrase "talking about...". So the post ends up as "talking about thoughts on dogs".

(2) The body of the entry, typed within a Live Mail editor much like the e-mail editor is changed on publication to be a quoted text block.

(3) The publish to blog link simply opens the browser to the web-based Spaces blog editor with the text filled in (with the changes noted above).

Maybe nice for transferring an email to a blog entry, but that can easily be done with copy and paste. Overall first impression: evolutionary, not revolutionary. That seems to be the tag line for tech this year.

Over on the Google Docs / Blogger front, there were some quirks too.

(1) Sending a document to blogger involves clicking the "Publish" tab. The user must preconfigure their blog target. If that is not done, clicking the 'publish to blog' button activates the blog target configuration dialog/webform. But you aren't done! Finishing the dialog simply configures the settings. You have to push the same button again to send off the blog post. This is all written on the screen (sort of) so if you are into reading directions, this double-pump shouldn't be a problem.

(2) Google docs offers to use the title of the document as the blog post title, or at least implies that is what it is going to do. Google docs has a 'feature' of using the first line of text in your document as the title. If you rename your document then publish, the new document name is disregarded and your post is untitled. Wierd, hard to follow, and just plain quirky.

(3) No labels support. Labels can be applied by opening the post in the blogger editor and tagging.

Bottom Line: both of these are preliminary editing tools. Some post-posting clean-up will still be required.

How to fix the blog post editor's title field.

Odd...The blog editor won't let me type in the 'Title' Field. What is up with that?

The fix seems to be to click on preview. That magically heals the unresponsive title field.

A sucky blog post, but good to know.

Follow up: It seems that the title field gets randomly disabled when blogger automatically saves a draft of the post. I've only seen it happen in FireFox, but haven't done thorough testing in other browsers.

Blogger vs. WordPress Smackdown, Round 1.

I was starting to think WordPress was such a good blogging tool that Blogger would become obsolete. Then I noticed something cool. Blogger has been doing Mobile Blogging for a while, but I ignored it. I really didn't 'get' it. Now I do.

The picture above (pretty bad eh? read on) was taken using my phone. I took a picture of my laptop screen showing an image on the blogger instructions for mobile blogging. Self referential, but it serves its purpose. Once the picture was taken, I sent it to Blogger (go@blogger.com). Blogger then sent me a reply with a 'token' to claim my picture. Blogger had also set up a blog for my phone (elfbug266, cute). When I was back at my computer, not too tough since I was sitting at it the whole time, I launched Blogger and claimed my picture. Blogger then asked if I wanted to merge the elfbug266 blog into my existing blog. The post migrated over and I was able to add this text to explain the very bad picture.

According to the instructions, Blogger accepts text messages as well. No photo required, same process. One nit on the whole thing: When I tried to edit this post by adding text, Blogger's text editor kept trying to delete the picture. After a few tries, I switched to 'Edit Html' view of the posting page and added some text then flipped back to 'Compose' view and here we are!

Round 1 goes to Blogger for mobile blogging. Wordpress, bring it on.