Back on the wagon

I keep telling myself to do some blogging every day, even if it’s boring- even-to- people-who- know-me journal entries in my persona blog. Why? For selfish reasons. When I’m keeping track of what I’ve been doing I get more done and I feel better about myself. I also notice patterns and figure out why I’m avoiding other things. I could do this all in private but I like the transparency and it’s easy enough to ignore for anyone who isn’t interested.
This weekend I saw Life Aquatic again, on Friday night, this time with the Reverend Bill and B, replaced the wound nylon C string on my tenor ukulele and got a big new bag of kitty litter, and then saw The Aviator on Saturday (liked it much better than I expected to). Sunday I went out for some wine and pancetta and for a copy of Pat Conroy’s cookbook, which took way too much time, and then enjoyed watching the Oscar’s with B and eating the lentil and pancetta soup she made.
Also, I nearly finalized my travel plans for SXSW next month but am tracking down why my listing at the website isn’t complete.
Oh, yeah, paid some bills too.

Odeo is Ev's next big thing

Looks like Ev is done finding himself and actually has a new business plan in the can: evhead: How Odeo Happened
Speaking of podcasting, I’m having trouble getting one working for Monkey Vortex Radio Theater. I installed the MT-enclosure plug-in to make the RSS feeds produce the correct enclosure information, and that part seems to work ok, but meanwhile, I’m still not really podcasting, in the sense that the iPodder software isn’t finding the files.
What am I doing wrong? Can someone who has got a podcast working via MT drop me a line and help me sort it out? Thanks!
Time for a podcasting category?

We can rebuild it

I tore down the monolog at x-pollen and built it back up as a new standalone blog. It was a fake blog before. Now it has its own blog number in my system and for the time being it will only update when I update it manually (at least until I get a crontab working).
I’m going to play around with the new dynamic page generation features in MT 3 and see how they work. If I can get them doing something interesting for monolog then I will probably apply what I learn to Telegraph.
It’s tempting, though, to just use something like CivicSpace which has a built-in news aggregrator and seems to know how to the do the cron stuff itself without asking. It’s gotten very easy to install and even though I’m not a social movement, for the sites that combine content from multiple blogs it might turn out to be the best solution.

Blogging as a public relations skill

B.L. Ochman’s tips on How To Write Killer Blog Posts are geared toward’s PR professionals but are general enough to apply across the board to blogging.
In fact, isn’t all blogging a form of public relations? Don’t we all need to write pithy headlines and grabby leads if we want the public to notice and care about what we’re writing?

Two new blog reviews

Checking my ego feed in my news aggregator yesterday I saw that two bloggers had posted reviews of the book. The first, Scot Hacker, a personal friend and longtime web colleague, liked the book quite a lot, calling it “an exploration – at turns straightforwardly journalistic, nearly stream-of-consciousness, and scholarly – on the transformative power of online communities,” and he selected the following quotation from the book to illustrate his comments:

On first discovering online journals, most people find them puzzling, a paradox. Who would put their private diary online? … Omigod, my mother read my blog! Indeed, there are countless stories of people who misjudged the effects of putting their thoughts and ideas into the public domain and who lived to regret the confidences broken, the parties offended by their snarky comments, their exposed secrets. In time, though, anyone who continues the exhilarating tightrope walk of online self-examination will manage to cultivate that gray area between public and private that seems just personal and revealing enough to draw in readers and invite scrutiny but that still holds back what truly belongs out of public view entirely.

The second, Andrew Sinclair, holds a nearly opposite view, finding the book lacking in insight and analysis and too heavily reliant on buzzwords and feature lists.
(He also thought our cover ripped off David Weinberger’s Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. I tried posting a comment on his blog but it has not appeared, so I may have failed. In it I explained the my publisher actually hired two designers to come up with cover ideas – a highly unusual investment of resources for any publisher – and that we all liked the final cover design the best, but that any homage to Weinberger’s book’s cover was strictly coincidental.)
While of course I prefer positive reviews, I welcome any and all feedback on my books and other writing, as I strive to improve and meet the needs of my readers, so thank you Scot and Andrew.

A blogger's fund drive

Almost posted about this here first but instead filed it over at Radio Free Blogistan: Kottke at the mercy of his readers.
Interesting test of the “power of many” to support the blogging work of one.

Kottke at the mercy of his readers

Jason Kottke, one of the best-loved personal bloggers, has quit his job and is soliciting donations from readers so he can pursue his dream, Doing kottke.org as a full-time job.
It should be interesting to see whether his very large audience contains enough supporters to enable him to make a go of it.
I’m not sure this “business model,” this way of leveraging “the many” would work for anyone who isn’t over at the left side of the power-law curve, but it’s still fascinating, if only for what it says about Kottke’s desire to put his blogging on the front burner and dignify with his full attention.
Update (via Waxy): over at Ask Metafilter, they’re talking about what they’d be willing to pay, if anything, for various weblogs.

Blog is beautiful

Jerry Brown is blogging. He is also running for attorney general of the state of California. He is also the mayor of Oakland.
I voted for him in the California primary in 1992.
He still has the generic TypePad design.
Welcome!

Hot on the heels of ping spam comes referrer spam

Referrer spam, by which a spam domain gets visibility on your list of incoming links, is the cutting edge of blog spam these days.
Jay Allen explains how to fend it off with a perl plug-in for MT-Blacklist (MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: Using MT-Blacklist on referrer spam).
Laura “limon” Lemay has another approach to staving off referrer spam.

Down into the easy chair

Ooh, whee! Ride me high.

Tomorrow’s the day my bride’s a-gonna come, yeah.

Ooh, whee! And ain’t we gonna fly?

…