So, what do I blog about?
This question has been arising in my mind for awhile now. What exactly do I blog about? Do I talk about Social Media? How to blog? Do I focus on Twitter or something else? I think that it is very crucial to find exactly what you are blogging about, because then you can actually wrap your mind around the extent of your blog. If you asked me what types of blog posts I do, I really couldn’t answer you, because they are soon separated. But, after around 4 months of blogging, I finally has chosen a subject: Become Better at blank.
There are a lot of blogs that focus on how to become better at blogging, social media, writing, photoshop, programming, you name it, they have it. But I think that there is a lot more that people want to know than just how to blog, or how to write. Instead, I am going to combine most of these subjects into a 3-4 post a week blog focused around becoming better with the Internet. In the end, I think that people enjoy learning things. I know that I go through a large amount of blog posts a week trying to find posts that allow me to learn something new, and I think there are others like.
If you have any suggestions for topics I should write about, or would like to guest post, please send me an email at chacha@chacha102.com. Enjoy!
Your Flavor of the Web.
I posted a guest post on Alex Wilhelm’s blog about how companies will need to make their content easily available in near realtime so that others can style it. Here is an excerpt.
“Lets say someone just poured out a big bag of M&Ms onto the table for you and that person to share. Now, you decide to pick all the red M&Ms first from the pile. For some reason you just decide to take them all, even though there is no real difference behind them besides color. You perfer the red variation of the M&M of the blue variation. On the Internet, I think it is going to be a lot similar.
Many people perfer working in certain ways, and having certain visual aspects present. For instance, Windows allows you to change your background image, your screensaver, and many aspects of your machine that don’t really give you a benefit. Now sure, if you put a wallpaper of the Periodic Table of Elements on your background, it could help you if you deal with elements, but in general there isn’t much more than an asthetic effect. “
Read the full article here.
Habits don't count!
Whenever you go to write a document, you save as often as possible. Whenever you lock the door, you double check that it is locked. And whenever you get up out of a seat, you might check to see if your fly has came undone. Many people have habits that they consistantly do that you can almost count on. Yet the funny thing is that most of these things don’t matter. Take for example, locking the door in my garage. The door is always closed anyway, and if someone is going to pry my big automatic metal garage door open, it is going to be fairly easy for them to bust through my flimsy wooden door, but why do I do it? If it really isn’t going to matter in the end, why don’t I just leave the door unlocked, save myself some trouble, and simply close the garage door? Why have I formed this habit of always locking the door on my way out?
It really gets into why we make habits. I think people make habits for a single underlying reason, and I’ll get to that in a second. First I’m going to look at the average person looking to get fit. This person, Tom, lets call him, wants to get fit. Like many other people in America, Tom has stuffed himself on fast food for too long and now he wants to get in shape. So, he decides to go to the Gym. Now Tom has very good willpower and doesn’t really care about the fact that it is hard work. Eveytime he goes to the gym, he puts his keys for his car on his wrist. Pretend that Tom lives in an ideal world, and there is no worrying about theft, and he could just as easily put his keys in his locker. What would be his incentive for putting his keys on his wrist instead of in his locker?
It really is simple. By Tom making it a habit that he is going to put his keys on his wrist, he knows that there is no possibility of him forgetting them in his locker. Now sure he could jsut remember everytime to get the keys out of his locker, but what happens when he is in a rush and forgets? This is why we make habits in general:
We make habits so that we constantly do them, no matter what type of situation.
If Tom was in a hurry and forgot his keys in the bottom of his locker while getting changed, he would be really annoyed when he went out to his car, only to find that he had to walk all the way back to get them. If something else in Tom’s routine changed suddenly, he wouldn’t be thrown off because he would be used to always putting his keys on his wrist while working out.
But how does this apply to people blogging? You might have a certain aspect of posting a blog post that you have to get into a habit of doing. If you forget to type tags into your posts, maybe that is a habit you need to start. That way when you are rushed and need to get out a blog post as fast as possible, you are used to putting in the tags and categories. Maybe you have a blog post that you want to put ‘more’ tags in? In my last blog layout, I needed to put the tag in so that the home page didn’t look messed up. Blogging, in itself, is a habit. In order for me to get posts out to you guys, I have to form a habit to write the ideas for the posts, write the posts, and then edit them.
What habits should you create today?
Social Media and Bob's Pub and Grill.
Imagine Social Media like a lot of resturants that you own. Each of them serve something different. At Chacha102′s Click and Link you can get our semi-famous bookmarks, while at the Cha-Cha-Chatroom and Lounge you get a heaping plate of twitter messages. Each of these resturants has something unique about them. Each serves a different style of media that different types of people like. Some people might like your brand of bookmarks more than your tweets, so they end up visiting your Twitter page more than your Delicious page. But, one day, you decide to launch a new resturant called ChaChapaloza which serves your new invention, The YouTube Slammer. Now, you already have peopel going to your other resturants, but how do you get people to go to your new resturant?
One method you might try is to advertise your new resturant at your existing places. This works fairly well for most people, because if they are already interested in your style of bookmarks, they might want to go try your videos. If you plan on launching any new part of your ‘Social Media Empire’, I strongly suggest doing this. But what if you want to introduce the people that visit your Twitter page, your Delicious page, your Blog, and your videos, and make it easy for them to find you anywhere?
This is where deciding what your focal point in social media is going to be. Often people use their blog as the main place for their content. I try to use it as my main page, and I’ll be implementing more things to allow it to be. But how exactly would I, or you, go about making it my focal point? Here is where we come to the point of this post, besides making you hungry.
For a site to really be a place for all of your content, you need to display everything relative to how relevant it is to your website. If your website is about marketting, but your tweets are mainly focused on your personal life, you shouldn’t make them one of the focal points of the website. You should still put it on the website, incase people are interested, but not in the most prominent position.
Take a look at David Risely’s blog. Notice that Twitter is still on his blog, but because his videos and blog entries are more relevant to his topic, making money while blogging, they are more pominent. Therefore it is likely that his content is going to be viewed by anyone who visits his blog, instead of only people who visit his Vimeo account.
That is the key. Make sure that people can go to one place to see all of your content, and everything is displayed prominetly. Everyone has said that your home page is the representation of you, yet many people simply link to their Twitter accounts and other profiles. Why not actually bring to content to the user so they can see it without clicking? Not only does it make you look like you know more on your subject, it also reuses the content that you have taken time to make.
Twitter via IM. It isn't just about the track.
It is an understatement to say that Twitter is used by a lot of people. With that large amount of people, there are many ways to get Twitter. Some people perfer the web client. Most people, actually, perfer the web client. But sometimes you need something different than the web client. Something that will alert you when certain things happen. This is why I believe that Twitter desktop clients are so popular. Unlike the web site, they run in the background and alert you when something special happens, like getting a reply, a direct message, or something else that requires you attention. It beats all heck for refreshing the page, looking through your Home and Reply tabs trying to figure out what happened recently.
People who do large surveys on what other people like to use while Twittering have figured out that more than 50% of Twitter users use clients other than the website. Most people use Tweetdeck, it having 7.3% of the application market. (Twitterfeed is first, but doesn’t count sine it is automated tweeting) Tweetdeck probably provides the most unique experience for Twitter because it allows you to get updates on specific keywords, similar to track. It does this using the TwitterSearch available at search.twitter.com.
In all, there are over 600 different Twitter applications. Most of which are using direct API calls to the website in order to get Tweets. But what happens when you need to get to Twitter when the website is blocked. In many cases, companies will block websites like Twitter in order to get people to be more productive. This breaks all the Twitter API calls, resulting in, yep, no Tweets on your desktop client. The entire debate on whether Twitter can be useful to your job is up for grabs, but I don’t have a job. I’m trying to Twitter while government paid teachers, sit on their butts during the 4 years I am in highschool, and proceed to waste my time. So, I’m not going to argue whether or not it is beneficial for your job to Twitter. That is up to you.
In order to solve this problem, you first need to understand a little about what Jabber is. Jabber is an open isntant messaging platform that is used by Google Talk and is supported by many clients. PSI, Pidign, etc, all support Jabber. Unlike AIM, MSN, and other networks, Jabber is open so anyone can create an application using it fairly easily. To find more, google ‘Jabber’ and you’ll find more information than you need to know about it/
Let’s examine the problem. Twitter + Unfilter Internet = Happy. Twitter – Unfiltered Internet = Sad.This is, once again, because in order for desktop applications to work, you must have the desktop application go to Twitter.com/api/blah. If that is blocked, you are out of luck. But what if you had a different computer, on an unfiltered connection, go and grab your updates. And then, after it grabbed your updates, it could send you the tweets afterwards, using this new protocol we just learned called Jabber. You would, well, have Twitter via IM!
Originally, when Twitter was first made, Twitter had a IM version, very similar to the one we just described. The unique thing about Twitter’s IM was that it allowed for ‘track’ or the ability to search all of Twitter for certain keywords. This was extremely useful for companies, because if Comcast wanted to bring customer service to Twitter, they just tracked ‘comcast’ and they would find any Tweets about Comcast. But Twitter soon removed this, saying that it the feature was disabled to keep the main service stable. They promised it would return sometime, but, we know that it won’t be coming back anytime soon.
Many believe that Twitter got rid of IM, and would later lease it to specific companies that paid them, as a way of making money. Comcast would now have to pay Twitter so that they could provide customer service on Twitter. Sounds fair enough.
But why did they have to get rid of the IM feature completely? They could have disabled track, and then given the rest of us our real time updates. This, is finally, where this post is headed. I would much rather have Twitter on my Google Talk, with or without track. I think that using IM is a powerful method of recieving updates, one far better than any current desktop client. Because if you enabled IM, you would enable people to get Tweets ANYWHERE, in real time. Instead of having to have a mobile browser on a cell phone, I could just open up my IM client. Instead of having a 3rd party application getting my updates, why couldn’t I just go right to the source and get my Twitter updates from Twitter?
How do you get your Twitter fix everyday? Do you have problems with internet access?