Bloggers post articles, and readers - more often than not also bloggers - respond. What could be simpler? Then why are things so complicated?
Commenting in the blogosphere, and managing those comments is one of the many things in life to which no perfect solution exists.
The blogger’s perspective
Most serious blogs moderate comments, and so they should! Even when you’re convinced to give up control of your message, spam comments can be a multiple of genuine comments, and you need to filter these out. Wordpress’ Akismet module deserves a thumbs up here, as it does most of the work for you.
But often even non-spam comments can be of limited value, like the ‘great article’ comment with a link to the commenter’s blog. Comments can be off-topic, badly spelled or self-serving. Across cultural boundaries, they can also be perceived as offensive, even when not intended. Therefore, as a professional blogger, you should have a blog policy, acting as your contract with the user. Whatever you put in them, the most important article in your blog policy is the last one, where you announce that the terms of use can change without prior notice. This is needed as one can never imagine all the ways how users will interact with a blog.
Company A needs to develop a website. As good practice prescribes, a project manager and team is established. A budget for content & website development is allocated. The team meets a few times, and develops a specification. Development is outsourced. After x weeks, the contractor comes back with a prototype of about 50-100 screens. A printout is made for review. Comments are made, and after a few iterations, the website is ready for the big launch.
Nobody has thought of promoting the website after launch (and the launch was actually a press release). No web statistical package is in place to track visits. After a few months, when this is put in place, company A checks the server logs and finds out …
Or … company A’s first website is well received internally, and a department manager also wants one of those. A micro-site is set-up for a public relations action. Then another for a product launch. Very quickly, company A has a proliferation of websites, using different templates and technologies, with a high cost of ownership, and almost impossible to maintain. Nobody wants to touch or own the system, and it lingers on and on.
If these stories sound too familiar for comfort, then pray that web-based marketing does not matter much in your sector. The good news is that you can make spectacular improvements.
Thanks for your vote on our quick poll how you, as reader or blogger interact with the blogosphere. Tick all the options that apply to you, except for the ones where you are only marginally involved:
Mindmapping is an essential tool that merits more use in many business processes. It increases quality and productivity. Whatever you’re currently using mindmapping for, you’re not using it enough.
This article could easily become a ‘40 uses of mindmapping’ list. It could be a mindmap. But I’d rather focus on a few examples, leaving the rest to your imagination.
Example 1: meeting management
(source: Mindgenius)
The lifecycle of a meeting lends itself well to be managed by a mindmap as a live document:
Announcement of the meeting, with meeting objective, practical information and agenda. You can add reference documents, necessary preparation, …
As confirmation of attendees come in, record them in the mindmap
During the meeting, you can use the mindmap for notetaking. At the end of the meeting, or shortly after, add actions and decisions. You now have a full documentation of the meeting to circulate the next day, rather than cold and sterile ‘minutes’ a few weeks later.
As an option, you could transfer the content of the mindmap into a narrative report, if you need to circulate it more widely.
Mindmaps can be used for a variety of management tasks. You can use them to define your organisation (especially its informal portion), define a business plan, plan a campaign, develop a roadmap, for planning & managing projects, … Continue Reading »
Many conferences are great communities. But they are also hard work. It appears a pity that all this energy is dispersed after the event, only to come back together at the next edition. Meanwhile, assuming quality papers on relevant research have been developed for the conference, it seems a waste to hide it in printed or CD ROM proceedings, rarely opened, or worse, drown it in a scientific repository among thousands or millions of other papers.
For conference participants, especially those presenting papers, the story is equally sad. After spending all this time to write and review a paper, and develop a presentation, it gets only a casual audience on the 3rd parallel session in day 3.
It’s almost as if conferences are designed to spend 80% of effort on 20% of the potential results. So how could we harvest the remaining 80% when the effort is already spent? Continue Reading »
I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. - Richard Stallman
This is a stolen article from Zenhabits. Feel free to steal it forward.
The open-source movement for software has created impressive applications, such as some of the world’s leading content management systems. It has spinoffs on the internet and blogosphere , where Creative Commons offers various licences to authors enabling them to release their work while protecting their author rights.
The benefits of having knowledge in the public domain are paramount. Free access allowing everybody to build upon knowledge takes control away from governments, media, companies and institutions. It improves democracy, empowers individuals and develops the world. It enriches us all. It should be the default option.
Some changes in the marketing blogosphere may be a signal of things to come.
This view is necessarily colored by the sub-segment of the blogosphere I observe, i.e. blogs about business marketing, technology, knowledge management, content management and social entrepreneurship. It represent a particular view, focussing on content-rich, technology-oriented business blogs. Continue Reading »
Joe Pulizzi is the driving force behind Junta42, the web community on everything about content marketing and custom publishing. Over the past 7 months, Junta42 has produced a continuous stream of relevant content, now adding up to a knowledge base of close to a 1000 articles. With the recent addition of the top content marketing blog list and the consequent increase of activity, it’s high time for a discussion with Joe about the emerging discipline of content marketing, and how it is supported by Junta42. This article is a digest based on an e-mail discussion.
When monitoring rss-feeds in a reader, here’ a take on keeping your inbox to the internet clear, while trying to keeping up to speed in your limited time.
Instantaneous abort
Sites with excessive ads (a discrete ad in the lower right column is OK though).
Anything containing the words ‘affiliate’, ‘home business’, ‘money’, ‘free’, … It’s not all bad, but statistically, it has a much lower quality content share.
If any pop-up box moves in.
If a clear summary is absent in your reader, ditch it. Probably it’s a machine-generated spam blog or a link farm.
If a post is excessively short (less than 100 words)
Tier 2
Stop reading list posts.
Skip posts with lame openings. The article may get better, but if you’re pressed for time, why take the risk? In any case, there is abundant content for your very limited time.
Check the source. The reason I need an ‘instantaneous abort’ mechanism is because I’m monitoring search terms from Google’s blogsearch as rss-feeds. This is a very powerful method not to miss anything, but produces a lot of low-quality content as well. Separating out known quality sources in a separate folder helps a lot.
If it still doesn’t suffice
In this case, you’ll need to qualify sources, and let them only in after they meet your stringent criteria. If you’re disappointed (once or a couple of times), be ruthless to wield them out. Your view on your segment will no longer be panoramic, but you can be more confident not to waste your limited time.
Addendum February 16
Especially for this month, but probably beyond, avoid anything containing the word ‘viral’, and if you’re based in the USA, anything with the word ‘recession’.
With over 150 social bookmarking tools to choose from [1-2}, the selection of Diigo is not obvious. But here’s a number of features that - in combination - make Diigo the tool we would never want to be without:
Highlighting: when browsing, you can highlight sections of a page. And as long as you are logged in to your Diigo account, these highlights are preserved during subsequent page visits, from any computer.
Productivity: the mere fact of highlighting (from the toolbar) already bookmarks the page (in seconds). The toolbar allows you then to add tags.
Comments: in addition to highlights and tags, you can annotate pages with personal comments, which you can choose to keep private or make public.
Groups: you can create groups where members collaborate to share and comment on bookmarks within a theme. Members can be ‘be invitation only’ or you can make groups open for any interested Diigo user.
Lists: a personal thematic collection of bookmarks can be easily organised in a list.
RSS feeds: Diigo produces annotated content streams based on your personal bookmarks, lists or groups.
Email alerts: groups members can receive alerts of new postings to a group, which can also be aggregated on a daily or weekly basis.
Tag management: tag clouds are great, but they come with a few issues that Diigo attempts to address, at least in part:
Inconsistent tagging (e.g. renewable, renewables, renewable.energy, “renewable energy”): merging tags by simply editing them is straightforward
popular tags: some tags tend to accumulate 100s of bookmarks over time, making them unusable. Diigo lists ‘related tags’ as a further filter. For example, if you have 100s of tags on ‘renewables’, a specific renewable technology, or country could act as a more specific filter.
(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
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