…I’ll be a week ahead on blog posts.
I meant that day to be today, but it’s not. And I’m going on vacation.
This is the kind of thing that should stay behind the curtain for you as a reader.
Next time.
Happy summer.
Category: Blogs
Twitter echelons
I recently was talking to a friend who I consider to be successful on Twitter: he has cracked 10,000 followers in a few months, tweets regularly, and his tweets regularly get picked up (retweeted) and cause a stir.
From his perspective, he’s a long way from the top of the Twitter foodchain, where people have hundreds of thousands of followers and are gaining 5,000+ followers a day (apparently @Oprah just tweeted for the first time this week…how psyched is Evan Williams?)
When networks of relationship are created, they are self-reinforcing, giving real power to early movers who establish themselves (who are in a different category than folks like Oprah who bring their fame to the table so are basically impossible to compete with…she joined 10 hours ago, has tweeted 6 times, and has 195,654 followers right now). This is why it’s incredibly difficult to jump from one circle to the next (100-1,000 followers vs. 1,000 to 10,000 vs. 10,000 to 100,000).
In terms of size of network, Facebook is already in its own category (more than 200 million users!). Twitter is still new enough (just) that you have a couple weeks left to join before you’re too late (heck, you can even start by following @sashadichter).
And if microblogging is the next big online trend, what does this mean for blogs, whose traffic isn’t growing as quickly?
Here’s my take: microblogging will be good for serious bloggers. Yes, there will be a migration of “here’s what I was thinking” from blogs to Twitter/Facebook (the blogs that were just about people’s daily activities make more sense on Twitter/Facebook).
But if you consider this spectrum from microblogging to blogging to newspapers/news weeklies, the question to ask is: 5 years from now, after most of the weekly news magazines have gone out of businesses and many major local papers go belly-up, will there be more or less appetite for thoughtful, analytical, 400-500 word opinion pieces on what is going on in the world?
I think more, and I think bloggers who up their game, who serve a need for a loyal and growing group of followers, will be more in demand, not less, in the near future.
(Oh, and if you really want to be an early adopter, now’s the time to check on Flutter, the leading nanoblogging site. You heard it here first. Click below)
P.S. note the moment in time: “blogging” and “blogger” are both in my spellcheck. “Microblogging” isn’t.
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44 reasons I blog
“Why do you blog?”
I get the question a lot. So here’s a list. I originally wanted to come up with 99 reasons, but 44 is where I ended up.
(If you have serious additions to the list please comment and I’ll approve. I’d still like to get to 99, and if I do I’ll repost the whole list as “99 reasons we blog”).
- It improves my writing
- It forces me to learn how use new social media tools
- It occasionally gives me a reason to fiddle with some HTML code
- It’s practice creating a written end product faster
- It’s a chance to experiment
- It’s a chance to work on my storytelling every day
- It’s a discipline
- It’s a megaphone
- It’s challenging to build my own tribe, from scratch
- It makes me to be more aware of and informed about topics that interest me
- It makes me a contributor to a community I respect
- It’s a chance to go from observation to synthesis every day
- It’s a diary of where my thinking is every day – and over time a reflection of the arc of where I am in my life
- It’s a platform…who knows where that will go?
- It’s free
- It’s become a daily habit, and I’d miss it if it were gone
- It makes my mom proud
- It’s fun to have people email me interesting things and say, “You might want to blog this.”
- It teaches me…about people, about writing, about technology, about storytelling.
- It’s an act of letting go – to take an insight and put it out in the world, asking for nothing in return
- I felt like I had something to say, and it turns out that I do
- I think storytelling isn’t just interesting, it’s important
- I started without a plan and in a short time have a good-sized group of readers – which means that there are a lot of people out there with shared interests who want to come together around these ideas.
- I don’t see anyone else out there linking up marketing, storytelling, influence, nonprofits, philanthropy, and social change…and I think these things are intimately related.
- I may inspire people I’ll never have a chance to meet
- I can share wonderful, undiscovered gems with others
- I’m a little compulsive
- I think the reality of how philanthropists think and make decisions needs to be better integrated into the dialogue about what philanthropy “should” be
- Marketing, storytelling, influencing, tribe-building, leading, creating, experimenting, sharing, testing, getting instant feedback…all good ways to spend my time.
- More people read my blog every day than read my college thesis – and that took a year to write
- Every so often, someone I don’t know emails me to say that something I wrote helped them
- Every so often, someone I do know tells me to keep it up
- Once you feel like (some) people are listening to you, it’s very hard to give that up
- Unexpected posts often strike a chord with people…and the ones I love can bore people to tears
- Learning what does and doesn’t work in spreading ideas online at a very low cost…THAT’S a skill that will only get more important over time
- Maybe, someday, if I keep at this for a few years, they’ll be a book in it
- And even if there isn’t, if I have a tribe of thousands of readers sharing what I’m writing with their friends, why exactly would I need to write a book?
- Traditional newspapers and magazines are dying a slow death. Even if blogs aren’t the end game, distributed, independently-created content is.
- Beats the heck out of a resume as a portfolio and a calling card (Malcolm Gladwell suggests that blogs are the new resume…Seth Godin says maybe you shouldn’t even have a resume.)
- Looking back, I can’t tell which posts I thought would be “good” or “bad”
- Won’t it be cool 5 years from now to look back on 1,000+ posts?
- Now that I know I can blog, I’m not afraid of Twitter (@sashadichter, by the way)
- If it takes 10,000 hours to get good at something, now’s the time to start logging those hours
- We need more hope in the world, and I’d like to be part of that hope
(HT to the SAMBAers’ Hamster Burial Kits & 998 Other Business Ideas for the long-list idea)
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Know enough
You don’t have to know everything to start something. You just have to know enough, and be willing to let the other pieces fall into place over time. In the act of doing you’ll learn how to do “it” better and you’ll learn more about what “it” is.
For example, it’s taken until now for me to figure out how to place all of those fancy Web 2.0 icons at the bottom of each blog post. But I figured it out (it’s a little more trouble than I expected). And now I’m glad they are there. They make it easier for you to spread the word.
So go ahead. If a post (today, tomorrow, next week) strikes you as interesting, click a button. People love to hear from other people about what’s interesting and what’s worth reading.
In the meantime, I’m going to try to figure out if I know enough to start Twittering (yes); and if I have time to follow people on Twitter (maybe); and if I have time to tweet (probably not).
I’d probably be better off doing a better job tackling my RSS feeds.
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Blog rewind?
I like this idea from samstrasser’s.com: blog rewind.
When you start reading a blog, you often end up missing most of what was written before you got there. Sure you can go back to the beginning, and you can use tags and search to find what you like, but all of these ideas beg a few questions:
1. When blogging, are you writing for your committed longtime readers (yes) or for new people (yes)?
2. As a blogger, should you occasionally repost “greatest hits” (e.g.: The 2008 Sasha Dichter Blog Wrapup) (yes, I think, but people don’t seem to click on the links nearly as much as read posts)
3. But wouldn’t it be kind of lame to just take a post from 9 months ago and repost it? (yes)
4. Once you’ve been blogging for long enough, should you look back, find some themes, and turn your blog into a book or an ebook? (hmmm, more interesting and more complicated)
At a minimum, I love the idea of someone creating a blog button that says “PDF this blog” and creates a PDF file of the whole blog (with the ability to customize the timeframe you want).
Since I don’t have these kinds of technical skills, I’m hoping someone reading will get on this ASAP.
(As a related idea, wouldn’t it be cool if you could go, say, to the NY Times site, click a button and get all of Nick Kristof’s columns? Oh wait, you can.)
Links I liked
1. Chris Blattman on using Obama as an ice-breaker in Liberia
2. Fast Company Magazine covering Pulse, Acumen Fund’s new initiative to improve measurement in the social sector
3. Post on Harumafuji (sumo wrestler) — just because I like to be reminded that there are things out there I know absolutely nothing about
4. Owen on six ways NGO’s can do more harm than good.
5. Seth Godin on Thanksgiving
Technorati post – for the spiders
The things you get to learn when trying something new….
Apparently registering with Technorati is a good way to increase blog visibility and traffic. So this post is for the spiders (web crawlers that will find my blog). And, coincidentally, today I learned a little more about what Twitter is, thanks to this Fortune article. Apparently, even the Obama Campaign is twittering (sending 140-character messages with updates to an opt-in group of friends). Go figure.
Happy spidering.