::Leading With A Limp::

Oversharing and Attention-Blogging Part 1

I read a series of very interesting blog posts today, a rabbit trail of writing that dove into the subject of the (apparent) psychological dysfunction of some bloggers, the decent new media balance of others.

I started with a post by Brad Feld called "I Blog, I Tweet, But Why". Being new to Brad's blog, I looked around the header and sidebar for interesting tidbits before I started reading.  What caught my eye is his Feedburner box in the upper right corner.  At first I thought it said 1205 readers.  Wow, that's quite a few.  Wait a minute...that isn't a five, it's a "k".  What the...one hundred twenty thousand readers?  Is that right?!?  But I digress.

In this post Brad talks about living a public life, a life of blogging and tweeting. It's a short read and does not go too deep, but he brings up some interesting points.  I like what he says about his oversharing, his mis-tweets.  He says,

The notion of living in public is an unintended side effect of this. It's part of the package if you really want to engage with this stuff. I've had my share of bad moments; like Fred the worst is when I piss off my wife Amy with something I write.  It doesn't happen often, but every now and then I get an email saying approximating "please delete that tweet".

I haven't had that experience too much, although I can relate to what he is talking about.  Sometimes those of us that live in the virtual world do share too much about our actual worlds, and it causes more than a little friction.  At the beginning of his post, Brad mentioned Fred Wilson and one of his posts, so I clicked on that to see what inspired his words for today.

I recently started following Fred Wilson on Twitter, at the urging of my friend Jared.  I haven't been reading his blog though, so this was a first for me.  His post from May 25 is called "Can We Live In Public?" In it Fred goes more in depth than Brad did, looking into a life under the lens of public observation via social networks and the new media. He mentions Emily Gould early on, we'll get to her in a moment.

Fred talks about mean things being said in the comments from people he doesn't know.  I've experienced this many times.  To my initial surprise (although I am no longer surprised by this, I have learned), I have even received mean comments from people I do know!  Fred responds by saying this:

But there will be mean things said in the comments. It's easy to say mean things to a computer. Harder to someone's face. I've learned to take the hit and move on. I never delete the comments unless they are spam or porn or hate speech (and I don't mean hating me). I figure by leaving them there, I am airing their hateful views for everyone to see. And I love it when Jackson or someone else who knows me well gives them a piece of mind.

I have opted toward a similar stance and have only deleted comments a handful of times in 8 years of blogging. Even though it stings to see those words come across a computer screen, I leave them there, unless...especially if...they are referencing somebody else. I can take my licks, but I won't let my blog be a forum for others' hatred toward the world.  Fred wrapped up his short post (though longer than Brad's) with this great thought:

But why live in public? It is necessary? No it is not. But humans are social beings. We were social in caves. We are social in cyberspace. And those who are extroverts will be extroverts online. And there is a lot to be gained from living publicly online. As long as you know where to draw the line.

And therein lies the problem.  Many people don't know where to draw the line.  For a look into this world of online social activity I clicked through to Emily Gould's recent article in the New York Times simply titled "Exposed".

This is a lengthy article, probably one of the longest articles that I've read online in a long time.  Usually if something can't be summarized in the first 1,000 characters I don't read it.  However, this article had me captivated.

For ten pages (web pages anyway, five minutes worth of reading) she goes into great detail about her online adventure with Gawker, a site devoted to "media gossip and pop culture round the clock".  Not a site that I have ever been to before, nor will I go in the future, but it's obviously very popular.

Emily talks about how her obsession led to the destruction of at least two relationships, a job and maybe even her sanity.  It's a gripping and somewhat sad tale, although Penelope Trunk does not seem to have any sympathy for her.  On the fourth page of her article, Emily mentioned another blogger that openly stated, "attention is my drug" and infers strongly that she can relate.  She even talked about the addiction of receiving comments on her blog:

It’s easy to compare the initial thrill of evoking an immediate response to a blog post to the rush of getting high, and the diminishing thrills to the process of becoming inured to a drug’s effects. The metaphor is so exact, in fact, that maybe it isn’t a metaphor at all.

I encourage you to read the entire article, it can be found here.  If you are a blogger or a tweeter, I especially encourage you to read this. If you click through to the comments you will find that she gets absolutely blasted, as does The Times, for this article.

In part two of this post I'm going to discuss what fuels attention blogging and oversharing from my point of view.  It's not scientific and it's not pretty, but I'm pretty sure it's accurate in too many circumstances.  It may hit too close to home.  Stay tuned.

New Media Primer: Facebook

**UPDATE TO THIS POST: If you want to see the amazing power of a strong social network in action, check out this group and this group on Facebook.  A young lady at our church got rushed to the hospital a couple of days ago with cranial bleeding.  These pages show how prayer and information can move around very quickly in the new media.  Please pray for Katherine and her family.**

The last couple of posts have been dedicated to starting a blog and following others that blog. We're going to move past blogging now to another platform that is even more interactive than blogging: Facebook.

Most of you have probably heard of Facebook, many of you actually use it.  So what is this medium of communication all about?  Well, if blogging is a roundtable discussion after a lecture, Facebook is like a scrapbooking party with friends and family.  With Facebook you can share pictures, videos, links to blogs and play games.  It's more interactive in the way that you can see and interact with what your friends are doing, but it's also a semi-private venture. Unlike blogging, not everybody can see your information on Facebook.  For that to happen, you must become "friends".  Here is what you need to do to get setup with Facebook.

Step 1: Create an Account

Go to www.facebook.com and set up your account.  This may take a little more time than setting up your blog because it's going to ask you for more information. You don't have to fill out everything right now, but you should put down information that will help others find you, like where you went to high school and college.  The more info you fill out, the happier your new "friends" will be.  You will notice that I keep putting "friends" in quotation marks...I'll stop doing that now, but you may find that eventually people will add you as a friend on Facebook that you do not even know!  These are usually friends of friends.

Step 2: Upload Content

Before you go public with your new profile by letting people know you have it, you need to add some content.  One of the key things is your profile picture.  It drives me crazy when somebody has an FB account but doesn't put a profile pic into it.  You can see from the screenshot of my FB page that you can have some fun with your picture...I have opted for the Matt Singley bobblehead to represent me. A striking likeness, I must say! You can also create photo and video albums for sharing these things with your friends, just look in your left navigation bar for an icon called "photos".  Once you click that you can find the area that will allow you to upload pics and videos.

Step 3: Add Friends

There are many ways to add friends to your Facebook account.  Unlike other things on the internet, nobody can see your profile unless you add them as a friend (unless they are in your network already), and you can't just add friends as you wish...you need to request them.  They will get the request and either approve or disapprove you as a friend. You can go to my profile and add me by clicking here. One way to find friends is to go to the Friend Finder page and submit their email address.  If they are on FB it will show their profile. You can also go to the general search page and search by high school or college (by year as well within these) or by company.  Just keep plugging away, you'll find your friends!

Step 4: Interact

The header (the top of the page) gives you several options.  If you click on "Facebook" in the upper left corner you will be taken to the public timeline.  This is the place where you can see what your friends are up to.  Facebook will pull events and actions from your friends and put them here for you to see.  Among other things, you will notice that your friend's birthdays are linked on the right side.  So when one of my FB friends is celebrating a birthday it's easy enough for me to go to their profile page and write on their wall.  Which brings us to interactivity with things like, "The Wall"

The Wall is a public area within each person's profile that allows you to write messages to each other.  I can go to my friends wall and write something like, "Hey, I missed you at the concert the other night, hope you are okay".  They (along with the rest of the people that are friends with my friend) can see this message.  He can then reply on my wall, or he can send me a private message.

Below each person's profile picture is an area that says "Send (your friend's name) a Message".  This is an area for private messages, they are only seen by the person you are sending them to.  This is a great feature for things that are a little more private in nature.

Step 5: Participate

Facebook has several different ways of connecting with other people in large or small groups. One way is an event page.  Events are usually one-time occurrences that you can be invited to, or if you are the one putting on the event, you can invite others. For example, my friend TJ is hosting a music gig next month, so he created this event page.  This way he can send us information, keep track of who is coming and who isn't, and market the event.  Another thing you can join is a group.  This page shows you what Bel Air Pres does for the church group.

Creating an event or a group is a great way to keep in touch and send information to many people quickly and easily.  For example, my friend Syd has set up a group to pray for a woman from our church that is really sick and in the hospital for brain surgery as I type this.  I appreciate that I can check in and get updates so easily, without expecting Syd to call everybody on the list.  In this way Facebook is making our church community feel smaller and very close to one another.

Step 6: Play

As great as Facebook is for keeping track of friends, it's also a good place to play with them!  I think the most popular application for gaming on Facebook is Scrabulous.  I know many Scrabulous addicts, they just can't seem to get enough.  You can start a Scrabulous game within your Facebook account, but I must warn you...once you start it's hard to stop. There are many other games and activites on Facebook that you can explore, but I tend not to pursue them a lot.  Can you say "productivity killer"?

That's about it!  Of course there is more to Facebook than what I have written here, but this should be enough to get you started.  Don't forget to add me as a friend! Oh, and if I'm leaving out anything that you think is worthy of mentioning, please put it in the comments section of this post so we can all see it.

The next New Media primer post that I write will be about one of my favorite social networks: Twitter!

New Media Primer: Following Other Bloggers

In the last post we talked about creating a blog, this post will talk about following other bloggers.

I currently follow just over 200 bloggers.  You may wonder how I keep up with all of them without spending all day clicking from one page to the next.  The answer is simple: I use a feed reader.

A "feed" is the name for a post that goes onto a blog that is supported by RSS (really simple syndication).  RSS allows people to dump their feeds into one place so they can neatly sort and read them.  Think of it like a newspaper: the blogosphere is the entire newspaper, made up of different sections and articles.  One blog post equals one article.  Just like you wouldn't expect the newpaper company to deliver one article to you at a time, likewise you should not expect to have to read one blog at a time.  Enter the feed reader (the newspaper), which help you collect them all.

While there are many choices of feed readers, I'm going to explain how to set this up through Google. 

Step 1: Set up an account with Google

Look in the upper right corner of the Google homepage.  You'll see an area that says "sign in".  Click that, then on the next screen, click "create an account now", which you can find on the right side of the page.  Your next screen will ask you for several pieces of information, but should be quick and easy to fill out.  Got it?  Great...sign in and move on to step 2

Step 2: Log into Google Reader

Google Reader will store and sort your blog feeds that you want to follow.  Go to www.google.com/reader to get started.  Once there, let's go find a blog to subscribe to!  Open a new tab or window and go to www.LeadingWithALimp.com

Step 3: Add a Feed

Once you have arrived at the blog you want to subscribe to there are a few ways to add this to your Google reader.  First, look for the universal RSS symbol, which is a orange square with white waves in it.  At Leading With A Limp you can see that it appears in two different places on the page...on the right column and in the address bar.  It appears in the address bar in Firefox, in Internet Explorer it's going to be in the menu bar that stretches across the screen right above the main viewing area.  When you click these they should give you an option to subscribe in Google or in a feed reader of your choice.

Another way of subscribing, which a lot of people find even easier, is to copy and paste the address of the blog right into the Google reader.  It will magically find the feed and at it to your list! This is particularly effective when services like Feedburner mess up.  It happens, technology isn't perfect yet...but it's getting there!

Step 4: Sort

  Just like a newspaper has sections (sports, business, metro life) I like my feeds to be sorted into categories.  I have labeled mine things like "Pure Geek", "Marketing" and "Bel Air Blogs".  Using the settings found in Google Reader, I categorize and sometimes even rename the blogs that I subscribe to.   Since I follow so many blogs, this makes it easier for me to read what I want and when I want it.

Step 5: Start Reading!

You will naturally find blogs over time that you want to subscribe to, so don't worry about finding everything all at once.  Very often bloggers keep blogrolls on the sides of their main page, so if you find a blogger you like, browse through their blogroll since they likely subscribe to similar people.  Add away!  Here are some tips for the morning reading time:

• In Google Reader your bests friends are the "J" and the "K" keys.  Striking "J" moves you forward to the next unread entry, striking "K" sends you back one.  Very useful.
• If you find something that you want to read more in depth or refer to at a later date, just "star" the item! You can find "Add Star" at the bottom of each post you are reading.  Later you can go back to your starred items and go through it closely, or refer it to a friend.
• Speaking of referring to a friend...you should share the most interesting stories!  Right next to the "Add Star" button is the "Share" button. This will put it onto your shared blog (everyone in Google has one, here is mine), or if you are a geek like me, you can add a widget to your blog that will show all of your shared stories.  Another cool and recently-added feature is that your shared posts will go to friends of your that have gmail accounts and have agreed to see your shared items.  I love this...people that are similar to me recommending blog articles to read!

That's it!  Well, that is to say, that is it for this post.  You can explore Google Reader or another feed reader, they will have plenty of other options for customizing your reading experience.  If you follow more than a handful of blogs, I strongly recommend using the RSS technology to keep track of them.

You can start by subscribing to mine!

See you in the next post, where we will explore Facebook with a little bit of depth.

New Media Primer: Blogging

This is the first entry into a mini-series I am writing about the New Media.  To some, the NM is a way of life, to others it's a foreign concept and to still others it's a threat to the old way of communicating ideas and actions.  No matter where you fall in this, I think this series should be of some interest to you. Today I will cover blogging, how to set one up, and what to do once it is set up.

Blogging has been around for the better part of a decade, although it's really come into maturity in the last few years.  I actually missed my billion-dollar idea about eight years ago when I coded an entire blogging platform by hand, but then never pursued the commercial application.  I thought, "sure, I like to post up my thoughts and have others comment on them, but would this idea really take root in the real world"?  We all know the answer to that question now.  So instead of owning my own country, here I sit in front of my computer in SoCal, telling others about blogging and it's benefits. :) Me? Bitter?  Nah...

The word 'blog' is a shortened version of 'web log', in other words, an online journal.  Most people have kept a journal or diary of some sort at some point in their life, so think of a blog that way.  The difference?  Anybody can read your journal, and not just read it...but leave comments about what they think!  Yes, the New Media is about radical transparency and global information collaboration.

If you are comfortable with the idea of blogging and want to get your ideas out there for the world to see, I'm going to tell you how to get started now.  BTW, as a side note, most blogging platforms can let you set your page to 'private' so that only people you allow or invite can read your blog.  You'll have to figure that part out on your own however, I'm going to tell you how to share your information with the world.

Step 1: Select a Platform

There are many, many blogging platforms (services) that you can use.  I have been using TypePad for about 2.5 years and I love it.  This is a pay service, and it allows me a tremendous amount of control over content and code.  For about $15/month I can do what I want, when I want to my blog.  This may be overkill for the beginning blogger, I'll talk about free services in a moment.  If you want to get started on TypePad, just click here and you will be taken to a page where you can start a free trial.  It should take about 10 minutes to set up, and it's very intuitive, you just follow the prompts and fill in the information that it asks for.

Another very popular platform is WordPress.  This is a free or paid service, depending on which features you want.  I don't use WordPress, but I know a lot of people that do.  A lot.

My favorite totally free service is Tumblr.  It's a very simple platform without a lot of bells and whistles.  I like that!  I like it so much, I started a mini-blog over there a while ago, intended to be my floating thoughts.  I saw a Twitter stream the other day between Kem Meyer and others that involved Tumblr as a destination for some beginning bloggers.  I totally agree.  From sign-up to first post should take you about 2 minutes...if you're slow.

Google has a great blogging service called...well, blogger.  It's free and very popular.  This is also a great option for people to use, and signing up is simple.  You never know who you'll find there, people like my wife and my son. 

Now is the most important part...select one of those platforms (and this is far from an exhaustive list, but I don't want to overwhelm you with choices) and sign up!   Then on to step 2...

Step 2: Know Your Audience

Are you writing your blog for Uncle Floyd and Aunt Mildred in Kansas so they can keep track of the kids, or are you wanting to share your business knowledge with a broader audience?  If you want people to follow you...and keep following you...then you need to know the answer to this.

A personal blog, that is, one that is familial and very personal, can be done very well.  Take a look at my friend Alli McKenney's blog.  She takes approximately 6,430 pictures of her kids every day and then puts the best of the best online for her friends and family to see.  It's very well done! That's an example of a good personal blog. Cute kids, too!

Think you know a lot about your industry?  Then write about it!  Check out VC and marketing guru Guy Kawasaki's blog.  He gets a ton of traffic through here because he is an authority on many things, and people want to know what he has to say.  Same thing with Seth Godin's blog.  He's an author and speaker, and very well respected.  He's an authority, so he writes about what he knows.  That isn't to say that you have to be super popular to have a great blog. Perhaps you like to knit.  Hey, who doesn't? Make a blog about it and share your passion and knowledge with the world.

Step 3: Write, Baby, Write!

Want a lot of readers?  Keep your posts short.  I know, I am totally violating that right now.  Call it creative license.  But do write...and write often!  I lost 500+ regular readers over the last 8 months because I haven't been blogging with frequency or passion.  If you stay regular, and if you stay passionate, you will have people find you and follow you, it's just that simple.  I think if you are putting up posts (the name for an entry on your blog) 2-3 times per week, you'll be just fine.  Of course some people have to post every 15 minutes, but that is more of a spiritual gift than anything.

Step 4: Interact

At the bottom of most posts is an area for people to comment on what you just wrote.  There is a reason that is there...people want to interact with you!  A blog is a platform for you to get your ideas out to others (like a lecture of sermon), but the big difference is that it's also a place for people to respond.  So suddenly your thoughts have moved from a lecture to a roundtable discussion!  I've found that fewer than 10% of the number of people that come by and read actually comment, so if you only get one or two people leaving their thoughts, don't be discouraged!  Make sure you talk back to them!  Leave a comment in your own comment section in reply to them!  One blogger that does this just about better than anyone is Anne Jackson.  Reading through her comments feels like eavesdropping on a fireside chat...it's very conversational, and she often replies directly to those that say things about her posts.  Very cool. 

Of course some people don't want to have comments on, and that's fine.  Seth Godin, who I mentioned earlier, doesn't allow any comments on his post.  This works well for Seth, but probably not so well for start-up bloggers.

Step 5: Share The Love!

Once you start blogging, others are going to follow you (which I will explain in detail in the next post).  You will follow others as well.  When you find some bloggers you like, share the love with your readers!  Create a blogroll.  That's an area in the sidebar where you link to other blogs.  Some people have blogrolls as extensive as a phone book, others (like myself) believe that too much information just makes people ignore it.  On my blog I have a rotating blogroll, so every time you refresh the page it's a different group of people.  Three categories (soon to be four), five people in each category per page load.  Simple is better.  If you want to know how to create a rotating blogroll, check out my post here.

If you made it this far....God bless you for your persitence!  In the next post we'll look at how to follow other people's blogs without clicking through to each page one at a time.  It's easier than it sounds, I personally follow 201 blogs and it takes very little time or effort to do so.