Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

This past Sunday evening’s #blogchat discussion on Twitter caught my eye – the topic was dealing with and avoiding blogger burnout.

You can get the full transcript of the tweets here (great for giving people a sense of how an hour-long hashtagged topic-specific “talk” on Twitter can work) but here are a few of my favorite ideas from host @MackCollier’s very helpful summary blog post about the chat:

**  Switch things up and try doing a podcast or video post - @mtlb

**  Bring in new bloggers or have others do guest posts - @eric_urbane

**  Try using an editorial calendar for your blog - @jdebberly

**  Keep a notebook with you to jot down post ideas - @lorieahuston

**  Check out your blog’s archives to see if you can find a new take -@amanda_pants

David Armano (@Armano on Twitter) said, “Ok, honestly, try really short posts to avoid burnout. Worked for me recently because it cut to chase.”

I like the suggestion to go super-short and to the point, almost tweet-ish, rather than the “standard” 300-500 word post.  I saw something similar in another tweet recently (can’t remember the source) which said that you need to quit trying to win a big ol’ Pulitzer Prize with every post. Just get a meaty thought up there and move on.

Short is OK.

For an obsessive rambler like me, that’s very helpful advice.

Here’s a handy resource that was tweeted during the chat:  10 things to do when you feel you have nothing to blog about.

When it comes to blogging, pay particular attention to suggestions for organizing your ideas.  I’ve found that when my thoughts are laid out in a list of possible posts or in an editorial calendar, my biggest problem is finding time to write about everything that interests me!

If you have an account on the Flickr photo-sharing site – like the Pacific Aviation Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii or South African Tourism – it’s easy to make one of your sets of pictures into a little rotating gallery.

You can do this in a number of ways….in a blog post (the way you see it below in this post,) in a wiki page like this one for Jelly Coworking in Round Rock, Texas, or anywhere else that allows you to embed HTML code, which are the letters and numbers that are seen as text or graphics on a website.

Here’s how I did the Christmas ornament one featured here….

Go to the page in your Flickr account where you’ve grouped your set – here’s mine for the ornament pictures.  At the top right you’ll see a clickable link labeled “Slideshow.”  When you click that, it will open in slideshow mode.

Look again in the upper right corner, where it says “Share.”  Click that, and you’ll see two options: a URL to copy and paste somewhere, and “Grab the embed HTML.”  Copy the embed HTML to your clipboard (or right click the text to copy it) then paste the whole thing it wherever you’d like to show off your gallery.

In a blog post or wiki, for example, paste it when your draft is in “HTML” or “Source code” mode (the pasted code doesn’t seem to “take” in other modes.)  Include a direct URL link just before the gallery graphic – as I’ve done in this post –  in case the slideshow box can’t be seen on some readers’ computers.

That’s it! You’re a genius!  Happy Holidays….

For RSS readers and anyone who can’t see the box below, the URL for the slideshow is here.

One of the world’s biggest and best tech conferences is South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) held every March in Austin, Texas.

I recommend it for anyone who wants to be immersed in the future of communications as it is happening right now.

Remember….Twitter was first truly introduced (hyped?) at SXSWi. Cutting edge shows up there first.

I spoke with fellow writer Pam Mandel at SXSWi 2009 about travel blogging; our panel was livestreamed on Qik by Todd Lucier and got some favorable coverage from UpTake, the Austin American-Statesman, attendees in the room and those watching the hashtag on Twitter.

This year, I proposed two different panels to be considered for inclusion in the conference schedule.

At SXSWi, response from the community-based Panel Picker voting public “….accounts for about 30% of the decision-making process for 2010 SXSW panel programming,” according to the SXSWi Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs.)

So, if you’re interested in my ideas, particularly if you might attend SXSWi, please register for free on the Panel Picker site and take a look at these possible panels (and any others that interest you….)

• Can They Buy Your Voice?  Blog Disclosure Ethics:  We’ll talk about “best practices” for disclosing sponsor help in a blog post and how companies can reach out to bloggers ethically with products and service demos, among other knotty questions. Will include a discussion of press trips.
• Drawing the Line Between Free and Paid: Are there some “rules of thumb” to know when it’s smart business to let one’s brain be picked for free, and when it’s smart to announce rate sheet fees? How can you turn the conversation from a free discussion to a paid consultation without being “that guy?”  Content DOES have value.

Thanks for your support, and hope to see you in Austin in March 2010.

We’ve all been there – you’re reading along through the comments in a blog post, and two (or more) of the commenters start getting into a written tussle, a back-and-forth that gets increasingly heated and increasingly irrelevant to the original post topic.

It’s similar to watching two drunks arguing at a party;  the usual reaction from more sober bystanders is, “Get me out the heck out of here.” Same thing on a blog – readers see all that racket and click away for more rational discussions elsewhere. Maybe a few want to hang around and watch the train wreck, but really, why feed the voyeurs?

If you’re the blog administrator, what should you do when your post is hijacked like that?

It’s easy to remove stupid, obviously spammy comments from trolls, but what about apparently rational readers who have a bone to pick with each other?

On the Perceptive Travel Blog, I wrote a post about the Art Car Parade in Houston, Texas – a really fun and quirky annual event with wildly decorated cars. Two commenters starting disagreeing about whether a woman in the parade had shouted foul language at bystanders, particularly children.

Since their own language remained relatively civil, I didn’t remove any of their comments, even when the Cranky Factor escalated.

My view is that it’s usually not a good idea to remove comments once they’re posted because yes, people DO remember that they were there, and as long as the discussion was reasonable, readers will wonder what the blog owner is trying to hide or squelch. They’ll often leave comments asking about the missing comments, too. (At times like that, you’ll be almost ready to swear off of two-way communications like blogging….)

The best information I’ve found so far also indicates that I’m not held liable for comments left on my blog (for you legal beagles out there who are wondering, because I wondered, too.)

So, after my one “let’s all calm down” comment failed to stop the additional verbiage coming in from these two women, I closed all comments on the post.

I’ve never done that before – it felt a bit odd, but I figured if I was tired of reading about who-said-what, my readers were as well, and my first responsibility on that blog is to provide good travel-related content, not a platform for those two to holler at each other.

Here’s what I wrote in the final comment:

“I’m now closing comments on this post, which is supposed to be about the Art Car Parade and not devolve into a “who said what in Houston.”

Dawn, I know you submitted another long comment in response to Nikki’s comment, but I really do not want my blog (which I think of as my house) becoming a platform for arguments about some other woman’s actions and whether they occurred or not on the day of the parade.

Y’all take your discussion elsewhere, please. Start blogs or something.

For all the other readers, just go see the danged event, but any verbal or actual brawling that occurs there is out of my control.”

That’s my take on the situation – most comment brawls only make the commenters look silly, not the blog author, but at some point, hey, it’s MY blog.  The comments are an integral part of any blog, but if they run off the rails, they also run the blog off the rails.  I stopped the train.

What would you do in a similar situation?

This morning I Stumbled a post on the Travels with Children blog; it’s a fairly negative review of the Crayola Factory in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Author Linda didn’t feel that the place met her expectations for a creative experience for her kids. There was no “wild blogger” ranting or digital spittle – she was simply disappointed in what visitors get there for their money and time.

Since she linked to the Crayola establishment (they should see that by monitoring inbound links/backlinks) and wrote about them as “Crayola Factory in Easton, Pennsylvania” (which any decent Google Alert should catch) I would expect a sharp PR/marketing person from the company to check out the post and leave a comment.

You know, at least something along the lines of “We’re sorry you were disappointed, we’ll take your ideas into consideration, we have a facility redesign in the works, blah blah.”

Figure the odds that anyone actually does that.

A quick glance would show anyone that Linda’s blog isn’t the home of some pajama’d nutcase. She has active and engaged readers who are interested in her family travel topic.

The business communications world often still doesn’t get it, so the review will probably sit there, unanswered.

To me, that’s a lost opportunity for Crayola to reach out to customers and possibly turn a negative impression into a positive one.

Your thoughts?