August 10th, 2009 §
Just found out my article was mentioned in Moleskinerie. So, welcome – readers from Moleskinerie!
I find that it’s almost impossible to do anything without penning down my thoughts in a physical diary or journal of some sort. I now have about four ongoing journals I keep notes on, and I didn’t think it was necessary to put everything down, but now I do.
Why Blogs Don’t Always Work
My initial reluctance to keep a journal was driven by the fear that I wouldn’t use it – simply because I would end up putting my notes on a blog, or on a wiki, or on twitter, or on little text files that I could sync across multiple computers using Dropbox (you can see where this is going)… and that would cause my £14 moleskine left there to collect dust – a thought that just drives crazy.
So, I initially toyed around with the idea of having a blog take care of that. Except that I have more than one blog, each addressing specific types of interests I have. Sometimes, the stuff I think about doesn’t quite fit in anywhere. Also, they need to be organized and polished a bit more before it comes out as a blog post.
Then, there’s the issue of private thoughts. Stuff I don’t want people to know. Or stuff that I’m still sorting out in my mind and I’m not quite done with them yet because they’re quite ephemeral and end up forgetting about them. A public blog won’t be good for that. And I don’t like the idea of protected posts.
So, I opened a private blog. But that didn’t work either, because I needed a computer to do that – and worse, a blog format is almost always linear – and trying to do doodles, sketches and arrows all over the place on a blog is possible, but difficult. I realized that my thoughts were pinging back and forth so often that writing it out as a blog post wasn’t always the best way to express what was going on in my mind.
Minimizing the Paralyzing Fear of not being able to control your own Destiny
Then I was about ready to give up, except that I often worry a lot about life so much that it gets me depressed, and there was just too many things I was trying to sort out in my mind, so I finally got down and started writing stuff down on paper. And doing that just solved my problems.
It wasn’t that I needed to write it down – but getting my thoughts out and putting it on somewhere permanent like a piece of paper was so liberating, it was like a huge burden being lifted off my chest.
And it didn’t just work for personal stuff, either. In fact, a lot of the stuff I worry about is about ideas. Like, how best to communicate something to my boss, or planning the next steps for my next sideproject, or calculating the cost of financing my dream home or something like that. Stuff that gets you depressed when you try to sort it out in your mind without any kind of external assistance, even if they were fairly stimulating when you first thought about them.
I drew up a simple diagram (actually took me a good hour) that describes how I view the different tools come into play, and how they help my thinking process, in general. While I still blog a lot to get my thoughts out, there’s a certain threshold I find myself struggling to get past, and this is how I end up using different tools to support my “thinking” needs.
Where I start really depends on what kind of message I’m trying to convey, and what type of output I’m trying to produce. If it’s something public, that I wouldn’t mind feedback on – then a blog or a public twitter message does the job nicely. But if it’s something more conversational (either with myself or personal friends), then I tend to use closed-off communities, or a private blog. Then, there are just other things that are way too complex to be pushing around using blogs or comments on social networking sites, then I ought just to pull out a piece of paper or my journal and start sketching or scribbling notes.
Other folks might do it in different ways, but this sort of works for me for now, and I intend to stick with it. I am starting to believe that writing unpolished scribbles and doodles doesn’t mean that I’m disorganized or incapable of communicating my ideas. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I find that it’s actually part of my communication process, and that it’s a skill that gets better over time.
February 1st, 2009 §
I’ve been on Twitter for awhile now but I’ve only started using it extensively as a:
- social graphing tool
- messaging tool
- friending tool
Twitter works best in two ways:
- avid follower
- ambient intimacy (credits to Cennydd Bowles for introducing the term to me)
Avid Follower
An avid follower is someone who uses Twitter to see what other interesting people are up to. Recently, a massive surve of celebrities have hopped onto the twitter bandwagon, creating what seems to be a tipping-point of the phenomenon. But that’s twitter for the mainstream. Consider specific industries, especially the web-related ones. Twitter is really great for getting to know prominent leaders in the field, and for getting the latest scoop about stuff around their lives.
Ambient Intimacy
Twitter is also great for folks who want to keep track of each other’s activities. I know it sounds a lot like Facebook, but it’s harder to add someone to your facebook account that you don’t know. With twitter, there’s less problems because it doesn’t reveal a lot about you. People who choose to follow you on twitter should already know who you are, by trusting what you have already published online, or by your twitter history.
It’s for that conference meet-up where you met someone but didn’t want to send emails to over and over again, or that pub meet where you wanted to find out more about the speaker who gave an interesting presentation.
It’s also useful for self-organized groups, such as volunteer groups or charities, where everyone does their own thing, but comes together once in awhile to do something. It’s easy to pick up on a conversation from a Twitter post at the next meetup.
Twitter works for me
I’ve found Twitter to be beneficial for me in the following ways:
- exchanging ideas with people from the user experience industry
- finding out the latest news or events
- exploring opportunities offered by people that I’m following (jobs, promos, offers, etc.)
Some people use twitter for social accountability, or as a to-do list. Some applications extend their functionality with twitter as an alert tool – rememberthemilk is one of them.
But you already knew that.
What you may not know is how fast I can get to know people on twitter, which helps to break down the ice when I speak to people or want to build on relationships.
I recently volunteered for a project involving some really fantastic people in the user experience industry. It was really hard at first to speak up, especially when I consider my relative lack of experience in the field – but because everyone encouraged each other to connect via twitter, I am starting to get to know these individuals a bit better, even though we’ve never met in person.
Filling the gaps
Twitter isn’t a substitute for real face-to-face relationships, but it does fill some gaps – especially in between times when you don’t meet face-to-face with people. It makes sense for some of us who are really busy but still want to maintain good relationships, and for those of us who want to build relationships that cross physical barriers.
I don’t think calling Twitter a “micro-blogging” platform does it justice – simply because people tend to think of it as a small blog. It’s not quite that. There are a lot of things that tend to be published on blogs require more than the 140 character limit that’s placed on each tweet, and people just don’t understand why they would want to blog about walking their dog or eating a sandwich.
So, coming back to the ‘ambient intimacy’ term – I believe it’s really all about that “gap” of relationships you wanted to address – people who you want to build a relationships with or get to know, who aren’t as accessible.
With all that said, I’m looking to meet new people: http://twitter.com/jaremfan
August 10th, 2008 §
I now run four Wordpress blogs simultaneously for different purposes. I setup, install, modify, tweak, and maintain all the code myself. I’ve worked with the Wordpress core, templates/themes, plugins, and then some. I’ve had some bad days with it, but at any given day, I don’t think I would give Wordpress up for any other blogging platform out there. Here’s why:
Wordpress is constantly improving
Wordpress gets updated regularly, and it keeps improving at each release. It’s currently at version 2.6, and I like the new features like article versioning, the new plugin page, and the new theme preview feature. It’s driven by open source, so anyone can contribute the best and latest thing that people want or need. If you want to see a new feature in the next release, go ahead and write it and contribute to the source. It’s completely free and open.
Tons of Plugins
The default Wordpress bundle comes with a spam filter plugin and a plugin that allows you to print the words “Hello, Dolly” somewhere on the site. If you want more functionality, there are tons of plugins that do almost everything, from tracking user behavior, improving SEO, adding a photo gallery, or finding out which are your most popular posts.
Here are the list of plugins I can’t do without:
And here are some really recommended ones:
Tons of Themes
I don’t know why but there are way too many Wordpress themes out there. So there’s a high chance that you’ll be able to find one that suites your needs. If this is not the case, hire yourself a Wordpress template/theme designer. You can find them quite easily too, and at affordable rates.
Wordpress is built on PHP
PHP is a programming language used to build of websites today. PHP isn’t the best for everything, but it’s good for Wordpress because
- There are an abundance of PHP programmers, so you can get a lot of help
- PHP is relatively straightforward to learn, code and debug
- PHP is mature, and thus compatible with most web hosting services
- PHP is also improving, and Wordpress leverages on that
Wordpress is easy to use
A friend of mine who’s surveying blogging systems says he likes the way Wordpress keeps posts and pages seperate. It just makes sense. Blogging with Wordpress isn’t rocket science at all. It just works. Before using Wordpress, I was on blogspot and I was fiddling around with blogging software, because I just couldn’t get the layout to work right or I wanted to do more stuff. But with Wordpress I’ve never needed any software. I just blog from Wordpress itself.
If there’s any reason to hate Wordpress, it’s that the themes might be a bit tricky to manipulate on your own. If you’re wanting to change the look and feel of your website extensively, you’ll need to know HTML, PHP and CSS. But then, that’s true for a lot of other blogging platforms. It’s really hard to get around that. Practically all websites run off HTML and CSS.
June 30th, 2008 §
Most people don’t blog – they don’t have any real reason to. But most people can discover the benefits of blogging, and some even want to try. The problem with starting isn’t about being technical. You don’t have to be a techie to start blogging – otherwise generation MySpace wouldn’t have happened.
People have all sorts of reasons for not starting a blog, but I mostly feel that people are trapped in a consumption culture, and don’t bother to try. Bloggers tend to be production-inclined. We believe that the stuff we blog about needs to be:
- archived
- shared
- discussed
It’s not as though blogs appeared on the scene and that it was absolutely the best thing since sliced bread. People who started blogs already had specific traits on which to build on, but were open enough to adapt with and sustain the emerging blog culture – whatever that may be (it keeps changing).
They could be anyone – visionaries who thought deep about specific topics, a socialite wanting to publish their whereabouts, a mother reflecting vicariously about childhood, or any regular Joe.
But to blog is to learn, give, and adapt.
If that’s what you’re after, then you’ve pretty much covered the basics of blogging. The rest are just details. And that’s what most blog how-to articles focus on, and there are tons of them. Articles on how to set up your blog, how to make it pretty, what topics to discuss, what style to write in, and on and on and on.
Blogging is an extension of yourself. It’s not the whole you, but just a part. It’s a part of you that you give to others – which is actually the permission to allow people play around with, talk about, and share your thoughts.
Therefore, you need to decide which part of you to share with the rest of the world. I feel this part is important, but I think everyone gets this. Whether or not these things are appropriate to share is subjective. Sometimes it’s worth just trying it out, while keeping certain things under wraps – like your identity, location, and so on. This is what creates the blog’s identity.
The difficult part about blogging is in managing this identity.
It sounds silly at first – why would anyone care about managing a blog’s identity? It matters when you realize that the blog is a part of you. It’s like shaving or dressing up.
One good way is to maintain seperate blogs that have separate identities. Another way is by keeping specific posts private. Yet another way is to use categories. Blog templates and themes can assist in some aspects. There are many ways to communicate a cohesive blog identity.
A lot of people get blogging wrong because they don’t realize that blogging isn’t like writing a book. It’s like a public journal, and bloggers can make mistakes, but good bloggers learn from their mistakes and publish them out and communicate their lessons with their readers. You’re not supposed to be perfect before you can start a blog. In fact, being imperfect is one real reason why you should.
But most people don’t want to look stupid, so they would rather avoid it. Bloggers, instead, find healing and connection with seemingly anonymous audiences that it drives them to write better and give more. It’s kind of a “good world”-”bad world” perspective. But it’s a perspective worth exploring.
The good thing is that you can start small, and find your way around until you reach a comfortable spot.
I started off writing personal thoughts and reflections, and my readers were mostly friends. I began to realize a lot of things I wanted to say were meant for a larger audience, and I created new blogs for that. I began to talk to other bloggers about the things they said. Some responded. Some were trolls. I killed off some older blogs, and kept some regularly updated. But the more I blogged, the more I realized that blogging is really about adapting socially. The benefits of blogging are due to its social nature.
If you’re not sure how to start a blog, start with asking yourself the question – why? It gets a lot easier after that.
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