Bloggers goes to lots of events. We do meet ups, conferences, breakfasts and bar crawls. I’ve traveled cross town, across the state, and across the border to hook up with my contacts, share ideas, and talk in person. If you blog, you’ve done it as well.
We come away from those events on natural highs. We promise ourselves we’ll do some things. Perhaps for you it was simply to stay in touch. Other folks will promise to change their blog, some will say they’ll change their life. Some people even offer business opportunities. It’s a very exciting time in our lives.
Now months have gone by. The emails have dropped off. The blog is stagnant. Your business plan isn’t even started. What happened?
It isn’t just you, it’s a lot of folks. And it isn’t all on you to blame. You might be disagreeing about now, and maybe you’re right. I want to challenge that a bit though and tell you something that made SOBCon different than other gatherings you might have attended.
What I’m willing to wager is that most meet ups, conferences, and such you aren’t just running into a few like minded folks, you’re running into a whole slew of them. These are people you’ve corresponded with before. You and them share social networks and perhaps dozens if not hundreds of contacts. And those contacts will be there as well. Heck, you probably have dinners out with some of your fellow bloggers that you see at conferences and such.
Diversity is the first thing that made SOBCon stand out. This wasn’t a group of the top bloggerati coming together for the fourth time that year. You wouldn’t find a whole mess of successful online businesses. Not even everyone there could hear.
Old and common ground was shared by few, as business owners with no blogs worked side by side with professional bloggers. At the same table were folks like me, small time bloggers and working professionals looking to move into other areas.
Differences in goals wasn’t the only diversity. Australia, Great Britain, and Canada were represented, as well as men and women from all across the US. Layered on that were individuals with disabilities, most notably Stephen J. Hopson, and Karen Putz, both deaf.
This mix of personalities, desires, and backgrounds, rather than being a stumbling block, became a catalyst. We were each positively challenged from the boat ride on Friday evening until our departure on Sunday afternoon.
SOBCon had a lot more to offer than diversity. Keep your eyes open for the next part of how SOBCon Lives On.
20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider: “There’s a lot of reasons why you might choose a post over a page or a page over a post (that’s for another post) - but today I thought I’d highlight a few ‘pages’ that I have here on ProBlogger as examples of pages that bloggers might want to develop to promote their blog to different groups of people. Some are more essential in my mind than others but all have been helpful in the development of my own blogs.”
With that statement, Darren Rowse leads us into the 20 pages all bloggers should consider. The idea is to provide permanent and useful pages on your blog for landing and internal referrals. Some of these pages are more critical than others.
Most important on the list would be the About and Contact pages. Darren has this to say on the About page.
Having an about page is essential in my mind as it gives new readers to your blog a snapshot of who you are and why they should subscribe to your blog. This is the page that I go to every time I hit a new blog - if they don’t have one it decreases my chances of subscribing significantly.
He couldn’t be more right. I visit lots of about pages, especially when I’m new to a blog.
Other pages brought up include a Subscriber page, and Series pages. A Subscriber page is used to clarify what subscription is and how to subscribe. This helps bridge the gap for those new to RSS and blogs.
Series pages allow you to consolidate a series of posts in one page. One could also be used to provide a central page linking to the individual posts in a series. This allows readers to select only the articles they are most interested in.
Overall this should be a must read for new bloggers or bloggers wondering how to get more ’stick’ to their blog.
Are you still reading magazines and newspapers? What are reasons for still enjoying print over pixels on occasion? Reading print is faster than reading online.
This reason alone might be enough for some. I find that I read faster with print once I’ve established a pace. It’s also faster when all of the print is on one page.
Printed media allows you to write in the margins.
Though not something I do often, it is especially common for technical journal reading. This feature is offered in part online by browser adds-ins, though hardly standardized.
Printed resolution for pictures is often better than online.
This could be a debatable fact, but is often true. When not true, you’re often expected to jump out of the article to another site or page to view the image in it’s best resolution.
Reliability for reading is another strong point.
A page in hand is worth a thousand pages waiting to load.
Portability of media is a big plus as well.
Printed media can be taken just about anywhere with little inconvenience. Printed media doesn’t require batteries or outlets, nor a place to work from. Devices like the Kindle though are making inroads.
Printed media is standardized and requires no instructions to use.
Printed media not only requires no special tools, no specific browser, nor optimized display, it is just plain simple to use. You open and read. If you can read, you can use a paper, book or magazine. My mother can use a magazine. My granddaughters can read books.
Several other reasons might be offered as to why someone might enjoy a good magazine read over reading online. In the end though, each individual finds they have their own likes and dislikes, and in my experience, will choose a mix of both media types.
How about you? What are you reasons for still picking up a magazine or paper? What are your reasons for going totally electronic? Do share.
I asked for and received advice from my contacts. I’d like to share some of that advice. Enjoy.
Geekmommy Remember: sometimes it’s more important to fix what’s wrong than it is to be right. You might be right as rain - but if you damage a relationship to prove it? You lose.
BlondeByDesign For ea person, what’s impt to develop their lives/themselves to their very best is diff. Being real, self love = BIGGEST asssets
BlondeByDesign Don’t try to be or act important. An honest & humble heart will tell the story anyone else needs to see.
gloriabell Live everyday like tomorrow will be your last and you don’t want to die alone or with regrets.
lizstrauss Keep the promises you’ve already made to yourself.
Lindsay Donaghe My #1 life rule: Before taking any action, think through and be willing to accept the consequences, good and bad. Try to decide before-hand what you would do in situations and why and then follow-through on that when the situations arise. Don’t stumble through life. Accept personal responsibility. You will make a bad decision from time to time, but be willing to own up to it, learn from it and fix it.
techmate No big deal if a magazine falls in a toilet
Rahsheen Porter If you forget that it’s not all about you, you will never reach your goals. Each person you meet is a golden link in your chain of success
It’s alive! It’s alive. Scrabulous closed its doors to North American players not even 48 hours ago. This brought to a seeming end the fun of tens of thousands of players.
Today a new application has appeared in place of Scrabulous; it’s called Wordscraper.
Look familiar? It should be.
The folks at Scrabulous have resurrected the game with a new name, but with some new play options. This isn’t your same old Scrabble game.
Players design their own board layout, placing letter and word multiplier tiles. Tiles can be tagged individually with either a word or letter multiplier with ranges from 2x to 5x. The play is still turn based, and scoring is done the same. Players even get seven tiles per round.
It will be interesting to see if folks will dive right back into the game or not. To make it easier, the Scrabulous application was automatically replaced by Wordscraper. It appears that active games may have been kept as well.
Bonus feature? Once you design a board layout, you can load that for future games. Check out this link to see my creation to a classic Scrabble layout.
Browzmi is the latest social networking plaything. And it’s a browser.
No, it’s not like Flock, the social browser that competes with IE and Firefox. It’s your browser in a browser tool, with built in social networking and sharing features.
Browzmi provides three panes to work in. The left is the My Stuff section. The center pane is the ‘browser’. The right pane is Explore More. Right and left sections are collapsable, with the center pane expanding to fill the screen space.
My Stuff contains four display choices: My Friends, Surf with Friends, My Favorites, and My Updates. Each of those selections pretty much shows what it’s titled. The Surf with Friends mode shows live updates as your friends navigate to new pages (i.e. friend updates stream).
Explore More also has several display modes: Where is Everyone, Related Photos, Related Videos, Updates on this Page. Where is Everyone displays a list by site of how many of your friends are on each site, and allows you to select that site and see just who is there. Related Photos provides related pictures from Flickr. This updates live as your browse to new pages. Likewise Related Videos does the same while drawing video results from YouTube.
Above the center pane is the little set of buttons shown above. These are fairly straightforward. Favorite however is where you are prompted to tag a web page. Clip allows you to clip out images. The thumbs up and down show the counts beside them, however I’m not sure how that affects things right now.
Want to jump in with some early players on Browzmi? Check out this Friendfeed thread with Browzmi links.
Please take the dive and give it a try. Registration takes seconds.
Koontz got your eye was a success. We have a winner! Andrea’s recommendation, Lightning, was the selected book.
Andrea has been sent an $8 gift Amazon gift certificate for her troubles. She was not only first, but suggested several good titles. To narrow the choice I read reviews of each book on Amazon. This gave me some insight on themes.
Lightning was chosen specifically at Andrea’s recommendation and that it involves a sci-fi theme. Koontz takes his spin on time travel.
Andrea, Tony Mast, Tracy Lee, Phil Baumann, and akaMonty, your support and suggestions were helpful. It took me some time to check out each one. The next in line will likely be Fear Nothing, a title recommended a couple of times.
The book is due to be shipped out on Monday. I’ll look forward to its arrival by Friday. Look for a review to follow.
Love Scrabble? Use Facebook? Then you were probably among the hundreds of thousands of players of Scrabulous. Scrabulous was the game of Scrabble online.
Scrabulous was well liked not only for being a fun take on a well known word game, but for it’s interface. Stripped of any pretense of wood and plastic, play was fast and easy. Without fancy graphics or spinning pixels, players could concentrate on the words.
It’s gone now. Gone that is for those in the US and Canada. The rest of the world can still play. For the rest though, they now have the ‘official’ Scrabble game on Facebook.
Yes. The game company Hasbro has brought out yet another version of Scrabble to enjoy. This one has more bells and whistles. Sound effects and spinning pixels are there to spare.
According to the message above, Hasbro is looking at making some of those things optional. This will probably affect the number of folks that become regular players. But will that and speedier play be enough to move the masses that played on Scrabulous?
Will you take up playing Scrabble on Facebook? Will you find solace in other word games? What features will drag you in?
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Bloggers have shown Scrabulous quite a bit of love. Will they continue to do the same with Scrabble? Or will they put down some harsh words?
