Loving tech, social networking, and blogging doesn’t mean I’m not also a dad. Heck, I’ve been a dad over half my life now.  Chris Brogan started a site for men like me, Dadomatic.

Dadomatic is a place for dads that blog to blog about fatherhood and family. This can take the form of advice, product reviews, or how-to articles. Visitors to Dadomatic will find whit, wisdom, and wackiness. Best of all it’s family friendly.

I’d like to point you to my two most recent Dadomatic offerings:

Massage and your children

Love, Anger, Kids

Some of your favorite bloggers blog there as well. Jeffery Sass, Chris Brogan, and Doriano Carta aka Paisano.

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• A New Podcast, Starring A “Cast of Dads” (sassholes.blogspot.com)

Got tools? by Tojosan

Pirate? That’s me and much more. Over the last few years the Flickr 365 group has brought out the hero, the villain, saint and sinner.  This particular picture though caused one young viewer to ask her parents if they knew a real pirate.

Some other friends online ask if I’m an actor. Truth? I am. That’s not the whole truth though.

We’re all actors.

Role players each of us. We learn to play weak when it serves us at an early age. Later some of us learn to play bully. Many of us act both at one time or another.

As we mature, we learn to take on many roles. Some are forced upon us, some we work to make part of our inner self. Parent is a great example. Most of us play at being a parent and only after some rough days does that role become internalized.

Blogger, it’s just another role. Part of the problem with this role is that we often miss that we’re no longer playing at blogging, but it’s now part of us. We keep telling ourselves we’re not really bloggers.

STOP. You have a URL. You post things. You’re a blogger. It’s that simple really. Blogger isn’t a title reserved for those that make a living blogging. There’s no swearing into the club ceremony when you get a thousand subscribers.

You blog therefore you’re a blogger.

So stop playing the role of wimp. No more acting the beggar or the fool. Sit down. Shut up. Blog.

N’ough said.

ATTENTION: If Your Subscribers Use Gmail Read This – Online Marketing, Visibility and Business Blogging Tips from Denise Wakeman: “Essentially, any URL that has a capital letter after the http:// is not an active, clickable link in Gmail.”

Denise learned about this from Alex Mandossian’s Productivity Strategies Facebook page.

Essentially if immediately after the ‘http://’ the first character is a capital letter the URL becomes just text. Click through to Denise’s article to see some examples.

At some point everyone has a chance to believe something other than what others told them to believe in.

by Akula.

Brent Nordquist is @Akula. I want to say right now he is one of my all time favorite bloggers. His blog, Nordquist Blog, isn’t deep in tech secrets, social media guru meditations, nor how to get rich schemes. Brent blogs about life, mostly centered around him and his children.

I highly recommend you check out Brent as @Akula and on Nordquist Blog.

Disqus is currently installed here on The Broad Brush and other blogs I run. I settled on it a good while back and it’s generally been good to the blog and the commenters.

Their team has released a new version in beta. I’m a fool, so I’ve installed it in place of the current release. So far it appears it didn’t eat the old comments. Let’s let it rip.

What do I want from you? Even the smallest comment you feel up to leaving. It’s easy. There is no registration required or you can sign in with  your Twitter or Facebook or other IDs.

Say anything, leave a cryptic code, include a link or three. Try to break it if you’re up to it. Oh, and leave a video comment if you’re brave.

Cheers to Disqus.

Addicted to check your blog stats? I am. Stats on Wordpress don’t just tell you how many hits you’ve gotten but where they come from. Recently there have been some hits from a source I didn’t recognize, Outside.in.

Tracking back to the Outside.in site, it was plain that The Broad Brush blog was being aggregated there, along with others from St. Louis. Checking the FAQ revealed that bloggers opt in. I’d never opted in The Broad Brush blog.

The site did provide an easy to locate link for contacting them. I requested to have the blog removed. Outside.in representative, Esther, has already gotten back to me. Let’s see what she says.

Hi Todd,

We automatically scan RSS feeds of great local bloggers and show only the headline and first 200 words of the story – with the intent of driving traffic to the blogger. We’ve sent you 27
visits since the beginning of November from the Outside.in core site and our Neighborhood News page on STLToday:

http://www.stltoday.com/neighborhoodnews

We’re working on removing your feed from our system now, and once it’s removed, we and STLToday will no longer be sending you traffic. I’ll let you know when your stories and links are down.

If you change your mind and decide you’d like to continue receiving traffic from us and STLToday, please let me know.

All the best,
Esther

The tone, to me, is very off-putting. It sounds like they were doing the blog a favor by including it in the automatic aggregation. There is something more irksome to me though, the part about STLToday.

STLToday is the St. Louis Post Dispatch online version. In recent years the Post has tried several channels to aggregate St. Louis blogs into the STLToday site as content.  This is an effort to steal the search engine juice from the blog posts and avoid spending time and money creating content. Several St. Louis bloggers argued against this practice, including me. It seems they’ve found another way to do it.

Interestingly, Outside.in, makes no mention on their site about affiliation with STLToday.

Rant off for now. Cheers and heads up out there.

Do you want to start a blog, but you’re not sure where to begin?

Do you have a blog, but you want to know how to take it to the next level?

If so, the New Blogger Boot Camp may be for you!

Presented by blogger, copywriter, and consultant Kristen King, the New Blogger Boot Camp 8-week webinar takes beginning bloggers through the process of creating a strong foundation for a strategic, sustainable blog.

From figuring out whether blogging is right for you and making technical decisions to planning your content and growing your readership, New Blogger Boot Camp is a high-energy, step-by-step guide to carving out your place online.

You can still get in at the beginning. Kristen is offering those that register now the previous lessons as well.

New Blogger Boot Camp gives you direct access to Kristen King on a weekly basis. This will give you a kick start with someone that’s already done it and wants to share.

Some of the upcoming topics:

• SEO
• Best Practices
• Monetization

A little bit about Kristen:

Kristen King, MPS, is a prolific blogger and social media user who’s been writing for the Web since the late 1990s. Her freelance writing blog, Inkthinker, was named one of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers in 2006, and she won several recognitions as a women’s health and women’s business blogger at global media network b5media from January 2007 through October 2008.

Disclosure: Kristen is part of my ongoing SOB team leading not only herself to success but the four other members of our group.

Scheduling blog posts is the most recommended winning practice for bloggers.  Pen and paper, whiteboard, and Google calendar are all popular tools used to track schedules.  Now there is something better.

Chris Garret demonstrates how to use the Editorial Calendar Wordpress plugin. Scheduling a post or rescheduling is as easy as drag and drop.

This post was started via a click on the editorial calendar. It would be easy enough to reschedule this post with just a click and drag on the calendar.

Clicking on the  + sign for today’s date triggered the new post method.  It opens a draft post and puts you in edit most.  The post is scheduled instead of immediate, with in this case about a 2 hour lead time.

This plugin will become my most used of 2010. How about giving it a go. Under Plugins, click on Add New. In the search box type ‘editorial calendar’. It will be the only plugin that shows up.

Cheers and Happy New Year,

Todd aka @tojosan

Darren Rowse, aka ProBlogger, is giving away books for a comment:

I’d like to do a bit of a giveaway today of a few of them and all you need to do is leave a comment saying which one you’d like.

This Wednesday I’ll randomly choose a winner for each book, contact you to get your mailing details and pop them in the mail for you (I’ll pay for the shipping).

Here are the 5 books:

1. Yes: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
2. Search Engine Optimization: Your Visual Blueprint for effective Internet Marketing
3. Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success
4. Blog Blazers: 40 Top Bloggers Share their Secrets to Creating a High-Profile High-Traffic and High Profit Blog
5. Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What it’s Becoming and Why it Matters

Oh and for a little extra I’ll throw in a copy of ProBlogger the Book as a 6th Alternative.

That’s right. You comment, you have a chance at one of those six great books. I chose #2 on SEO. It’s definitely an area I can improve my skills in.

Which book will you choose?

I found this fascinating quote today:

This is an interview with Robyn Wright who didn’t mention that she was voted one of Nielson’s 50 Online Power Moms. Robyn is active on Twitter and Facebook and writes many product reviews on her blog. She has embarked on a new journey coming out  from behind her avatar of a hand on a keyboard to showing photos of herself and now making videos. It’s nice to see the real her that so many have come to enjoy reading about on her blog. Learn some more about her:murraynewlands.com, Robyns Online World Online Power Mom Robyn Wright Interview, Oct 2009

You should read the whole article.

Robyn, a fellow St. Louis area blogger, is both an online and offline friend.  She’s one of the most fun bloggers I know, local or not.  Her blog, Robyn’s Online World, is not just give aways, and good ones, but gives us an inside track on her world.

Robyn may not brag, but she’s got plenty of reason to be interviewed. She’s a prolific blogger. She networks both on various social networks online, but also connects by phone, email, and in person with both individuals and companies. 

She recently was selected to join EA for their big Spore event. As a follow up she had some Spore goodies to give away as well.

Please click through to the full interview and show Robyn some love.