Archive: Posts about Blogosphere
March 4th, 2009, 2 Comments »
At Northern Voice, Rob from Techvibes introduced me to Frank, who (I gather) created ZinePal. Here’s the elevator pitch on ZinePal:
Use zinepal.com to create your own magazines or zines for short. Select content from your favorite blogs, websites or RSS feeds and put it in your zine. zinepal.com creates an online version and a printable PDF. Then you print it and read it in your favorite coffee shop, e-mail it to your friends or just let them subscribe to your online zine feed.
There are bunch of these print-your-blog services out there, but what I liked about ZinePal was the sample Frank handed me. It was a two-page version of the recent posts from Kitsilano.ca (another of the aforementioned Rob’s projects). I snapped a photo:
Kitsilano.ca is a hyper-local blog, covering a particular neighbourhood of Vancouver. It’s easy to imagine that they could produce monthly “best of” editions of their blog using ZinePal, and distribute them to local businesses. They could replace the charming but goofy Coffee News (I recently took a photo of that publication as well). Local businesses could buy a combo advertising package, with their ads appearing both online and in the print edition. Briana from Tenth to Fraser (a blog about New Westminster) should check this out.
I created a quick ZinePal edition of my own site, picking entries that didn’t have embedded video. ZinePal provides a dedicated page for each, uh, zine, or here’s the direct link to the PDF. I didn’t go to the trouble of uploading a custom header or deploying a few other bells and whistles.
In an age of embedded audio, video and other Flash-powered widgets, ZinePal certainly isn’t for every site with an RSS feed. However, I do like the idea of extending a hyper-local blog’s audience into the offline world.
2 Comments »
January 16th, 2009, 1 Comment »
Just a brief note to point you at the awesome new blog, Superuseless Superpowers. I have infonesia about where I discovered it, but it’s awesome. Each useless power is described and illustrated. My favourite might be In-flight Flight:
Being able to soar through the air still won’t save you from recycled oxygen and endless stories from complete strangers. Known as the “Cabin Sparrow,” this so-called power lets you fly, but only within the confines of an airplane. At least you can leapfrog the beverage cart when explosive diarrhea strikes at 30,000 feet.
If you were looking for it, here’s evidence that there’s plenty of original blog ideas out there. And this one is ready-made for a dead tree version in 2010.
1 Comment »
October 27th, 2008, 2 Comments »
Over the weekend, I gave a couple of talks at the Surrey International Writers Conference. First, I wanted to say that the conference was a really friendly and well-organized event. They treated us speakers really well, and I had a lot of fascinating conversations with interesting people. My only gripe–and it’s a minor one–is that it’s in a bleak corner of Surrey. My hotel room had a lovely view of the vast Walmart parking lot. But, they get 800 people to the event, so I imagine their options are limited for venues.
And I had no idea how big a deal this conference is in the publishing industry. I spoke to an agent from New York (there were plenty of Americans there from all over the country) who said it was one of the three conferences she attends every year. So, many thanks to kc dyer for inviting me to the event, and I hope she’ll have me back next year.
One of the talks I gave was ‘Blogging 101′. It’s a little shocking to me that I still get asked for this talk in 2008–I’ve been giving it for five years or so–but the room was pretty full.
During this talk, I like to run through setting up a WordPress blog, so that people can see how straightforward it is. To choose a topic for the blog, I asked for an unusual place and a type of food. Combining the two, I created a simple blog called Sushi in Vilnius. Vilnius is, in case you didn’t know, the capital of Lithuania. I wrote a quick sample post, and moved on to other bloggy stuff.
The next day, I checked my email, and somebody–a legitimate Lithuanian–had come by Sushi in Vilnius and left a comment:
You have tried Kabuki (Didþioji 28)? Very good sushi. If not try Tokyo (Vienuolio 4). Sushi chef is from Japanese.
Their intent wasn’t to spam–it was to legitimately recommend some sushi restaurants. Hilarious, eh?
It provides a handy example for another lesson in a lot of my talks: the web is just getting more and more real time. Some of that is thanks to Twitter and camera phones, and some of it is thanks to search engines indexing new material in minutes and hours instead of days and weeks.
2 Comments »
August 4th, 2008, 2 Comments »
I’m organizing a little field trip this Wednesday night for a media preview of a Vancouver store opening. It’s the sort of store that would appeal to the geekily-inclined, and it’s got a couple of exciting wrinkles. I’ve invited some local bloggers, but we’ve got spots free for a couple more.
If that sounds appealing, send me an email and I can provide all the details.
I apologize for being obtuse, but I’d prefer not to disclose the details publicly, lest I scoop all of the journalists and bloggers in attendance.
UPDATE: I think I need to cut things off there. Thanks for your interest.
2 Comments »
July 26th, 2008, 7 Comments »
On Twitter, Jeremy linked to this well-written New York Times article by Kara Jesella about BlogHer. Entitled “Blogging’s Glass Ceiling” it emphasizes BlogHer’s strong community ties, appeal to marketers and and an imbalance of power and income among genders in the blogosphere:
These days, there is money to be made, fame to be earned and influence to be gained. And though women and men are creating blogs in roughly equal numbers, many women at the conference were becoming very Katie Couric about their belief that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts at, say, Daily Kos, a political blog site. Nor, they said, were they making much money, even though corporations seem to be making money from them.
I think Ms. Jesella misses a key point in making her case. The blogosphere is still pretty geeky (arguably, 8 of the 10 most popular blogs according to Technorati focus on technology), and interest in technology has tradition skewed toward men. So, you’d expect that the most money and fame would follow that topic area. I don’t mention this to refute her thesis, merely to suggest an important cause or symptom that she ignored (or had edited out of her piece).
I did, however, want to highlight the fact that this piece appeared in the ‘Fashion & Style’ section of the New York Times. If ever there was a way to reinforce the notion of BlogHer as a female ghetto, it’s to feature it alongside articles on ‘Dining & Wine’, ‘Home & Garden’ and ‘Weddings/Celebrations’.
7 Comments »
May 8th, 2008, No Comments »
My friend Gwendolyn recently started a food blog entitled Patent and the Pantry. She’s combining recipes with great photos of her concoctions. She brought a bunch of rosemary cashews when she came to visit us, and they were very tasty:
Rosemary Cashews have rapidly become my go-to hostess gift since I began making them a few years ago. They have been to book club and video nights, served as work snacks and traveled all the way to Malta as a small, homemade gift for friends hosting me there. (They were such a hit, we made a bastardized version for Canadian Thanksgiving, in which my friends invited 10 for turkey dinner by the pool.)
I love the play of salty and sweet and the hit of heat, combined with the herby woodiness of the rosemary. Plus they’re ridiculously easy to make.
My only tip for Gwen is that she ought to host (and tag and add to groups) her photos on Flickr, and include links back to the appropriate blog posts in the description field. That will likely drive some traffic, given how attractive they are.
No Comments »
April 6th, 2008, 12 Comments »
A couple of years ago my wife Julie started a figure skating blog. She’s got a particular purpose in mind for this project: she wants to get media accreditation for the skating events at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.
One way to do this is to write the most popular figure skating blog in the world, according to Google. She currently sits in the #2 spot.
The goal is to get her up to the top spot, and I need your help. If you’re so inclined, please link to Julie’s blog with the phrase ‘figure skating blog‘. Collectively, we ought to be able to boost her up to the top spot, eh?
To entice you, she’s collected eight of the worst falls in figure skating (Digg that mofo, if you’re thus inclined). It’s, uh, not for the squeamish. My favourite is the hip check that Laetitia Hubert lays on Midori Ito.
12 Comments »
March 17th, 2008, 7 Comments »
Last month I was contacted by the awesomely-named Shelly Banjo, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. She wanted to talk about our ebook (more news about that in the coming weeks, incidentally) and some of the other blogger relations work that Capulet has done. We had a couple of chats, and today we were included in an article about social media marketing for small businesses.
You can only see a preview without a WSJ subscription. I picked up a copy of the dead-tree edition. I’d take a photo, but I’m currently living a camera-free existence. Here’s the section that concerns us:
Others say personalizing a pitch can sometimes win a mention without participation in blog discussions. Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo recently co-authored an online book called “Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook”. To promote the book, they played to the romantic angle of the title by sending personal, hand-written letters asking 10 influential bloggers to review the book.
They enclosed each letter in a sticker-studded, perfume-scented pink envelope. In each letter, they included the address of a Web site set up just for the recipient, where the blogger would find a two-minute video message welcoming him or her to read the book. The idea was a hit: Almost every blogger wrote about the experience.
Mr. Barefoot and Ms. Szabo took another creative approach to promote a new line of printers for Brothre International Corp. (Canada) Ltd., one of their clients. To ask bloggers to review the printers, they created pitches in the form of comic strips customized for each blogger. The duo found pictures of the bloggers online and pasted the images into the strip.
“You want to be creative, but play to your strengths,” says Mr. Barefoot. “If you are a T-shirt vendor, for example, creative personalized T-shirts for each blogger.”
The article also features a slightly-tweaked version of the comic we sent to John and Rebecca. Thanks to Kris, Rebecca and Derek for their permission to use their photos (they’re credited in the article).
7 Comments »
February 24th, 2008, 11 Comments »
Well, it sounds like Northern Voice 2008 was another success. I watched via various dodgy video streams and a Skype back channel (I wasn’t the only one watching from afar). I also participated in a streaming (hmm…more of a trickling) video chat as part of our experimental ‘ask an expert’ booth. That’s where I took my only photo at the conference:
That’s actually not particularly different than other conferences–I’m usually too preoccupied to take photos.
And here’s a nice photo that Chris Heuer took of my friend Lesley talking to me. It was all very Max Headroomesque, but I was glad to get in a little face time.
In checking out reactions on the web, I was struck by how (it seemed to me, at least) there were fewer blog posts about the conference. A few bloggy wrap-ups that I did find: Boris, Rebecca, Kate, Mack and I’m sure others will pop up.
The Balkanization of the Social Media Sphere
I don’t think less web content is being made, it’s just appearing on a lot of other arms of the starfish. There’s more audio, video, microblog posts, streaming video, IM chat, Facebook and maybe less traditional blogging. You need only look at this year’s schedule to see how the 2005 ‘blogging conference’ has evolved into a 2008 ’social media conference’. I might bemoan the loss of thoughtful analysis a little, but otherwise that’s just the way of things.
I do bemoan the lack of tools to find and aggregate all that ’stuff’ in one place. I have to visit an increasing number of locations to feel confident that I’ve seen most of what’s been produced. Technorati and their brethren have not kept pace with this divergence and balkanization of the social media sphere.
Speaking of media, I’m always amazed by how many photos get generated over two and a half days. I decided to see how that number had changed over the past four years. Here, according to me and Flickr’s best guess, are the totals for each year:
2005: 620
2006: 1788
2007: 2115
2008: 2303 (so far)
And who doesn’t love a chart? Click for larger version.
The number of photos seems to map pretty much directly to the number of attendees.
Making the Conference More Noob-Friendly
We try new things every year. Many of these are aimed at making the conference more noob-friendly. This year we ran the Internet Bootcamp as an alternative stream on Friday, and set up an ‘Ask the Expert’ booth on Saturday. I gather the booth didn’t work so well. It’s also my instinct that the bootcamp ought to be on the Saturday, as that’s when we get more of the toe-dipping folks. I forget why, but that wasn’t viable this year.
Speaking of noobs, Meg Tilly is an author who appeared in Monique’s books and blogging session. She wrote a nice, touching post about her mixed experience at the conference:
And even though I only understood around 1/4 of the words that came out of the speakers mouth, that 1/4 was sort of fun, and it was a fun feeling. Like I was a little kid playing dress up and somehow I passed for the real thing. I mean, I am a blogger, but I’m a blogger by default. I don’t know ANY of the lingo. I don’t know what software I’m using. I don’t know what streaming is or if I’d like to do it. I DID know enough to laugh at the joke about pooh. So that’s something.
I particularly like how she spelled ‘pooh’ with an ‘h’. Or was she referring to Winnie?
We set up a post-mortem feedback page on the wiki, and we’ll probably send out a more formal survey in the coming weeks. If you didn’t attend this year, but want to be notified if and when we announce Northern Voice 2009, you can give us your email address here. If you did attend this year’s conference, we’ll definitely email you, so there’s no need to sign up.
UPDATE: Jennie Roth guest-posted a recap from an outsider’s perspective on Rebecca’s blog.
11 Comments »
February 12th, 2008, 2 Comments »
Once again, Northern Voice is sold out. I always find it a little remarkable when that happens, as we have a marketing budget of precisely zero dollars and zero cents. Plus, all of us organizers are busy people. We barely have enough time to organize the conference essentials, let alone promote it.
In any case, we’re four for four for sell outs.
In related news, check out the cool poster than artist Basco5 did for the conference this year:
You may recall that he did something last year as well.
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