Corporate Blog Tip #2 (read a bunch of blogs before you start)

Here's our advice for anyone thinking of blogging: read a bunch of blogs before you start. For that, we recommend you get an RSS News Aggregator. There's a bunch out there for both Windows and Macintoshes.

I use NewsGator because I live in Outlook a lot. Other good ones are RSS Bandit, SharpReader, FeedDemon, OnFolio 2.0. Also, many browsers are including news aggregators. On the Mac side, Net News Wire gets a lot of recommendations.

So, how do you find blogs? Well, if you're in the tech industry you can read my link blog. I read through more than 1200 feeds and put the best things up there. Out of 3,000 to 5,000 items per day that come through all of those feeds, I'll post the best 100 or so.

But, if you aren't in tech, you'll want to use a search engine. There's several:

http://www.feedster.com (best for beginners who haven't started with RSS yet).
http://www.pubsub.com (gives best results, but via RSS).
http://www.technorati.com (shows linking between blogs).

Let's say you're looking for blogs on "quilting." Well, you can just go over and do a search on quilting on any of those search engines. But, if you use an RSS News Aggregator, you can subscribe to the search now. That's really cool because anyone who uses the word "quilting" on a blog, from that point on, will automatically show up in your news aggregator (if you subscribed to the search feed).

We do searches on our names. Our company names. Our competitors. And some common terms that people in our industry would use.

That way you can listen to what people are saying about you, your company, or your industry.

Here's the crux of the tip. If you read 50 blogs for two weeks and you don't have something to write on your blog to start it off you probably aren't gonna be a good blogger.

So, get reading and blog about what you find!

Comments

[Steven Streight aka Vaspers the Grate]

Very good advice. This is worthy of including in your book. A CEO or business leader who doesn't know how to get started with a blog should follow this advice--read 50 other business/product/CEO blogs for a few weeks.

I also maintain that an empty life results in a trivial blog with boring mundane chatter that nobody will read or comment on.

You don't have to develop any special skills set to blog. Oh, there are a few standard guidelines, but the so-called "blog writing tips" I've seen are superfluous hogwash.

Just talk in your blog like you were sitting on a red couch facing a couple of customers or colleagues you really like.

Blogging is talking in web text. That's all it is. Nothing more or less. My blog posts tend to be scholarly tomes, but are still in a conversational style.

You ask questions like it's a slow chat room.

Yeah. A blog is a slow chat room, only hopefully more informative and substantial.

[REK]

Agreed, managers should be monitoring blogs.

Yet, I find your advice re. aggregation software too techie. Most managers don't want the hassle of a new piece of software. Web-based feed aggregators have two key advantages over dedicated aggregation software: (a) they leverage the familiar browser platform (low hurdle to getting up and running); (b) they are accessible from any webbrowser on any machine dependent (pervasive). Bloglines.com and pluck.com are two examples of web-based aggregators that managers warm up to quickly. Bloglines even has an integrated blogging tool.

[Robert Scoble]

REK: I should have mentioned http://www.bloglines.com

Thanks!

But, offline readers have a big advantage: they display text faster, since everything is loaded locally (I find Bloglines unusable for the number of feeds I read) and it works offline, which for a busy executive can mean all the difference in the world (he/she can read feeds on a plane).

[Steven Streight aka Vaspers the Grate]

I'm weird, that's why I'm slightly notorious, but I have absolutely no interest in news aggregator or RSS.

I don't want content "pushed" at me. That violates the user-control democracy of the web.

I will visit all the blogs I wish to visit, at least once a day, as this one, or once a week for others.

I do not see any benefit to RSS or news aggregators, and they are vulnerable to spamming.

[Robert Scoble]

Steven: if you're reading blogs in a web browser you're wasting your time. I'm glad you have it to waste. It's about 10x less efficient to read in a Web browser than in a news aggregator. Want me to go into the reasons why? I covered them in a recent talk I gave at Northern Voice.

[Robert Scoble]

Steven, thanks!

I'm hoping that we can have a whole chapter of tips. Or, maybe, that we can sprinkle them through the book in sidebars or something. We'll see. I'll keep writing them as they come to me.

[Brett Nordquist]

Bloglines works well but I'm noticing a slow down as the number of blogs increases. I'm going to checkout NewsGater and see how that compares. But I do like the idea of being able to access my blogs from work and at home over the web.

[Steven Streight aka Vaspers the Grate]

But I thought you couldn't read the blog comments in a news aggregator RSS reader, and that the thing just keeps flashing post titles at you, like a blinking banner ad.

Then there's the problem of RSS feed spamming.

So I guess I need more information on both the positive and negative aspects of RSS.

John Maeda also is not happy with RSS, see his SIMPLICTY blog post on "RSS Not Simple" at MIT:

http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/
SIMPLICITY/archives/000093.html

[Bud Gibson]

I'm reacting a bit to this phrase:

"If you read 50 blogs for two weeks and you don't have something to write on your blog to start it off you probably aren't gonna be a good blogger."

One of the things I find is that people can be inhibited about writing, regardless of how much they have read. I think reading is good, but it does not necessarily produce writing.

These people may still become good bloggers once they can drop the inhibition. A lot of time, the inhibition is that they fear what people will think of them or repercussions from management.

One way to solve this in my experience is push people to write and then praise the good. Do not deliver negative consequences if they blog responsibly about things you do not necessarily agree with. Even if they are slightly irresponsible, do not come down hard. If you do this, you can achieve about an 80% success rate in getting people to blog which I will soon document.

Clearly the intervention I have just described requires that management and other people who matter have decided blogging is good and something they want to encourage.

I talk more about these ideas under "Milestone 1 — Getting the conversation going" in this post which you so kindly mentioned on Scobleizer:

http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/03/a_learning_blog.html

Bud

[Helen Hoefele]

In response to your last two paragraphs, I agree, in my experience, reading other people's blogs always gives me things to blog about. (Though sometimes I'm not sure if my response should be in a comment to their post or in a post on my blog.)

Anyway, on a separate but related note, I've been starting to feel the need to contribute more original thoughts and experiences in my posts, and not just those things blogged about by others. (This is what I kind of feel that Jason Kottke does.)

So my question to you would be, how much of ones blog would you suggest should be about things that are not blogged about by other bloggers?

[Robert Scoble]

That's an interesting question. Depends on what role you want to play in the blogosphere.

If you want to play a connector role and build a community around something you're doing, then quite a bit should be links to other people's blogs. That's why I started my linkblog. So that people new to the tech blogosphere would have a place to start.

But, you can be a quite successful blogger just by putting great information out there and using blog tools to just publish.

Linking to other people will help you get discovered, though.

[Steven Streight aka Vaspers the Grate]

I hear that some RSS feeds are being corrupted not only by spammers scraping email addresses from them, but now a new disturbing trend is ads being included in the RSS feeds.

I've heard that when an RSS content provider includes ads in the feed, many recipients are simply unsubscribing from that commercialized feed.

Sorry to be a cranky contrarian, I was born in Ft. Knox Army hospital, but I think the important controversial topic of RSS, the pros and cons, might make a very good topic for this blog and for the book.

But my real reason for ruining your lives with this vaspersian post is to remark how sad it will be when the book is published and this blog is abandoned and deleted.

I just want to be one voice crying in the wilderness, as I munch on my locusts and honey: "Consider continuing The Red Couch blog as a fantastic forum for business bloggging issues."

I gotta say guys: this is my #1 favorite business blogging blog. It has mysteriously turned into something more than the noble experiment of blogging about a book on blogging.

I learn more here than on any other business blog. The posts are rich and relevant and challenging. The comments are interesting and spark good debate, while not going too far on OT tangents.

I have stumbled on some sleazy, crazy "business blogs" recently, and will post on my own blog about this soon, but how refreshing and educational this one is.

Thanks Shel and Robert.

[Juliana Aldous Atkinson]

Quilting? An excellent idea for starting a blog...
--Juliana Aldous Atkinson
who blogs on Microsoft, Publishing and Quilting

[melissa]

Just to let you know i found this great place to make holiday cards. They are usually like $20 but free if you click on this link. I am going to put my christmas letter and favorite family picture in them for christmas cards this year. If your interested

http://www.vistaprint.com/vp/gateway.aspx?s=9171591673

[down]

Chris Locke writes about "Indigo Children," a meme reported on by the New York Times. The Indigo idea sounds like it pushes a whole bunch of buttons all at once — New Age, angels, the paranormal, child-worship, ADD. If it had some anti-child-porn hysteria about it, it'd be perfect. As one of the people in the NYT article says, this is basically the same social world view as Harry Potter's muggles v. wizards set up.

Anyway, it is a great example of what Chris has been talking about over at Mystic Bourgeoisie, America's Toughest to Spell weblog

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