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Thoughts and things I care to shareBlogging Momentum
Darren Rowse talks about Maintaining Momentum in Blogging today. This is a welcome discussion as I have been having trouble finding time and energy to get past a ‘bloggers block’ I’m having. Its inspirational enough that I’m actually getting a bit more excited trying to work through some of the site issues I’m having with Snowmoblog – RSS XML generated by WordPress won’t verify, my graphic work is as lame as I expected (Dave H. I may give you a call), and I need to upgrade the hosting service – to name a few.
Not to mention that its been hard to find time to properly review the BlackBerry units I’m working on at work. See this is the real issue – I’ve got some good plans for larger posts, but am having trouble finding the time to commit to writing them. Work is a real drain right now – and it may be because of th weather, I’m not really sure.
Anyhoo, enough of these sorry excuses, I’ve got a lot of work to do and it needs to be done. The family and I are taking a few days out of the week and heading north for a quick getaway – just a little ‘pine time’ as the saying goes around here.
Just as I was posting, Darren posted part II in this series. In this post he posits several good tips on maintaining the focus needed for building a good blogging rythum. After reading the entire post, I can really see where I’ve made a few ‘classic’ mistakes in following some good advice. More opportunity to regain focus and move forward. Thank you Darren!
Skype-out free ’till year-end?
Did anyone else get an email message from Skype this afternoon indicating that a number of calls were going to be free through the end of this year. If the call originates in the US/Canada and is directed to any US/Canada Landline, Wireless, or Skype number, that it is free.
Calls to friends and family on Skype have always been free. Now we’ve made calls within the US and Canada to all phones totally free till the end of the year.
Starting from today it doesn’t matter if it’s a Skype-to-Skype call or a call to landline or mobile phone – it’s free as long as you’re calling from within the US or Canada to US or Canadian phone number.
How can we do this? Well, we hope our customers will support us by using Skype to make international calls at incredibly cheap rates, or by buying stuff from our store – like Skype Voicemail, perhaps an accessory like headphones to make using Skype even easier, or even a cool ringtone to personalize your Skype.
Very cool!
IE 7 Plays Fair
Well its nice to see a little common sense prevail. Check out the news at TechWeb:
U.S. Dismisses Google Complaint, Says IE 7 Plays Fair
I’ve been following this silly attempt of Google’s for the past few weeks and it really disappointed me that they would sink to that level Google has brought some innovative products to market, and have injected a lot of excitement and attention to the ‘Web 2.0’ world. But their cry-baby routine about the defaul search settings in a browser that they don’t own simply sours my opinion of the cocmpany.
Hopefully they will not attempt anything more insulting, like litigation about this. There are so many other areas to focus on, and changing a default search setting in a browser is not going to make/break their search revenues.
Google does occasionally come across like the “big bad” Microsoft many people are concerned about. While I think MS has turned the corner on that behavior, I’m sure that some corners of the company may still harbor that “attack mode”, if you will.
At any rate, the current squabble is rediculous and is best settled by this US DOJ report.
Backup My Blog!
Ok, here is a neat new service: BackupMyBlog
TechCrunch has the details on the new service that is currently in beta.  The BackupMyBlog service performs an automated backup of your blog once a day. The service will then email you a status report on the backup.
Great stuff, I’m trying it out on RickMahn.com to see how the service performs and evaluate the reporting features. Should be interesting, I’ve been looking for this type of service for awhile.
More on personal brands
Today I found When Brands Collide on Own Your Brand, where Mike Wagner elaborates a bit on the subject of Personal Brand. In it, he discusses how the concept of personal brand is more important, and has more impact than in previous years.
Ever since I read this post on Personal Brands by Shel Israel, I’ve been seeing more and more discussion on the topic. Not that the concept is ‘new’, but that the impact in our society is/will be huge. The implications to businesses as employees with strong personal brands could affect the bottom line. As we move into the future, and blogging continues to grow, the audiences of those blogs will continue to grow.
In our daily lives we travel in small geographical circles that are very comfortable, very well-known to us. Most of us work with the same people every day, we go to the same places, see the same things. The physical audience in our daily lives is small and well known, we know who we can be upfront with, we know who we need to handle with ‘kid gloves’. We have the ability to see another’s face when we communicate with them, and see the impact our conversation has.
When we blog, we connect with people who have similar interests, but are geographically dispersed. And because of the revolution in communications technologies, we have an audience of hundreds of millions of people. Through tagging and searching, we find each other and start conversations. Since we can’t view each other during the conversation, we tend to be more honest and open in what we say and do. The ability to have clear honest communications is at the root of blogging – and as a side effect, you can learn a lot about the blogger.
Now take the concept of personal brand and figure in that massive audience. Can you see how personal brand (a person’s reputation) can now be built to have the name recognition of a corporate brand? In the blogosphere, there are already a number of people who are approaching this kind of recognition.
So for the rest of us Z-Listers the important part is to understand what your blog says about you. What power you hold in your hands when you post to your blog. You have a powerful tool to shape your career or your life, and that massive audience that we can write to, but how do you want to use it?
Technorati tags: naked-conversations, own-your-brand, personal-brand, shel-israel
Tracking Conversations
Easton Ellsworth has posted an article over on Performancing about the three tools he uses to track his conversations & comments. He uses a combination of coComment, del.icio.us, and co.mments. Head on over and joint join the discussion.
Snowmoblog
Alright, I finally went and did it this past weekend. I’ve gone ahead with my idea of creating a snowmobiling focused blog, called Snowmoblog.
So I thought I didn’t have time to write on one blog, eh, well now there’ll be two to keep up. In all honesty, the idea keeps me going. Work sucks, and I needed a creative outlet that I have a great passion about. The fun part (I’m hoping) is to have that outlet and be able to talk about blogging, web, and technical related things here at RickMahn.com. If you are into snowmobiling, check it out over the next few weeks – its in a rough form right now, but it will start coming together as I work out the kinks.
Snowmoblog is powered by WordPress, and I’ve got a temporary 3-column theme that will work for now, though I’ll be working on a custom theme for that site as well as this one in my spare time. The hard part will be the graphics, as I’ve mentioned before, it is just outside my capabilities sometimes so I may need to outsource that part.
infoSync World reviews T-Mobile BlackBerry 8700g
To all you crackberry users – infoSync World has reviewed the new T-Mobile BlackBerry 8700g. The 8700 series has a new, larger QVGA screen, includes EDGE data services for better wireless performance (I’ve seen up to 200kbps on my MDA), a refined user interface, and a new Intel XScale processor helps speed up the device.
Team evaporation
Its amazing how one new individual added to a team can start to disolve the well understood relationships within. This is happening at work, and unfortuntely, I don’t think I can work with the result. We’ve added a new manager for one are of our department, and he seems to be too intent on playing the role of “manager” than being a team member.
The approach is quite remenicent of isolationism than anything else I’ve seen recently, and is really rubbing a number of other groups the wrong way. Too bad, because he has the ability to shape his group in a whole new way, but I don’t know if he’s going in the right direction yet. He sure pissed me off – ’nuff said (for now).
Windows CE 6 Beta is released
TechWeb is reporting that Microsoft has released the first beta of Windows CE 6, the base OS for Pocket PC and Smartphones and many other embedded devices. The announcement was made at MEDC 2006 which is going on right now at The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.
I hope the leadership of the Republican Party will take his word seriously. Because this is exactly right.
This is very simple: only Americans citizens should be allowed to vote in American elections.
The SAVE America Act is common sense, and we need to pass it now!
I don’t recall you complaining when gas was $5.00 under Biden.
Hypocrisy much?
Please RT!
This Middle Ages bullshit is a cancer on the planet👇👇🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸