Post Idea Giveaway 2012

Apr 20, 2012 | blog, featured

ideas-notebook

Ideas Notebook By Matthew Allard

Sometimes you find that you’ve got too many ideas.  Ever have that problem?  I do this week, and I swear I’m going to do something about  it. I’ve got blog post ideas going back several years covering things from social media to technology to life topics and so on.  It’s time I liberate these post ideas.  I’m giving them to you to take and run with, just in case you’ve run out of ideas and need some inspiration.  What better way to end the week, right? Alrightly, here we go:

  1. Social Networking & The Impact On Your Personal Brand
  2. Moleskine Notebooks – Going Analog For The Fun of Writing
  3. How To Balance Social Network Participation In The Workplace
  4. 101 Uses for Twitter
  5. Why I Believe The “Smartphone” Isn’t So Smart
  6. Your Blog IS Your Social Network
  7. Online Communities – You Get Out Of Them Only What You Put Into Them
  8. The New Social Economy
  9. Social Media Is About Sociology Not Technology
  10. Never Stop Experimenting To Grow Yourself Or Your Brand
  11. If Words Mean Things
  12. Old Media Using Social Media
  13. Building A Better Branded Blog
  14. Decline Of Technology In America?
  15. Social Media And The IT Professional
  16. Anonymity – Pros & Cons
  17. Can You Connect Up To 6 people?
  18. Linux: Ubuntu Or Fedora Or ?
  19. The Most Powerful Social Media Tool: YOU
  20. Decisions: iOS Or Android
  21. Personal Branding And The IT Professional
  22. 10 Reasons For A Windows Hack To Love The iPhone
  23. Disengage From The Collective That Is Your Corporate Mindset
  24. “Who Am I?”
  25. How Can I Help People?
  26. Linux Software Installers – Why Do They Suck?
  27. Essential Software For The Blogger
  28. The New Intellectual
  29. Is the Theme/Style Of Your Blog Important To Readers?
  30. Social Realities Of A New Generation
  31. What Do I Do?
  32. What Can I Accomplish?
  33. Powerful Writing…
  34. Do I Realize How Lucky I Am?
  35. Social Media In The Enterprise
  36. Negativity In The Workplace
  37. Don’t Talk, Just Do
  38. Social Media Is An Evolutionary Step
  39. Tear Down This Wall (Cubicles That Is)
  40. What Is A “Social Entrepreneur”?
  41. Enterprise/Corporate Culture Clashes
  42. Good Enough
  43. Social Media Shoehorn
  44. Blogging Is A Commitment, Social Networks Are A Fling
  45. Making It Happen
  46. Why My Blogging “Rock Stars” Are From the Z-List
  47. SharePoint Can Be An Internal Enterprise Social Media Tool
  48. Labeling Things And Why It’s Ok
  49. Why Paper Publications Will Never Go Away
  50. A Culture Without Culture
  51. To Meme Or Not
  52. Step Away From The Ledge – It’s Going To Be Ok
  53. Help People
  54. Want To Be A High-Buck Consultant?
  55. Positive Growth Through Negative Feedback
  56. Virtualization: For Technology Only?
  57. Build Your Own Brand Armies
  58. Networking For Fun And Profit
  59. Fostering New Communication In The Enterprise
  60. What Social Media Has Taught A Techie Geek
  61. Afraid To Succeed?
  62. Stodgy Or Stale Brand? 10 Sure-Fire Ways To Freshen It Up
  63. Social Media Does Not Equal Marketing Or PR
  64. Fearing Free (Free Rage Fears?)
  65. The Problem With Technically Excellent Solutions
  66. Be Your Own Editor
  67. Thinkers – The Ones To Watch
  68. Getting Back To Where We Came From
  69. Go Where Your Forefathers Couldn’t
  70. Unsung Heros: Headhunters
  71. The Line In The Sand & When You Step Over It
  72. Landing Pages – Why Bother?
  73. Put It On paper
  74. Gen Y & Why They’re different
  75. Engage HR For Change
  76. Friend Counts Do Mean Something
  77. Anatomy Of Twitter
  78. Lack Of New Examples
  79. The More You Share
  80. The Android Dilemma
  81. Is Your Day Job Your Only Gig?
  82. When Self Promotion Goes Too Far
  83. The Joys Of Building Community
  84. Is Social Media Respected In Corporate Environments?
  85. Lets Not Screw Around
  86. Why The Old Tools Don’t Work
  87. Why The Old Tools STILL Work
  88. Corporate Obsolesce
  89. The changing Face Of Social Media
  90. What’s The Big Deal About 4G?
  91. What’s Next For Social Media
  92. The Dark Side Of Social Media, And Why It Sucks
  93. You Will Live Online
  94. Why Tablet-Haters Loose In The End
  95. 10 Billion Apps
  96. Do What Comes Naturally
  97. The Decline Of Social Media
  98. Social Media Posers
  99. Ongoing Standards Wars
  100. Shortsightedness Of Newspaper Publishers

Well, there’s a handful of the post ideas I’ve got in my notes.  That was just from one page of a OneNote notebook of post ideas! Sometimes, you just run out of time or simply never get back to the ideas you had when you thought of the topic.  Whatever the case, I figure somebody might make use of one or two, or ten of these.  Better to set them free than keep ’em in a dusty digital notebook right?

Photo credit: Ideas Notebook By Matthew Allard. Thank you Matthew the use of your photo!
Blog Header Photo credit: JOH_1994 by star5112.  Thanks for a neat picture of post-it notes that captured my thought!

Giving It Away

Aug 6, 2008 | blog

Part of what made the early and current social media crowd important to me, has been the willingness for folks to “give it away”. By that I mean all the ideas, tools, and techniques that are used and talked about on the social web. This post itself is inspired by the very concept of sharing and giving ideas away as the title comes from Chris Brogan’s 100 Blog Topics I Hope YOU Write. During one trip nearly a year ago, he gave away 100 topic ideas, offering them up for folks to expand on.

That is an example of what I mean. One guy has time on his hands and wants to share his ideas, knowing that he may not have time to write about some of the posts he’s thought of. There’s more though. The bulk of social media to date is based on giving away something. Whether it’s ideas, or stories, or comedy, or podcasts, or how-to’s, or videos, the interest in sharing in this new media venue is what makes it all so exciting. Sure, it’s going to change – you can already see that happening – but it’s the folks who’ve started it, and those that follow the same ethos that make it exciting.

As this medium evolves as a method to connect and interact with clients and customers, it will become more commercialized and controlled. At least, there will always be attempts to control it. We believe at this point that most attempts to control the social web will fail – we’ll have to wait and see if that turns out to be true.

Mostly, I enjoy the idea that through all the years, through all the social and political change, through the technological changes, that we still value social interaction as much as our grandparents. It’s the satisfaction that through the years, the desire to share tips and things we’ve learned with folks doesn’t change. That people are quite happy to share and “give it away”.

Photo credit: mdezemery

Thank you to Chris Brogan for giving away some good blog topics. Occasionally dip into those 100 ideas to see what I can come up with.

Delivering A Consistent Message

Jun 1, 2008 | blog

'Sutradhar' by gaurang One of the toughest things for bloggers starting out is staying on topic. The free-form aspect of blogging, of having a public soapbox of sorts is the desire to start talking about just about anything that comes to mind. Actually, I’ll contradict myself here for a minute and say that doing just that is good for bloggers, and should be done before you pick a blogging genre to dive into. Heck, you can find my first three blogging attempts here, here & here.

Once you find a topic or genre you are passionate about, it’s really important to remain true to that area of interest. There is a wide range of things to write about in your genre, so you shouldn’t need to try to combine two disparate topics. Trying to write about bicycling and fudge making for example just wouldn’t make a lot of sense.

It’s also hard to find topic ideas that consistently cover new areas or explore more detail on a regular basis. That is the more difficult part of blogging. Finding the topics that don’t seem to be repeating previous ones or feeling that you’re writing to too low an interest level. It’s easy to second guess yourself and simply not write because of it. That seems to be a common affliction too many bloggers, even one’s that have been blogging for awhile. 😉

A tip to combat that problem is to simply sit down for an hour, even 30 minutes, and brainstorm on things you want to talk about related to you topic. Do it once a month and reduce it to a reasonable number to accomplish in 30 days for your schedule and genre. One of the tools that I’ve recently been introduced to is mind mapping. There are many online and software-based tools to accomplish this, but it can easily be done with pen & paper to great affect for the needs of most bloggers. Starting with a central topic or theme, you can quickly map out interconnected ideas and develop an outline of topics very quickly. Highly recommended.

Since there are many different perspectives on this, I’m interested in yours, what would you add to this?

Photo credit: gaurang

8 Suggestions for blogs of the future

Sep 1, 2007 | blog

hollywood tunnelI started thinking a bit after Robert Scoble’s (yeah I know I reference Robert a lot) Kyte video post about his blog of the future.  While I may disagree with a few of his concepts, the whole concept of what a future blog may look like got my mind racing in new directions.

The problem that I think we have in many blogs, is the lack of white space which I know is not a new discussion point for many bloggers.  The difficulty comes in the tools that we use in combination with most peoples skill in design.  Helping the blogger (beginner and experienced) with some additional pre-packaged design elements that fit the majority of styles that a person may choose from would go a long way to improving this situation.

  1. Configurable Text Boxes that can be placed in a post by the blogger. These boxes would act similar to placing a picture and allow the blogger to set it to the left/center/right and allow text to flow around it.  It would have selectable edges (rounded/square), alpha blending borders and background, and allow for different fonts. Possibly accommodate different shapes for the box (circle, square, rectangle, octagon, triangle, etc…).
  2. Standardized Font “Module” System similar in concept to TrueType or PostScript in the desktop publishing industry, standardized fonts that could easily be added to the blog.
  3. Standardized XML framework to more easily create customized or customizable Widgets.
  4. Integrate common technologies like Lightbox into the rendering engine of the blog software so there is less need for users to have to manually enhance their blogs with these add on’s, plug ins, or by having to edit code.
  5. Use existing research on how people view/read blogs and apply those learning’s to the default layouts, templates and themes that come “in the box”.
  6. Standardize an Ad Engine API that would allow bloggers to plug in standardized Ad modules from the major ad engines out there. Accommodate, in-line text ads, context-sensitive ads, text-link ads, banner ads, skyscraper ads, etc… Make it easy for the blogger to more cleanly integrate the ads from any vendor.  This would also make it easy for ad vendors to integrate with any blog software.
  7. A standardized tagging engine provided as open source. Get an open source library of standard tags that are either automatically attached to a post, recommended to the blogger, or that could be manually selected.  We have too many people creating similar but different tags out there.
  8. Easily customizable HTML tag styles on a panel in the blog management interface that allows the blogger to more easily customize the “a href”, “img src”, and “abbr title” HTML styles (formatting). Make it easy for bloggers to pick the border, background, text, color, and so on. Allow them to set their selections to override the installed theme’s CSS for these tags.

Well those are my suggestions to help build the blog of the future.  I personally believe that the basic layout of a blog is well defined and has little room for improvement.  The basic idea of a top banner and a single column of content arranged in reverse chronological order (newest at the top, oldest at the bottom) is hard to beat.

It’s in the themes, bling or “farkles”, badges, advertising, and add-on’s that we all add to our blogs that tend to detract from the readability.  Fancy graphics and animations may be “cool” but the pictures and code take time to download – even in our increasingly highly-connected broadband world.  Glossy, intricate interfaces are wonderful for local high-powered devices like PCs and phones.  However, any time you need to pull the bulk of the site’s rendering media and content across a connection, it’s better to keep it simple and effective (i.e. elegant).

There is more, a lot more, that we all need to start tossing on the pile of ideas for the blog of the future.  I’m an IT geek that always thinks about the technical part, but that’s a small portion of what makes a blog a blog.

What are your needs for your blog going into the future?  What needs aren’t being addressed today?  What are your ideas to make a better blog?

Update: Well, I guess I’m not the only one thinking about fonts on the web. This article over at A List Apart, covers this idea in more on CSS3. I also didn’t realize that CSS has been around for a decade! 😛

Photo credit, Kris Kros

Technorati tags: , , ,

Pin It on Pinterest