I’m really getting into the whole blogging thing now. Part of this has been my use of Bloglines and the increased number of blogs I’m reading. As I am more exposed to new blogs and new ways of using them, I’m more and more excited by the concept.
Most of this is down to Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and their Red Couch project. Two people writing the same book over a blog, with constant critiques coming in from commenters. It’s like a writing reality TV programme. Only interesting. As well as these two, philb is another who has excited my interest in the topic.
I’ve had a personal blog for a year or so now. I get fed up with the system I’m using so I chop and change a lot. I guess I didn’t really know what I was meant to be doing with it. That changed with the Closed Circle, where some of the stuff I posted was half decent and even worth hanging onto. Maybe I’ll look into importing some of that stuff into this blog.
I also use Blogger for the Graham Parsnip blog, a collaborative writing project with my friend Al Kitching. It suits because a slightly amateurish image is what we are after there. But my frustrations with Blogger (largely connecting to the damn server) mean that I couldn’t use that as a longterm solution for a blog I am working on regularly.
I’m pretty interested in a Scrutiny blog, specifically a collaborative one. I’ll try and grab stuff together for this blog, but it simply won’t have the range of one being put together by the whole county. We’ll see how receptive the other Scrutiny officers are at the next meeting – I’ll hold off sending that email till after that.
What would I like to see to improve Blogging? Better integration with images than I have seen so far. With Blogger you can use Picasa which I downloaded yesterday and haven’t yet decided what I make of it. That then links with another service call Hello which enables you to post pictures onto your blog. What if you don’t use Blogger? Tough, I guess, though I haven’t looked into it too deeply.
What I would want to see is a program that allows me to organise all my digital images, cut and crop them, reduce the filesize (v. important when a digital camera is involved), then ftp directly to my webspace, and then take me into my blogging application to post on that image.
Does this application already exist?