An online notebook
I wondered what would happen if I included every public Twitter profile in a customised Google search. The result was a pretty cool way of finding what people are saying on Twitter on a certain topic.
You can have a go yourself at Find a Tweet.
One drawback is that it relies on the Google cache, so isn’t up to the minute accurate. But if you are looking for something you know someone said a little while back, you should be able to track it down.
Following my beginners’ guide to blogging, I thought it might be nice to expand further on what sort of content you can use on your blog. After all, a blog is just a website, and what you do with the words you publish on it really is down to you.
There are a number of different blog post ‘types’ and it’s best to use a number of them regularly, otherwise your blog might end up a bit of a one-trick pony. Here I go through seven different types of post that I have identified.
1. List posts
You must have seen these around: “10 ways to make your blog accessible to cats”, “5 ways to ensure you are bankrupted by the Digg effect”, “33 ways having a blog makes you less attractive to women”. That sort of thing.
List posts are very good for being noticed on social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit, for example.
List posts are a useful framework to hang ideas from, and if you are struggling for inspiration, they are a good way of driving yourself through bloggers’ block. Everyone knows this though, so if you use them too often, you end up looking a mite desperate.
2. Reblogging
A lot of people are bemoaning the large amount of reblogging that goes on these days, but I still think there is a place for it. Effectively, it’s just picking a news item that’s particuarly hot, linking to a popular post about it, sticking in a quote from said blog and then maybe adding a line or two of comment at the bottom.
You don’t need to be terribly creative to do this, and it serves a purpose to highlight stories you think are important to your readers. But, if it’s all you do, then you will probably come across as looking pretty pointless. You need to add a little more value now and again.
3. How-tos
How-tos are great, because they can be genuinely useful for your readers. Pick a topic, maybe something you have done yourself recently, and write a run-through of how you did it, with plenty of links and screenshots. Everyone will love you for it, but they take quite a long time to do and require some real dedication – if they were all you did, you’d soon go mad.
4. Summary Posts
These are quite tricky to do well, but can be really good for catching new traffic and generally interesting for everyone. It’s where you take a current news topic, quote a few different sources about it and try and weave your own views inbetween. Again, it can take ages to find decent quotes and then come up with something original to say about it all.
5. Random brain dumps
You can get away with these only every once in a while, but they can be pretty entertaining. Say something has been nagging away at you for a little while, well, just start writing about it with no idea where you are ending up. It’s just possible that somewhere in your witterings will be a gem or two – but you are likely to be relying on your readers to point them out to you in the comments. These posts are great for starting big “what if…” type conversations and even sparking things to get done or built. However, if all you post is this sort of stream-of-consciousness stuff, the only thing likely to get done is your readers’ heads (in).
6. Reviews
I used to do quite a bit of reviewing of new web 2.0 stuff that cropped up, and I really want to start doing it again. Take a new service, explain what it does, compare it to the competition and summarise your thoughts. Dead useful.
7. Asides
Sometimes it just isn’t necessary to produce huge screeds of text to make a post useful. It can just be a one liner, or a couple of sentences. Euan Semple is great at these – just chucking a thought out there and seeing how people react to it. It’s possible that microblogging platforms like Twitter are starting to be the best place for stuff like this, but I think it’s nice to have a more permanent record, with the structured responses in the comments that you get with a blog.
So there’s my seven. Anyone got any more?
One of the great things about Twitter is the community that comes with it. Not just the community in terms of the people you follow, and who follow you, but also the network of people working to make Twitter more useful, or just more interesting.
Much of this is because of the API Twitter has released, making it dead easy for hackers to build stuff around the service. There is also a community run wiki gathering resources together, as well as a Google Group mailing list.
So what are some of the projects that are built around Twitter? Try these for size:
Have you got any favourites?
TechCrunch announces the launch of a new Mozilla (the guys behind open source projects like FireFox, to name one) site called Mozillla Messaging. This site aims to ‘fix’ internet communications, firstly by driving the development of the new version of Thunderbird, a desktop email client that replaces things like Outlook Express on Windows machines and Mail on the Mac.
Thunderbird has never really taken off like Firefox, largely, I would imagine, because people just don’t use desktop email clients much, unless it is a heavyweight like Outlook or (bleugh) Lotus Notes at work, so there isn’t much to replace. Indeed, the success of Firefox in making web based email applications even more usable, like Gmail and the new Yahoo! Mail, has reduced the possible market for Thunderbird.
Still, giving the email app. a bigger online presence, out of the shadow of Firefox, is probably a good idea. Mozilla Messaging hasn’t completed replaced the former Thunderbird online places though – you can still get it from the Mozilla.com site.
It’s not just about Thunderbird though. In a blog post, the new CEO of Mozilla Messaging David Ascher says:
It is worthwhile considering what the right user experience could be for someone using multiple email addresses, multiple instant messaging systems, IRC, reading and writing on blogs, using VoIP, SMS, and the like. What parts of those interactions make sense to integrate, and where? I don’t believe that stuffing all of those communication models inside of one application is the right answer. But the walled gardens that we’re faced with today aren’t the right answer either. There is room for innovation and progress here, and we need to facilitate it.
There has been plenty of writing recently about email actually being the hub that links all of our social networks, rather than being replaced by them. However, I’m not convinced that a desktop application is the answer. Indeed, I would imagine that you can pretty much manage all your online social networks through Gmail in FireFox now.