Blogging

On blog comments

How do you track the conversations that go on in comments around the blogosphere? It’s easy enough to know what the actual blogs themselves are doing, after all – we have our feed readers, Google’s blog search and technorati. We have trackbacks and pings to let us know when people are linking to us on their sites. But what about the hidden conversations that are happening in the comments?

There are two angles to this. For example, it annoys me that when I comment on someone else’s blog, I am leaving content there that isn’t aggregated on my blog. I see DavePress as my little hub on the web, from which you can find out what I am doing elsewhere, on Twitter, or del.icio.us, or Flickr. I have a widget on this blog that displays the latest comments here – I’d also like one that displays my latest comments elsewhere.

This might be a fairly selfish thing to want, but the ability to do this has more practical advantages too. If we want people, whether public servants or those working for private enterprises, to engage with bloggers and to respond to them we really ought to be providing a way for those responses to be easily tracked.

Likewise, when a discussion is going on around an issue, with lots of stuff in the comments, how can that be tracked, or even found in the first place? You can subscribe to comment feeds I guess, but if you do that with every blog you’ll end up with twice as many feeds as you have already…

I think this could be a really important issue if we are to start using blogs as consultation mediums.

I suppose one possible answer is that we abandon comments altogether, and instead everyone responds to everyone else via blog entries, linking to the original.  I have read of some bloggers turning off the comments on their site for exactly this reason.

It’s a funny decision to make, actually, whether to start your own post on a subject or whether to respond in the comments. I don’t think I have a hard and fixed rule about it, maybe it just comes down to how much I have to say on a topic.

Does anyone have any ideas on how we can track comment conversations – whether our own or those we are interested in? What could change to make it easier?

Councillor 2.0

Just popped up on the Gallomanor blog – Cllr 2.0:

The Ministry of Justice Innovations Fund II approved a bid from Gallomanor and Norfolk County Council to help set this record straight.  We’re filming a group of six Norfolk County Councillors as we train them on how to blog.  The film along with a introductory booklet will be distributed to public sector organisations to help them convince their decision makers, their civic leaders that using the internet and blogging in particular are good communication tools.  We’ll also be setting up a series of Q&A session with local bloggers for the first 25 local authorities wanting to run them.

Great stuff! And perfect for my Public Sector Social Media meet on the 26th Feb. I have emailed Shane at Gallomanor to see if he and maybe someone from Norfolk CC can come along and chat to us about the project, which has its own blog (of course!) at http://cllr2pointzero.wordpress.com/.

Andrew Brown is also involved in Cllr 2.0, whose blog I have been subscribed to for a while now.

Another good example of councillors blogging is at Chester City Council, with their Chesterblogs project. I had emailed their generic web team address about this, and whether they would like to be involved, but sadly never heard anything back.

I’m a bipolar blogger

Writing for a blog is like writing for any other form, you have highs and lows in terms of producing content. What’s important is that you remain consistent in the numbers and length of posts that you produce. People are far more likely to respond positively to what you have to say if they have some idea of what they can expect from you.

This doesn’t mean you have to pigeonhole yourself into producing only certain types of posts. What it does mean is that you have an obligation to be smart about how you use the content you produce to create a better experience for your readers.

For example, I would definitely describe myself as a bipolar blogger. That is, I have manic episodes of producing stacks and stacks of content – my mind is buzzing with ideas for posts, I’ve got the time to get them written, I don’t have too many distractions. But there are also times when I’ve got blogger’s block and can’t bring myself to produce anything. The trick is to try and manage the ebb and flow of my content creation to try and appear more consistent, even if I’m not.

It helps that the blogging I do can be split into two main categories. Firstly, there are posts like this one, longer, maybe more thoughtful and most importantly, time unspecific. Quite frankly I could post this entry today, or next week, or next month, and it wouldn’t lose (or gain) relevance as a result.

The second type of blogging I do is more news based, whether it be reviews of new services, reports of goings-on in the world of web 2.0 gleaned from sources like TechCrunch which are shorter, to the point and very time specific.

If I am in a manic writing mood, I try and get as many of the longer posts written as possible, and save them on my desktop PC for use later on. I don’t post them all in one go – it would be a waste because, if nothing else, readers won’t pay attention if ten massive articles appear on one day in their reader. Instead, I hoard the non-time critical articles for blogging slumps, when I might be struggling for time or concentration to write them.

WordPress, the blogging platform I use here, provides two ways in which I can store the blog hoard online. One is simply to add posts and save them as drafts, only clicking the publish button when the time is right. Another option, which is great if you are going away, is to publish a post with a future date on it. This means the post will only hit the front page on the date one specifies, thus automating the publishing process to a certain extent.

As for the time specific news posts, well, I consider them to be non-critical to the blog. Most people that read DavePress will read other blogs too, and while my efforts to put my own spin on them might help people see how they could use certain technologies or why developments are relevant to them, I don’t think folk would miss them if the bigger bits are still being produced. So, when I am terribly busy, good quality content is still being produced, albeit it’s all of a longer nature than the short bursts of news.

Of course, it’s quite possible that trying to manage my bipolar blogging will break down at some point – like an extended period of struggling to find the time to write – but by stretching out the longer posts over time, I can hopefully make this a less likely occurrence.

What about your blogging? Are you a bipolar blogger – or can you achieve effortless consistency (if so, then I hate you)?

Use Google CSE on your blog

Google’s customised search engine service is really cool, useful and dead easy to use. It’s what I used to create LGSearch, which is one of the most successful bits of online work I have done. What Google CSE does is allow you to create a ‘whitelist’ of sites you want to limit your search to, so it’s a way of guaranteeing relevance in search results.

Another use of it is to replace your default blog search functionality. For example, it’s better than the WordPress standard search because it searches pages as well as posts; and it allows you to run contextual ads next to the results – taking people away from your blog but providing you with a little income, which is always nice.

The functionality is improved even more by using the new AJAX results overlay, which means there is no need to create a results page. Try it out on DavePress using the search box on the top right.

To get this on your WordPress blog, all you need to do is head over to Google CSE, create your search engine, remembering to only add your blog’s URL to the whitelist, and then copy the search box code into a text widget. Easy!

A thought on spam

spam Just a thought… If one runs a blog or online forum about erectile dysfunction and the use of viagra to combat that – how do you decide what is and isn’t spam?

A hypothetical thought, of course!

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