Good to be home

I’ve been briefly back in the Bay Area. There hasn’t been any blogging in the past few days because I’ve been busy catching up with family & running errands. Hope the 10 or so readers of this site are having a great week

Write blog postings, not articles

Both Daily Blog Tips and Scoble are pointing to a piece called Write Articles, Not Blog Postings. According to its own summary:

To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings.

The piece is dead wrong. The blogosphere is a series of conversations. What if I simply want to contribute to the dialog? Why should every blogger strive to ‘demonstrate world-class expertise’?

Reader to comment ratio

This blog has had 200 visits since it was created and 5 comments. 2.5% of readers have commented, not bad. What’s your blog’s ratio?

Analogy: blogging is like going to the gym

Angela compares blogging anxiety to the feeling right before heading to the gym. Yeah, I can see that. Blogging can feel like a chore and you start making excuses such as, “I have writers block, I’m tired, etc”. But after a post is finished the blogger feels really good.

Any other good blogging analogies out there?

The Scoble Effect

The graph below shows the visitor traffic in this young blog’s life. I’m calling the spike on the 24th “The Scoble Effect” because all that additional traffic came from the Scobleizer.

Here’s how this happend:

1. Scoble wrote this post.
2. I responded with this post.
3. My post inadvertently trackedback to Scoble’s post and became the first comment.
4. Ta-da! 42 extra visitors.

Maybe “blogosphere” is a better term for the extra traffic

Blog tags rule

Check out my “tag cloud” in the sidebar. You’ll notice there are multiple topics ranging from the Chicago to Judaism to blogging to politics. Each time I “tag” a blog post with a certain topic, it becomes part of a mini-blog which includes posts only related to that topic. Thanks to being part of the WordPress.com my posts also are indexed there too.

This reflects my life, which is a number of intertwined stories. For example: I’m in Chicago for the summer, exploring my Judaism, blogging, and following politics.

Am I using tags correctly? Any feedback/experiences with tags?

Scoble is a facebook wh*re

Here’s the problem with opening up Facebook to the public, they don’t get it. Robert Scoble (who I’m a huge fan of) is bragging about his Facebook friend network:

(in two weeks I’ve already gathered more than 600 friends).

Back in my day, the reason why people used Facebook was to enhance real life connections. Examples: staying in touch with high school classmates, keep track of friends’ birthdays, plan real life events, etc. As Facebook opens up, it reminds me more & more of MySpace.

UPDATE: Check out Scoble’s response. I can buy that, he certainly does have a unique way of interacting with his readers. What other bloggers do you know who have dinner with their readers?

UPDATE 2: Chris Fleming seems to agree with the original point I made. Check out his comment on Scobleizer:

I almost added you as a friend, in fact I got as far as hitting the add friend button. Then I decided against it.

The point of Facebook (for me at least) is that a Friend is a real friend, I can put things up on Facebook that I wouldn’t necessarily want members of the public to see.

This is for personal relationships, it’s about meeting up with friends, and staying in touch with friends, and the sharing of things with friends.

UPDATE 3: Scoble is up to 1300 Facebook friends.

UPDATE 4: Teresa also finds Scoble silly:

Basically, Facebook is wonderful because it creates virtual maps of actual, real-world connections. It’s just like LinkedIn because it assumes that when someone becomes friends with someone else, they are endorsing that person. A friend request is a request for an endorsement. It’s a way to reach out and say, “hey, tell the world that I’m really an OK person.”

Music feature

I just added a music widget by Sonific to this blog’s sidebar. In short, it’s a jukebox which I will change from time to time based on songs and genres I’m intrigued with. Don’t worry, it’s not obnoxious the way some sites are, music will not play unless you specifically click the play button.

Lately, I’ve been exploring my Jewish identity, which is why the music player is set to play a song called L’cha Dodi.

WordCamp Coming Up!

WordPress (the nice people who power this blog), are putting on a second conference in San Francisco. FYI, the guy to the right in the picture founded wordpress. Last year, it was a great way to hang out with fellow bloggers and learn more about wordpress. The attendees and speakers were a great bunch. Definitely looking forward to attending this year.

Robert Scoble: A gentleman & a blogger

Instead of breaking the story about Terry Semel stepping down, Scoble finished an interview he was working on:

So, just before interviewing Sun Microsystems’ DTrace team today (that’s a photo of them) I got a call from a source. He said “Semel is out. Yang is taking over.” This is why I am not a good journalist. I didn’t drop everything, tell the three geeks to hang on while I banged out a post, etc. Instead I went on with the interview, which was a lot of fun.

Lately, it feels like there’s an obsession with breaking stories amogn bloggers. It’s nice to see that someone is interested diving deep into substance versus breaking the latest sound bite.

Bloggers and journalists can work together

Ask any journalist what’s the first place they turn to research a story, they’ll tell you it’s the internet. For a few years there has been an absurd (and hyped) rivalry a between bloggers and journalists. It never made sense to me. Bloggers typically excel in owning little niches, while journalists are professional writers. Journalists ideally document life as impartially as possible, while most bloggers stick to a code of ethics, we certainly aren’t impartial.

Relevant Example:
My Target blog was recently referred to in a newspaper article about Target. The the author of the piece sent me a note asking for a link to his article. I gladly complied and gave a biased subjective analysis of the piece. My blog gave the newspaper readers a great outlet to get more in depth, and the article gave my readers an unbiased overview of the the retail market in Orange county. Win-Win.

UPDATE: A friend who read this post mentioned that “biased” (paragraph above) is a poor word choice.

A different kind of blog

UPDATE: My Target blog was mentioned in a story by the Orange County Register, which tempts me to continue that blog as well.

Until now, I’ve been blogging at Target Culture, a niche blog for people who love Target stores. There are over 200 posts about my favorite store. The problem: blog burnout. I have nothing more to say about Target. That’s where this blog comes in. It’s called The Hiller Report, in honor of The Drudge Report, a site I visit all the time.

For a while now I’ve wanted a place to place to document and think about life. Hopefully, this is that place.