CT Biz Blogs

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m at BlogHer 06, and I’ll be glad to ask your questions, if you put them in the comments. I tried to post this last night, but the site was apparently down for a bit. Seems ok now.

Here are the sessions for Day Two that I plan on attending today (except for early morning yoga)– what would you like to know about them? Ask questions in the comments, if you’re curious.

• Get Deeply Geeky.
  BlogHers want to talk technology and gender. Is the web itself a feminine construct? How about open source? Join Laura Scott, mir verburg, Nancy White & futurist Melanie Swan to discuss.

  To tell you the truth, I don’t care about the gender part — I just want to talk tech!

• Business Blog Case Studies
  Yvonne DiVita, Susan Getgood & Toby Bloomberg lead a rap session with you, the BlogHers, about what worked (and what didn’t) when implementing blogs for business.

  I’m very much looking forward to this one.

• Group Blogging
  Mandy Moore from the KnittingBloggers community, Iris Rodriguez & Veronica Hernandez from Smashcast and Sarah Gilbert & Asha Dornfest from Portland Urban Mamas are among those who have dealt with the practical & inspirational realities of building online blog communities.

I love that this conference is so wired — people have laptops open at every table, wi-fi connections (sometimes flaky when lots of people are logged on), plenty of plugs for laptops. It’s great.

But, just like at work, it’s tempting to check email while people are talking, instead of listening and taking notes!

Technorati : BlogHer

For the final two BlogHer 06 sessions I plan on attending tomorrow(I’m exhausted just thinking about all the stuff I’m going to learn):

• Video:

For the beginning or new user. We’re bringing back Video Goddess Ryanne Hodson, along with Zadi Diaz, to help you walk away ready to add video posts to your blog.

• Design/Style/Customization:

Want to make your blog your own? DIY or pay? And what’s reasonable in time & money? Miriam Verburg and Tiffany Brown walk you thru it, plus stylesheets (CSS) and how they work.

So don’t be shy — if there’s anything you want me to ask, leave a comment.

Technorati : BlogHer

Continuing with my idea of posting about the sessions I plan on attending on Day One of BlogHer ‘06, here are two more:

• Audio/Podcasting

Instructors will be on hand to serve all user levels. Beginners will create & post an audio entry with Susan Kitchens. Advanced users will get hands-on instruction and interactive Q&A about advanced techniques, plus best practices in promotion and distribution from Nicole Simon and Anita Campbell.

• Audience Building

Elise Bauer talks traffic: how to build it, how to understand your site statistics, how to optimize your site to build search engine traffic, how to use syndication and subscriptions to build recurring traffic…the works!

We’ll see what I learn. Don’t hesitate to give me your questions to ask at the sessions.

Technorati : BlogHer

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m at BlogHer ‘06, and I want to write about the sessions I plan on attending at BlogHer. That way, anyone who reads this before the session can give me a question they’d like me to ask for them.

The first workshop session I plan on attending on Friday July 28 is called So, You Have This Crazy Idea. As it says in the session description:

You want to start a community-based blog site, but aren’t sure where to start. Melanie Morgan, Nancy White, Susannah Gardner & Lauren Gelman are among those who will help you examine what’s out there, define what you can do differently, and create a plan to develop content, promote your efforts and watch your back….

This session is a how-to from a bigger-picture and more holistic perspective. How to tame a crazy idea, find out if it’s worth pursuing, figure out how-to pursue it, and pursue it with confidence. We have lined up four women who are uniquely qualified to help you do just that.

I plan on picking up some tips on blogs that center around a community of practice or interest. That can be an actual physical community, such as New York City, or it can be a community of practice such as lawyers, programmers, even bloggers.

Aside from learning more about community-based blogs, I expect that I’ll pick up some good tips on fostering community that would apply to any blog.

So if anyone has any questions they’d like me to ask, leave a comment here and I’ll try to get them answered.

Technorati : BlogHer

It’s been a busy week at CTBizBlog, mostly because I’ve been off-line. It’s been a strain, but I think I’ll survive.

But now I’m in San Jose, and I’ll be attending BlogHer 2006. This conference was started last year, partially in reaction to the scarcity of women bloggers at other blogging and geek get-togethers. Men are welcome, too.

I’ve been looking forward to this conference for months. I have a roommate, too, who I am looking forward to meeting — Liz Strauss of Successful Blog.

I’m not sure if I’ll “live blog,” actually typing my notes into a blog post and publishing while at sessions. For me, that takes concentration away from the speaker, as I try to compose in whole sentences so that my notes make some sort of sense to non-attendees. At some conferences bloggers just post their rough notes, scattering sentence fragments and obscure references with abandon, but as a reader, I find that less than helpful. I’m always skimming through those posts, and the parts that interest me usually happen to be the sections where the notes are the most cryptic and frustrating, so I never get much out of it.

Instead I’ll try short posts throughout Friday and Saturday, sharing things I think might be interesting to my readers.

What I might do is post about what sessions I plan on attending, and ask folks to leave comments if they have any questions they’d like me to ask at the session. That could be fun!

I’ll do that tonight when I get to the hotel — let’s give that a try and see how it goes.

Technorati : BlogHer

Blogs are great ways to let people get to know you a little bit. Usually it’s done indirectly, as your interests, skills, and knowledge are revealed in what you write about.

One way you can let people know about you is by interviewing yourself. By this I don’t mean the “I-have-12-children-and-live-in-Podunk” kind of stuff. Although that’s a good bit for the “about” page. (I’d certainly like to know, because anyone with 12 kids and still sane has miraculous management techniques!)

One approach to telling us about yourself is to try writing more stories, maybe about a time when you accomplished something or learned something. That isn’t really telling — it’s showing.

This is the basis of a technique that’s become popular in job interviews, called “Behavioral Interviewing.” In a job interview (which a blog is, in part) the interviewer might say something like “Tell me about a time when you had to tell someone bad news. What did you do and what happened?”

The stories are best if they stick to things that happened at a job, or something not too personal. And certainly not confessional — a small business blog shouldn’t be a tell-all diary. If other people in the story are recognizable by those who know you, it’s best to get their OK. You don’t want the kids at school teasing your son because of something his daddy said on a blog.

To get you started, here are a few sample behavioral interview questions from the Quintessential Careers website:

• Describe a time when you were faced with a stressful situation that demonstrated your coping skills.

• Give me an example of a time when you set a goal and were able to meet or achieve it.

• Tell me about a time you were able to successfully deal with another person even when that individual may not have personally liked you (or vice versa).

Katharine Hansen has some good interview answering tips on the Quintessential Careers site.

On your post, you don’t need to actually ask the question first, of course. You can start in with the answer. But you will need to have some introduction, some reason why you’re telling this story. It can be something as simple as a news item that reminds you of something that happened to you, or something that someone said, or even something as simple as, “You know, the life of a Waste Management Engineer isn’t all roses. Sometimes the compost heap can get piled pretty high. I remember a time when…” And you’re off.

See how easy it can be?

Technorati : blogging

If you have a small business and you’re thinking about blogging, one big thing you need to think about is how you want your blog to look. All the blogging applications have a way of customizing the look and feel of your blog via templates or themes.

Templates and themes (which is what WordPress calls a template) are types of “skins,” or looks that you can use to customize your blog. One of the great things about modern websites is that the functionality has been separated from the look of the sites. It’s kind of like how my Toyota RAV 4 is really a Corolla. Or is it a Camry? I can never remember.

While that may or may not be ideal for cars, it’s definitely the way to go with web sites, which is what a blog is. You separate out the things you want to have on your blog — such as search, comments, trackbacks, and so on, from the way they’re displayed.

How your blog looks is one way you can make it distinctive and “branded.” As PR and Marketing folks will tell you, this is a good idea.

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If you’re trying to make money from the ads on your site, then you do need traffic, and lots of it.

But if you’ve got a small business, sometimes blogging a lot can be too much of a good thing.

Via Debbie Weil’s WordBiz Report, here’s a great article from Eric Kintz’s Marketing Excellence blog on why you don’t have to spend all your spare time writing posts for your blog. It’s well worth reading.

The short synopsis is that, as a small business, total traffic is not as important as reaching your target audience.

You can do that by such things as: commenting on other blogs or forums that your clients or prospective clients visit and by putting your blog’s web address on your regular site, on your email signature line, on your outgoing voice mail message, handouts, brochures, and just about any place where your target audience is likely to see it.

You still need to post, of course. You just don’t need to obsess over it.

Whew, thanks Eric for taking some of the pressure off.

Ok, the template experimenting is over for now. I found a few previously undiscovered bugs in the template, so I reverted back to the old one. For the record, here’s what that template looked like:

Very plain, but it has several things I like, such as the ability to subscribe to a feed of comments on a per post basis, and the next/previous navigation links at the bottom of the page. You can see this theme, Barthelme, in greater detail on the ThemeViewer site.

The theme I’m leaning towards now is called Andy Blue. Here’s a screenshot of that:

It is a three-column theme, which I need. But for my purposes, it’ll need to be tweaked.

The thing I find amazing is that how relatively easy it is to tweak the WordPress themes. You don’t need to know PHP, you only need to know or learn how to recognize what PHP function is doing what.

And you learn that by looking at themes, and looking at the theme editor in the dashboard. Not a piece of cake, but not caster oil, either.

If you want to get some idea of the number of WordPress themes, the ThemeViewer site is a quick and easy visual way to do that.

Another excellent place to find themes is How to Blog’s list of 960+ WordPress themes. This woman has put a lot of work into collecting and updating her list of sites and it’s well worth checking out.

Technorati : WordPress

When you have a blog, one thing you need to decide on is how you want the blog to look.

I decided that 11 months ago for CTBizBlogs, but for about the last 3 of those months, I’ve been trying to decide on a new look. Feedback on this has been mixed. For the old theme, it’s almost as if you can put your self on the geeky to normal spectrum based on your reaction to it.

Loved it = techy
Accepted it = techy tendencies
Confused by it = non-techy

For the record, here’s what it looked like:

The main reaction from non-techy types was that it was busy, and not clear where the focus was.

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