Jim's Blogging!

Jim Blasingame, The Small Business Advocate, is finally blogging. Jim has a great weekly newsletter and I hope the content from the newsletter makes its way to the blog.

Welcome Jim!

Macs aren't perfect

Good to be home

No time to blog? Go Micro

My friend and colleague Cale Bruckner has modified his blogging strategy over at his blog PalmIT and I think it is a great way to keep blogging without feeling the pressure to post long, in-depth articles. A major hurdle to blogging for most people is the intimidation factor and the time commitment. It feels like a major commitment to churn out a few hundred or thousand words a day/week/month. And it is.

So, instead of setting out to write a book with every blog post, why not try micro blogging? This is the practice of posting very short blog posts, often just one or two sentences and a link. A photo and a comment would also be good enough. If you find a site or an article that you think is interesting, post the link, add a short comment, and post it. Not only will this approach keep you blogging and keep your blog fresh, but most likely your audience will appreciate it as well. Everyone is already overloaded with information. Keeping things short and to the point is probably a good strategy.

Seth is Smarter than Me

Shocking, I know. It turns out that my snipe at Seth Godin in my previous post for not having comments is not really valid. There might be an actually strategy, not laziness, behind the choice to not have comments. Darren Rowse explains it best in an interview with Guy Kawasaki:

However another stroke of genius (I'm not sure if it's intended) with this approach is that Seth has made his blog a little more viral by not having comments. What happens when he writes something that people want to respond to? In many cases they blog about it - 'sneezing' his post further than his current readership.

Check out the number of blogs that link to his posts in Technorati. Most of them are just writing things that you'd normally expect to see being left as comments on a blog. It's no wonder that he's currently the 13th most linked to blog in the blogosphere (according to the Top 100 list)!

Darren goes on to say that this "strategy" wouldn't work for everyone, especially new bloggers, unless you have an alternative method for getting traffic to your site such as a successful book or a well known online profile of some kind.

So, I'm eating crow today. Sorry Seth. It still would be interesting to know for sure if this was an intended strategy or if Seth just didn't want to moderate comments.

Retail Packaging

Seth Godin's post today on retail packaging is right on the money. Having lived in this world for several years, he is speaking the exact truth:

[Bad] packaging is the result of a paranoid retail buyer (the person who orders in bulk for the store, not the buyer at retail) demanding pilfer-proof packaging combined with a lazy brand manager choosing a lousy solution to the challenge presented by getting it into a retailer. "Make it pilfer-proof or we won't carry it," he says. The brand manager doesn't want to take a risk, so she packages it the way they packaged it when the device cost $1,000. Impregnable.

The online thing I would change here is that it's not always a "lazy brand manager" but sometimes a business that can't afford to loose a major channel and has to bend to the retail buyer's whims. I've lived this and that's how it works sometimes. If you want to stay on the shelf you have to do what the buyer says.

And as long as I'm writing about Seth's post, here's my plea to Seth: Open up comments on your blog! Please! You preach about social conversations and about customer/company interactions but don't open up your own blog for public discussion. I just don't get it.

Social Pressure

In the world of web 2.0, the expectations to be social are overwhelming. We're all supposed to be sharing photos on flickr, blogging, reading blogs, managing our facebook and myspace profiles, updating linkedin, tweeting, posting video, and more. There are new services every day that are supposed to make our social interactions "easier."

In reality, what we have is a new flood of inbound information. Honestly, it's hard to keep up! Or maybe I'm just getting too old ;)

For me, the hardest thing is the pressure of all of this new inbound information. It feels like if you turn your back for a few minutes, go out to lunch, play with your kids, etc, you will miss the next speedy evolution of the web. People that are participating in social media for a living generate such a high volume of content that it feels that that level of participation is the expectation for all involved in social media. Not only that, matching my consumption to the production level of this content is virtually impossible to do while making sure I honor my obligations to work & family. Forget a full inbox. How about a Google Reader with thousands of unread blog posts?

I think it's time to re-set expectations about what is possible in social media (production and consumption). Thankfully, Sarah Perez has a new post about how real people don't have time for social media. It's a relief to see a post like this and also nice to re-set expectations about the real commitment that it takes to be fully involved in social media.

This topic of balance seems to be a growing theme among bloggers of late, although maybe not addressing the content parsing problem that "social media" creates directly:

(update: Erick Schonfeld gets it - Web 3.0 will be about reducing the Noise)

37Signals: Urgency is Poisonous
Tim Berry: Are you Making this Startup Mistake?
37 Signals (again): Workplace Experiments

The crux of all of this is to have a work-life balance and enjoy life beyond the computer screen. I love computers and technology, but I strongly believe that sometimes taking a break (even 30 minutes) is a good thing.