Most bloggers should tweet instead

In the cacophonous jumble of thoughts that bounce through our heads every day, there are a few that stand out. We feel compelled to share these observations and ruminations -- the uncommon moment, for example, where you see a mailman who is walking quickly and smoking a cigar.

I've been using Twitter for about a month now and I've found it's a handy way to bookmark such observations and ruminations when they happen. And I've come to appreciate the beauty of Twitter's brevity constraint: your posts (or tweets) can be no longer than 140 characters.

What's so good about this extreme conciseness? This: it forces you to get to the point. Have you ever taken a random walk down blog street? Granted, there are great blogs out there, but the vast majority are one of two types:

• Ramblefests: Stream-of-conscious rants that are ferociously uninteresting.
• Copycats: Multi-paragraph quotations from news sites and other blogs, with maybe a sentence or two of original commentary.

All the bloggers that fit in the above two categories should discover the joy of Twitter -- where there's really only room for original content. And where it's difficult to repeat yourself (unless you accidentally hit the "update" button six times, like I did the other day).

You can stalk me on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/thefoible

Tags: Twitter

My sister's on the radio today

While I've been undeniably lax as a blogger over the past several months, my sister has been on an incredible blogging spree. Her blog about the 70s has quickly built up an active community of readers. Indeed, she's gotten so popular that she was interviewed about her blog by local radio station KUOW. The interview will air today at 2 PM, and Katy will post a link to the interview after it airs.

Tags: Rollerblog interview

Fun with the Feedburner Headline Animator

I don't post for a week and all of a sudden I post three times in a day. I know, I know, I'm rebelling against blogging best practices. So be it.

I just used the Feedburner headline animator to make a nifty little widget that displays the latest posts from the Healia Blog:

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Fun stuff!

Tags: Feedburner Headline Animator Healia widget

Children of the 70s

Born in '74 (me) and '76 (her), my sister Katy and I are children of the 70s. We wore the funny clothes. Everything was orange and brown and hazy and bellbottom-y.

In honor of the strange decade of our birth, Katy has started writing The RollerBlog. In her words:

This blog chronicles my journey into the decade of my birth, in which I will immerse myself in all things seventies. Movies, books, music, television, pop culture, and more await.

Definitely take a look; her blog is a lot of fun. She's posted reviews of the film Silent Running, the discography of Yes, and a very...interesting...book called Half Past Human.

Katy, I bid you a warm welcome to the world of blogging. :)


A few more photos of us from the 70s:

• On the couch, when Katy was just a baby.
• Christmas! No, we weren't exactly wealthy.
• Halloween, With Grammy and Dad.
• Wheelbarrow ride.

Tags: RollerBlog siblings sister 70s music movies culture seventies photos

Eavesdroppers

I've been laughing (silently to myself) at overheard snippets of conversation for years, so I was immediately charmed by a blog I happened upon via BlogExplosion the other day: Eavesdroppers. Here, you can find a compendium of eavesdropped bits of conversation, compiled by three bloggers.

One example:

[Two middle-aged women are discussing their mothers.]

Woman 1: I'm really thankful that my mother's mind is still good like it is.
Woman 2: Yeah, that's great.
Woman 1: She's still sharp for 78, aren't you Mom? Aren't you 78?
"Mom": Umm... I don't know, I guess so.

Tags: Eavesdroppers eavesdropping blog

The Healia Blog

We just launched a company blog at Healia. It will discuss health news, emerging health technologies, and new Healia developments. Take a look here:

http://blog.healia.com/

Tags: Healia blog health

Get your blog displayed in search results pages

Healia, where I'm interning for the summer, has just rolled out an interesting program called Healia Links. The idea's pretty simple: bloggers display the Healia search widget on their blogs, and in return, Healia displays a rotating link to participating blogs in its search results pages.

I'm not aware of any other search engine -- or any other site, for that matter -- doing something quite like this.

If you're a blogger or site owner, you should give it a shot. Note that in order for Healia to display a link to your blog, your content must meet the editorial guidelines. You don't need to be a healthcare blogger per se, but your blog can't have offensive content, ad link directories, defamatory language, etc. More information available in the terms of agreement, accessible through the program description page.

The search widget looks like this:

As an experiment, use the widget above to try a comparative search between Healia and Google on a junk-results prone search term, like, say, "diet pills."

Tags: blogging healthcare health links popularity visibility search Healia widget

A futile quest for advice

Reviewing my site traffic log this morning, I noticed that someone in Alabama chanced across a tiny post I wrote that links to the "ulimate rejection letter." Their search string? Rejection letter wording. Mysteriously, my post appears in the first page of Google results.

I can only guess as to the drama underlying this anonymous Alabaman's search for advice on penning a rejection letter. It's a shame my post wasn't of more assistance.

Tags: blogging search unhelpful

Blogging lapses and shifts in digital identity

I've been done with the school year for a week now. My internship doesn't kick off until next Friday, so I've been luxuriating in what feels like a vast expanse of free time. Directed by my whims, I've been walking around my neighborhood, watching great films (I highly recommend The Lives of Others), and spending leisurely swaths of time in local coffeeshops. As for the Wall St Journal that appears in my building lobby every morning -- I'm actually reading it now, rather than just glancing at it.

I've also been spending plenty of time in bed. That's where I'm at right now!

With all this free time, why the almost-month-long lapse in this blog? I've been following blogs for six years now, and the blogging lapse is a common phenomenon. Bloggers go on hiatus for a spell, and then invariably return with an apologetic post: life's been busy.

But I don't think this is why blogging lapses occur. Trust me, one can always find time to blog. :) Rather, I think it's a matter of uncertainty about how to go about constructing one's digital identity. Blogging allows people to build an online representation -- a Googleable self that is traceable by anyone around the world, presumably for a very long time to come. It's a pretty exciting opportunity, particularly for narcissists such as myself.

I've stepped back from blogging recently simply because I've been processing the changes I've gone through over the past year. As this round of processing comes to a close (I feel this happening soon), my blogging will kick off again. It's like an internal tectonic shift is going on. In a good way. Ok, perhaps not the best metaphor.

Along these lines of thought, check out this interesting article. It explores the question: what motivates Second Life users to select avatars that bear no resemblance to their real-life selves? Perhaps a better question is: when you have no limits on how you can appear in a virtual world, why pick an avatar that exactly resembles yourself (which is basically what I did in SL)?

As a recent WSJ article describes (subscription required, but you can see the video here), this really may be a generational issue. Today's teenagers and early-twentysomethings are much more comfortable with their digital selves than us older folks. We oldsters cautiously try and put our best face forward, whereas the younguns accept the very public nature of the internet and just express themselves.

An overgeneralization, to be sure, but it's clear that things are changing.

Tags: MBA blogging digital identity blogging lapse processing

The pathos is palpable

Ok, so I know I said you wouldn't see me til Tuesday. But we all need study breaks, right? I've done well; I've stayed on schedule. Over the last few hours I've been working my way through stats, listening to one of the finest albums released in the last ten years, and if you haven't heard it, I urge you do do so soon.

So anyways, I was just checking my site traffic, as bloggers are wont to do (often). In the past hour, someone in California found my blog via the Google search string cheat sheet for marketing mba (although I offer no such study aid on my blog, as I don't take marketing til next quarter, I nevertheless unhelpfully appear at #20 in the Google search results.)

Ahh, but the pathos of such a search. One can sense the late-night desperation.

Tags: MBA studying Boards of Canada

5,000 visitors

My humble blog has just received its 5000th visitor: someone googling ibm secondlife. Incidentally, the most common googlish pathway to my blog is the string "imagining the tenth dimension" review, where visitors find this page.

And as the day darkens into dusk, I am down at Online Coffee, working on our group econ paper. It's a group endeavor; I'm editing and assembling everything.

The next week and a half will be busy. This econ paper needs to get finished, as does my stats project. There's a take-home IT & Innovation final, and an evening meeting with a client that I'll be working with in a type of mini-marketing internship with a group of classmates. (This is known as a BCN project in the UW MBA program. More on this next quarter).

Then there will be the in-class finals to prepare for: management, microeconomics, statistics, and the dreaded 3-hour accounting final. A lot to keep me busy. Finals will be finished 3:30 PM on 12/12, at which point they'll roll out some free congratulatory beer for us (according to rumor).

I'm listening to Galerie Stratique's Nothing Down-to-Earth, an album full of vaguely sinister sounds wrapped in shadowy gray rhythms. It reminds me of Aphex Twin. I think it's been a while since I've listened to it in its entirety, maybe a couple years ago when I worked at Washington State Ferries.

Speaking of which, I'll be joining those ex-coworkers for an xmas dinner in a few weeks; I'm looking forward to catching up with them.

Tags: blogging MBA business school finals Galerie Stratique

This blog has been smacked (soundly)

This blog was reviewed today over at italk2much. The blogger there and assorted commenters raked me through some fiery coals. I shouldn't really take it personally, though; I submitted my blog for review figuring that I'd be resoundingly trashed. I did it anyways...does that make me a masochist? Hmm..

The blogger brings up a good point: that I'm not really showing my personality in this blog:

I think it reminds me of magazine articles because there’s not a whole lot of personality in it. I read one post, started to glaze over, and skipped to the next one. I glazed over again and wondered if it was because I needed a nap. Then I figured out it was just the blog I was reading.

Particularly lately, I've been enthusing about the MBA program and I can imagine that's boring or much worse for anyone other than the MBA-curious and the handful of friends 'n' family sorts who read this blog.

The commenters were a bit more pointed. Some of them made good points, others didn't, and most made me laugh (wryly). Some of my favorites:

Another MBA student. Why do they feel the need to announce this like it’s a plus or a badge of honor?

Alliteration is of the devil.

Holy shit the last one is fucking boring. Ignorant Google ads and the design leaves a lot to be desired. Although he is slightly cute.

...It’s also boring as hell and I don’t think he’s all that cute...

I only said he was slightly cute. Not a hunka hunka burnin’ love.

I wonder why someone chasing an MBA would blog about MySpace. Does this mean the intellectually superior have been sucked in by the Evil Empire’s Tractor Beam too?

The title is stupid and I’m even more pissed off that he thinks he has to explain it. And yes, it’s just as it sounds, no hidden meaning, really. Yep, another “uber-geek” MBA student, optimistically gushing, “I can tell I’m going to learn a lot!” and off to fix the world with his brilliant “Management” skills.

it bothers me that someone that seems to have something to say, is not saying it. What are you hiding?

Dorje-generated content

My good friend Dorje, apparently distraught over the lack of recent news updates here on Fixing Foibles & Follies, has started sending me suggestions for blog posts. Or perhaps he just thinks he's sending me interesting news stories, and I'm interpreting these emails as reminders to me to keep posting good stuff. Whatever your intent, Dorje, do keep sending me the goodies!

The first thing Dorje sent me, in the middle of my skool(intentionally misspelled cuz I'm hip like that!)-centric week, was this New York times article about Google.org, Google's new philanthropic organization. It's exciting to see what Google.org is committing to, namely:

plans to develop an ultra-fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline.

The philanthropy is consulting with hybrid-engine scientists and automakers, and has arranged for the purchase of a small fleet of cars with plans to convert the engines so that their gas mileage exceeds 100 miles per gallon. The goal of the project is to reduce dependence on oil while alleviating the effects of global warming.

Dorje also directed my attention to a great blog called The Greener Side, which is a truly linkalicious resource for alternative energy, socially responsible investing, and other green blogs. Check it out.

Tags: Google.org philanthropy green

Telos and transition

Five years ago, I started up an account with LiveJournal. I kept the "LJ" going for a few years. It was a digital identity that reflected who I was at that time: hypersocial and thoroughly extroverted, revelling in bizarre and self-deprecating humor.

I eventually deleted my LJ because the writing began to feel stale. The digital identity no longer conveyed my real interests, which were evolving.

So I decided to start over from a clean slate on Blogger. I originally dubbed the new blog Foibles' Follies. I thought the blog would consist of more self-deprecating humor -- just better written. But when I finally got round to writing posts this past June, I changed the name to Fixing Foibles & Follies.

The name explained
Foible has actually been my online moniker since 1993. Defined as a minor weakness or failing of character, it's long been one of my favorite words. Weaknesses and failings are particularly fascinating to me. This isn't because I'm a "glass half empty" sort who focuses on the negative. Much to the contrary, I'm a very optimistic person. I just firmly believe in thorough familiarity with one's weaknesses -- knowledge of the inner demons, if you will -- as a path of growth. You can't be truly strong unless you know where you are weak.

We can extrapolate beyond ourselves, to the entire planet. Foibles and follies are inarguably widespread. For example, many folks have been focusing on the short term, at the expense of the long term. My goal (or "telos" if you prefer a cooler word) with this blog is to look at the foibles and follies as fixable. Hence, the Fixing bit.

Plus, I like alliteration.

What lies ahead
It's been a busy time of transition for me over the past week as I've gotten ready for business school, which started today. In future posts, I'll be delving into what I'm learning, and explore the MBA program experience a bit. But I'll continue to tie topics to my main interest: how business and technology can help fix foibles and follies.

Tags: blogging foible digital identity

Pluto demoted: BLOGOSPHERE AGHAST!!

That's a headline on Technorati right now, and I find it particularly funny. It's true; bloggers have devoted lots of ink pixels to Pluto over the past few days. You can use Technorati to find what bloggers are saying about Pluto here.

A few recent Pluto posts that caught my eye:

• Requiem for a Planet
• Survivor: The Solar System
• An open letter:

  I don't like being lied to. You've been pretending to be something you're not, and now the truth finally comes out. And it hurts.
  
  We've believed in you for generations, and you let us down. Don't blame it on others. Just because other people say you're something, it doesn't change what you know in your heart. Your cold, cold heart. But you didn't speak up. You just remained distant. Extremely distant.
  
  I'm with science. You're dead to me, Pluto.

• Pluto, We Hardly Knew Ye
• Is this how Pluto feels?
• Union of Plutonic States Contests Earthlings' Demotion of its Status
• Pluto Suffers Major Slap Down:

  First it was called tiny, frigid and distant. Now, in a stunning rebuke from the International Astronomical Union, Pluto has received the unkindest cut of all.

Tags: blogging Technorati Pluto

Blogger beta: my initial impressions

I saw the invitation to try out Blogger beta yesterday, and I've been giving it a go. At this point, I think it has its pluses and minuses:

• Categories. It's now very easy to add categories to your posts (Blogger refers to them as "labels"). Previously entered categories appear as a list of links (you need to click on "Show all" to reveal them). Alternatively, if you type the first few letters of a category name, Blogger gives you an auto-complete prompt, which is a nice touch.
• Drag-and-drop template customization. Using the mouse to modify the template is definitely easier than tinkering with the HTML and CSS directly.
• No raw HTML editing. On the flipside, you can't edit the HTML and CSS in your template. While Blogger does give you the ability to add "HTML/JavaScript" modules to your template (which you can edit), you don't have contol over the HTML of the overall page layout, or of the posts themselves. So you can't adjust the column width, or put HaloScan trackback functionality in your posts, for example. Blogger says that this will be fixed very soon.
• Incompatiable with Windows Live Writer. I'm not able to download my latest template into Windows Live Writer. Windows Live Writer indicates this isn't a problem; it can still publish my posts. But a big part of why I use Windows Live Writer is so I can see how the posts will appear in the template. I'm guessing that this is related to the fact that Blogger beta isn't allowing raw HTML editing of the templates. And hopefully, when this changes, it will work fine with Windows Live Writer.
• JavaScript: some works, some doesn't. Site Meter works fine for me. AdSense ads don't appear at all.

I'm guessing these little wrinkles will get smoothed out in the near future.

Tags: blogging Blogger beta Windows Live Writer

Your very own Web 2.0 logo

I discovered this site this morning via Micro Persuasion, and I just couldn't help myself. Don't worry, it's temporary. :)

8/17 update --> I changed back to my original plain "Fixing Foibles and Follies" title. But for posterity's sake, this was my title banner for one day:

Tags: blogging Web 2.0

Using Windows Live Writer with Blogger

An astounding amount of blog posts have appeared today that are dedicated to the new blogging authoring tool from Microsoft: Windows Live Writer. The reviews are resoundingly positive:

• PaulStamatiou.com admits to not being the biggest fan of Microsoft products, but finds much to praise with this one. "It’s not some little mini-app Microsoft put out as an afterthought, this is a full-blown… blogging processor?"
  
• GigaOm, also not the biggest Microsoft fan, is very impressed.
  
• Performancing is generally impressed, but they (unsurprisingly) prefer their own blog editor, Performancing for Firefox.
  
• Digital Inspiration is equally impressed, but points out that a strange phantom post ("Temporary Post Used For Style Detection") appears after you configure your blog with Windows Live Writer. Although I experienced my own problems (see below), this didn't happen to me.
  
• And apparently, conspiracy theories are already linking Windows Live Writer with the NSA and Satanists.

As for myself, I downloaded the software tonight after work tonight, and this is the second post that I've created with it. I definitely agree with the positive reviews. Windows Live Writer is very easy to install. Naturally, it features Windows Live Spaces as a blogging service, but it is also compatible with all other major blogging services, including Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and WordPress.

The UI is clean and uncluttered, and the word processing functionality feels just like Word (albeit a very limited version).

My favorite part is the View Mode menu options (Look how those handy keyboard shortcuts are listed in plain view...ahh). The default view, Web Layout, is similar to the default Print Layout view in Word: It's a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) interface. The Web Preview is the really handy bit: you can see exactly what your post will look like in your blog, nestled correctly into your current template. (Granted, a million bloggers have covered Windows Live Writer today, but maybe I'm the only one that has used the word "nestled.")

The Web Preview function in Windows Live Writer is much, much better than Blogger's terrible built-in preview function (maybe Blogger is improving this in its new beta). But I do like how the Blogger editor lets you change the time and date of your posts (didn't know about this? Look in the bottom left corner of the Blogger editing pane for the "Post and Comment Options" section). Unfortunately, Windows Live Writer doesn't include this feature.

I also make much use of Blogger's "Post Template" feature, which lets you add a chunk of HTML to every post: for me, the paragraph of Technorati tags of the bottom of most of my topics. So far, I haven't found anything like this yet in Windows Live Writer.

However, Windows Live Writer has developed an SDK to allow developers to easily add their own enhancements. So we should be seeing all sorts of nifty plug-ins soon.

Note: I didn't have any problems writing this post with Windows Live Writer, but I wasn't able to publish it (or post the draft) to Blogger. I got this server error message:

Server Error 0 Occurred
com.google.blogger.exceptions.PostNotFoundException

I'm not sure why this is; I was able to publish my last post fine with Windows Live Writer. Maybe a problem on Blogger's end?

So, I had to do it the old-fashioned way, and copy the HTML into Blogger and publish from there.

Anyone else using Windows Live Writer? What do you think? Are you having any problems posting to Blogger?

Tags: Windows Live Writer blogging tools blogging Blogger

Blogger categories (real ones) have arrived

Perhaps overshadowed by today's deluge of blog posts dedicated to Windows Live Writer (which I'm trying out for the first time, with this post) is Blogger's announcement of a new beta version that supports categories. Blogger will be gradually rolling out invitations to try out the beta, but you can create a new account by using your Google account.

Digital Inspiration has posted a great review, with screenshots.

I haven't tried it out yet; I'll wait -- with baited breath -- for an invitation. This is definitely a great development for Blogger users.

Tags: blogging Blogger Blogger Categories

How to add categories in Blogger

Unlike other popular blog services like TypePad and WordPress, Blogger does not include built-in support for blog categories. This is a big strike against Blogger. Categories make blogs much easier to navigate by topically organizing posts in an easy-to-access list.

You can find a number of workarounds to this problem on the web. Categories via Technorati tags is one example.

However, I haven't found anything as elegant and easy to use as David Nicholson's solution, posted at Where Magic Lives. With his approach, which employs a nifty Ajax technique, you add some simple code to your template, and then add a transparent one-pixel image (he has the code for this too) to each post that you want to categorize. It's as easy as that.

I tried his solution myself last night, and it works great. One thing I learned during the process: it's best not to put the pixel code at the beginning of your blog entry. This is because it makes a small "empty spot" at the beginning of a paragraph. It's better to put it at the end of a paragraph, preferably one that ends with a short line of text.

Tags: Blogger blog categories blogging