Edward Vielmetti is inviting you to A2B3 lunch on Thursday at Eastern Accents in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

On emptying your inbox into your blog

This seems to be a plausible strategy - people send you interesting things that you want to remember, so you post them to your blog so that when you search for them you find them.

If the blog seems overful of cut and paste of events sometimes, it's not that I'm necessarily going to be going to all of them - who can do that with two kids at home! - but that it seemed like the best way to deal with an influx of details.

2,000+ posts and ten years later, what have I learned from blogging?

Typepad says that I have 2,000 posts in this weblog.  Some of them, to be sure, are drafts that were abandoned, and some are scheduled in the future, but that's as good a round number as I need to reflect on blogging (the practice and the habit).

I've been blogging since April 1999; here's the first month or so of posts.    They were edited oh so patiently with vi, and at the time the genre was new enough that I could say with confidence "Huh, this daily weblog stuff is too hard. " and have that be a novel observation.    Jorn Barger at the time noted in his Robot Wisdom blog

        "New weblog from Ed Vielmetti, who's been on the Net forever."  

Ten years later I'm still at it.  I suppose that I might have just enough experience in blogging that even I would think of myself as an expert at it, for what that's worth.  (As Forbes once said about my bright ideas, "Too bad everyone else had the same idea.") And like any good blogger, I have a nice pat seven item list to share with you - because people who read blogs love pointless numbered lists.

1.  Repetition is the soul of the net.  If I've told you this once, I've said it a thousand times.  Every year, regular as clockwork, there is an audience for people reading about where to pick blueberries, how to get election returns, who makes the best paczki, what to do on your birthday or your kids birthday.  You get a free pass to repeat your good content over and over again annually, do it.

2.  Don't think too much.  Think more, perhaps, than you would in writing a 140 character twitter message; think twice before saying something that you'd regret before a judge or in print.  But don't think more than twice, and be prepared to post something before it's absolutely polished and done.  Sometimes the people who read what you are writing will fill in the blanks for you.

3.  Omit needless words.  Your screen is small, and the day is short.  Don't ramble on and on - fill the text input box until it's full, and hit post.

4.  Leave comments.  Comments on other people's blogs will remind them of stuff that you have collected that's relevant; comments on your own blog will let you update things that are changing without going back and re-editing.  Every once in a while, you'll unearth someone who is a bona fide expert who reads the news clippings you pasted together and gets an insight.

5.  Don't feed the trolls.  (And there are so many of them.)  Squash idiot comments, commercial spam comments, irritating comments, stray trackbacks, and any other crud out of your blog as soon as you see it.  

6.  Did I mention pointless numbered lists?  Use them.  Everyone's attention span is short, and lists let people know just how far along they are before they can be done.  They let you jump from idea to idea without pesky transitions, and make it easy for someone else to cut and paste that one good idea hiding in your pile of dreck and take it for their own.

7.  Quote liberally (and credit liberally).  Half the battle in blogging is figuring out who knows more than you do about something; the other half the battle is figuring out who is uselessly ignorant but still writes a lot.  If you are good and thorough and relentless in clipping out good paragraphs from other people's work, and you are good and thorough and relentless in doing the searches that end up in results that aren't on everyone else's front page of Google, you can learn a lot and share a lot.

I've been averaging a post a day for a long time.  Some days more, some days less, and some blogs are mercifully left for dead from ideas that didn't pan out.  I wish I knew what it all meant.  In some ways it reminds me a lot of my short lived but illustrious high school forensics career of impromptu speaking - all it really shows is that you can be coherent on short notice about pretty much anything, and that you have enough diligence to keep being coherent for a long time.

If someone can tell me what career that qualifies me for, please let me know - I'm looking.

Note to future self: on planning ahead and making sense

This blog serves a couple of functions, not all of which are sensibly part of the same easy to define train of thought.   It's "note to self", or "note to future self", for the sorts of things that I want to publicly remember so that I can find them again.  It's notes about places I'd aspire to be and events I'd like to go to.  And some of it is research in progress, in which I get interested enough in something to write down what I find out about it and then wait for searchers to come up with good questions that find it (and more) so I can learn more.

The result was described by someone as "it looks like part of a bigger project, but I don't know what it is". 

Let me describe the bigger project in words that I used in 1998 when I launched some earlier version of this project as the Vacuum mailing list:

How can people organize in their minds and personal interactions information about a network so large that strains the limits of the imagination? Vacuum tries to provide insight, tools, and clues to find out.

That was 1998, about 10 years ago - the net was a lot smaller then.  I marvel at its complexity now.  But for the most part I don't try to do anything other than help answer this continuing question.  I'm trying to take a systematic approach to self-instruction at my new blog called The Bloggers's Secret, but as always understanding what you already know in a format that lets you tell others about it is a continuous work.

--

More reading: Karl Weick on Sensemaking in Organizations.

Blogger's secret: don't feed the trolls

This advice goes back as far as Usenet, and really is about managing the comments in your weblog.  And it's simple advice: don't post any comments to your blog that you find inappropriate.

This means filtering out spam, either by hand or (better) with the help of spam fighting tools; it means taking fake comments from people who are paid to post them and neutering them of their commercial value; and it means taking your angry, abusive critics off your page.

On the spam fighting front, your choice of platform matters a lot.  I've been happy with Typepad's service, though it lets a few things go by the admin tools make it possible to unpublish something fairly quickly.  People using Wordpress use its default Akismet tool with good success.  If your comment tool doesn't aggressively screen for spam, you need a better system.  In many cases, Trackback is a source of spam as well; I ended up completely blocking that just to save the hassle.

There's a huge and messy market in fake comments, helped by systems like Amazon's Mechanical Turk that anonymize the payments for them.  Every so often the fake commenter actually has something marginally interesting to say, so I tend to let those through but rewrite the target URL of their post to remove the commercial value from it.  Life is too short to live with commenter bots.

When on the odd chance that you have an angry, abusive critic aimed at you - the sort of person who would scribble profanities or spew personal attacks - the only reasonable remedy is to remove the text.  Ideally, you do that without acknowledging it, or if it's important for context to keep some fragment of it around, a traditional method is to edit the text to make it semi-legible e.g. by removing the vwls or st*rr*ng th* ess*nt**l p*rts **t.   Let the critics and nastygrams find their own site, and force their authors out into the open. 

One of the reasons that blogs emerged from the Internet primordial soup in the late 1990s was that Usenet had degenerated into spam, fake posts, and abuse; by holding the discussion on a web page you control, you could start to control it.   That makes the world a little bit harder to follow when discussions fly around, but in exchange you get to be not just author but (critically) also editor of your own publication.

Blogger's secret: note to future self

Part of an occasional "blogger's secret" series.

Write for yourself. Really, you are best off with an audience of one to start, and use your time and effort to write down things that you will want to read in a week or a month or a year. If you are interesting to your audience of one, you have some hope of being interesting to some other person somewhere else on the planet who is interested in you. Tip: If you have already writtten something somewhere on the net that you're proud of, repurpose it or reprint it in your blog; that can get you off to a good start.

As an adjunct to this, you can use scheduled reminder services to nudge you in the right direction and remind you about things you might want to remember in the future.  So write that note to your future self, and then publish a pointer to in in the future, so that you'll see it again.

The blogger's secret: familiar searches in unfamiliar databases

One in an occasional series on secrets to blogging.

If your site is like mine, it gets a sizable fraction of its readership from people who type things into the main Google search index and click through.  More than half the traffic comes from that, and on a typical day 80%+ of the visitors are new.

Search traffic coming from other search engines are relatively small, almost to the level of being noise - even though, for some search terms, the arguably 'best answer' for those searches is not anything I wrote but some targeted, focused search in some other database other than GOOG.

If you're doing your homework, you should be able to do homework for your readers.  Find a popular search term that's driving traffic to an existing page, identify an alternate database with better resources than what a simple Google search will unearth, and add to your existing copy.  I find Google Books to be a good source, especially for pre-1922 materials which give some historical perspective on the matter.  Amazon or your favorite library can be another book reference source.  Literally thousands of other database have more awful user interfaces and more hidden away content which can be selectively referenced for good effect.

This is neatly summarized by Steve Fuller in his 2001 book Knowledge management foundations

Public ignorance thus ascends to the meta-level of not knowing the expert system in which the relevant expertise is contained.

and thus as a blogger you have an opportunity to pull from one unfamiliar expert system into a familiar non-expert system.

The blogger's secret: cumulative advantage

One in an occasional series on the secrets of blogging.

The longer that you have been blogging, the more materials you have accumulated, and the more things you have written that may possibly attract search traffic.

By tuning into this effect you can get distant early warning of when people are interested in topics that are seasonal, and start work on them before they hit mainstream news and media.  Your cumulative advantage is not just that you've done your homework last year, but that you know when people are starting to be interested in seasonal things.

For instance, this afternoon's traffic included this query:

14:04             Google Search:  prices of pumpkins

which reminds me that Halloween is right around the corner, and that it's time to check out the pumpkin crop and locate a source for this year.

When someone says to you that they won't write about or invest in topics that have limited "shelf life" - the annual outhouse races, the chicken broil, the first tomato, football parking, the opening day of deer season - smile and know that those one time events happen every year and if you ever write something reasonable about it you'll start getting repeat visits next year.