I might occasionally go into firehose-mode, but at least you've got a way to control it! =)

84%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Here are my answers:

1. Where is your blog located? My own domain (for example: www.matts-awesome-blog.com)
2. How often do you update your blog? Several times a week
3. How many blogs do you read a day? More than 20. (Although it's in my feedreader and I read headlines, so…)
4. How much time do you spend reading blogs a day? Less than 30 minutes
5. How many different blogs do you post entries on? 5 or more
6. Have you ever live-blogged? Yes
7. How do you stay up to date with all your favorite blogs? I subscribe to feeds via RSS, Atom, etc
8. Have you ever blown off an important task, such as studying for an exam or making a deadline, because you were blogging? No
9. If something interesting happens to you, do you immediately think about how you're going to write about it on your blog? Yes
10. What do you usually blog about? Anything and everything, including personal issues or something funny you saw at the park the other day
11. What kind of blogging do you do? Both [work and personal].
12. Have you ever tried to convince a friend or family member they should start a blog? Yes
13. Have you ever come up with a great blog idea while doing something completely random, such as taking a shower or watching a movie? Yes
14. When this quiz is over, do you plan on blogging about your blogging addiction? Yes

I'd say that these are signs of blogging being part of your way of life, not addiction. I don't use blogging to escape important things I need to do, but rather to enhance what I'm already doing… =)

1. Who are you?
2. What are your interests?
3. What are your goals?
4. What’s a typical day in your life?
5. How did you get started?
6. Share a recent challenge or success story!
7. Share a tip!

COMING SOON: The presentation and recording from the event
Check this page on March 7 (Friday) for more news, or leave a comment below so that I can e-mail you when new tips are up!

Connect with other people who attended this talk by leaving a comment! Put in your name, your e-mail address, and the address of your blog (ex: http://example.blogspot.com). Tell us what you thought about the presentation, and what you’d like to learn more about. Your e-mail address will not be shared or sold with anyone, and your name will be automatically linked to your blog. Check out other people’s comments and blogs to find out more. Good luck and have fun!

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande Read more about this book…

Here's a quote for all you writers, bloggers, and other aspiring communicators, from the afterword on how to become a positive deviant [p.249]

My fourth suggestion was: write something. I don't mean this to be an intimidating suggestion. It makes no difference whether you write five paragraphs or a blog, a paper for a professional journal, or a poem for reading group. Just write. What you write need not achieve perfection. It need only add some small observation about your world.

You should also not underestimate the power of the act of writing itself. I did not write until I became a doctor. But once I became a doctor, I found I needed to write. For all its complexity, medicine is more physically than intellectually taxing. Because medicine is a retail enterprise, because doctors provide their services to one person after another, it can be a grind. You can lose your larger sense of purpose. But writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.

… Most of all, by offering your reflections to an audience, even a small one, you make yourself part of a larger world. Put a few thoughts on a topic in just a newsletter, and you find yourself wondering nervously: Will people notice it? What will they think? Did I say something dumb? An audience is a community. The published word is a declaration of membership in that community and also the willingness to contribute something meaningful to it.

So choose your audience. Write something.

Atul Gawande, Better

My blog anchors my participation in the larger world, resulting in not only online interaction but real-world as was well. It makes me part of the conversation.

When I talk to people who don't blog. I feel a strange disconnect as if the conversation we have stops there: stops at the e-mail exchange with each other, stops at the meeting, is confined within the boundaries of our encounters. When I talk to people who blog, the conversation is wide open and embraces the world.

It's hard to explain that to the people who are afraid that they might have nothing to say. The truth is that you won't discover what you have to say until you say it. Sometimes it's hard to remember that not everyone has discovered the use of writing in reflecting and connecting with others. People have other priorities. They have no time. And perhaps at the core of it, they are shy as I was shy, as I still am shy. But I can overcome my shyness because I want to be part of that larger conversation with them. With you.

Write, and join the conversation.

I'll need to work extra hard to balance all these conferences with paying work, and to show the business value of all of that. It's a bit of a challenge in the consulting world where we're supposed to maximize our utilization, but maybe it will work out well.

To help keep track of all the conferences, articles, and other significant events on my horizon, I've added an upcoming events widget below the calendar on my blog. I used MagpieRSS and PHP to read the XML file from Google Calendar, and I did a little regular expression magic to get just the dates and locations. Maybe you'll find it useful too!

Business responsibilities come first. If my clients aren't happy, I may just have to pull out of some of the conferences. I think everything will work out, though, and the conferences will help me bring even more value to my client work!

I wonder how well it works…

Sorry about the RSS thrashing! <sheepish grin> It took a while for the idea of a test blog to occur to me. So sorry. =)

In conclusion: Emacs posting to external weblogs - not quite there yet. Weblogger.el is somewhat okay, g-client and atom-api didn't work at all on my system. Waah. Quite frustrating.

1. Write for one person. Don't get intimidated by the blank screen or the unknown audience. Write for one person. Write for yourself, write for your boss, write for your coworker, write for your friend, write for your mom… but write for one person at a time. I like writing for myself.
2. Cc: world. Recycle as much knowledge as you can. Answered a question over e-mail that other people might find helpful? Blog it. Had a great conversation that other people might learn from? Blog it. Learned something interesting that other people would like? Blog it. There's plenty to write about.
3. Get personal benefits. You won't stick with blogging unless you see what's in it for you. Me, I like being able to look back and find out what I was doing and why I was doing it. My blog helps me answer those questions. My blog helps me see how I've changed. My blog helps me remember how I solved problems. My blog helps me connect with people. My blog helps me make the most of time because I get lots of value out of the books I read, the conversations I have, the things I do. My blog opens lots of opportunities. As you can see, I blog for selfish reasons.
4. Create value for others. When you tell your stories or share your ideas or pass along a tip that you found useful, you might end up helping someone months or even years down the line. Searchable blogs keep providing value in unanticipated ways.
5. Let people discover your blog. Add it to your e-mail signature. Mention it when it's relevant. Link to it. Make it easier for people to find your blog, and you'll benefit by having richer conversations with less small talk and more interesting topics.
6. Read and comment. Read other people's blogs to learn what they're interested in and what blogging is like. Comment on their blogs: share your thoughts or even just thank them for posting. Write about their blog posts in your own blog - great way to quickly add content and share the link love.
7. Keep writing. Don't expect your first post to get a hundred comments. Keep writing. You're not writing for other people, you're writing to discover what you have to say. You will be boring for at least the first few months, or however long it takes to throw off the writing habits you picked up in school. Keep writing anyway. Eventually, you'll get more used to writing and you won't have to think about writing so much. Then you'll be able to concentrate on what you want to say.
8. Be yourself. Don't write corporate-speak. Don't keep it just business. Show a little of your personal side. People will connect with you better for it.
9. Give yourself permission to get better and better. You had a typo. You gave the wrong link. You were wrong. You changed your mind. That's okay. It's a blog, it's conversational, it's chronological. It's okay to make mistakes. You get better every day.
10. Have fun. Don't treat it like homework, treat it as a terrific way to discover who you are and who other people are. Keep an eye out for your positive experiences and celebrate them!

What do you think? =)

• Blog about your research. This is the single best thing you can do to get the word out and to find people who are interested in this kind of thing. I can't begin to describe how helpful people were. And if you end up falling in with the way the company does social networking (like I did!), people will help you find a great job too!
• Build relationships. Again, the internal blog's a terrific place to do that, particularly for this area of research. Invest time in scanning the blogs and commenting on things you find interesting.
• Don't worry about disappearing off the dashboard. Plenty of people use feed readers and subscribe to specific people or tags, so once you get on their radars, you'll stay there.
• Use a feed reader that lets you create keyword searches. That way, you never miss discussions that you are interested in. Feedreader, Omea, and FeedDemon all have this feature.
• Get to know people. I recommended a whole bunch of people who are interested in social computing. =)
• Read these books: Crossing the Chasm, The Diffusion of Innovations, The Tipping Point, and Influencer.
• Check the blogs for news about interesting tools. Our internal early adopter program is good, but the internal blogs catches the coolest hacks from all over.
• … and other tips! =)

I tried to squeeze as much as I could in half an hour, but I'm sure I'll think of other tips! I loved just passing on everything I could think of. It was the best way to give back to all the people who helped me with my research, and I was happy to have stumbled across someone else who could learn from what I did. Besides, it was the Right Thing to Do.

Thank you, blogs, for this opportunity to help!

I shared the Lifehack article because it described many things I work towards, and because I thought other people might like to read it. Looks like that paid off!

You might have noticed that I haven't written much about Emacs lately. I confess: I'd been distracted by the dark side of the Force. I'm not referring to Lego Star Wars for the DS, but to using Windows Live Writer to post entries to my WordPress blog. Writing about blogging on Planner was awkward when I wasn't blogging on Planner.

I have to confess: I like Windows Live Writer. I like easily uploading images to my blog. I like previewing my blog posts. I like integrating with my RSS reader so that it automatically picks up an excerpt and a link back to the original site. (It's a little like a limited Remember.)

But I miss Emacs. I miss referring to people in the course of my blog post and using a keyboard shortcut to the hyperlink to their blog, website, or whatever else was in their contact record. I miss the freedom to change all the keyboard shortcuts and define my own markup. I miss using Emacs. I got distracted by a shiny new hammer but I can't stop thinking of a Swiss Army chainsaw.

Now that I've tried these "modern blogging clients", I know more of what I want to say when it comes to Emacs and blogging. What I want to show here is that as archaic as the interface looks, it's still got this amazing power that I just can't find anywhere else. I want to show people the benefits of integrating blogging with all the rest of your life: your contact list, your todo- list, your e-mail, whatever else you have.

First I need to set up Emacs, Planner, and my blog on the computer downstairs…

I'm still using Windows Live Writer to post this, but soon I'll be back!

Discover old posts and make random connections.

1. On this day
2. Random Posts widget
3. Similar Posts

Make it easier for people to comment and keep track of the conversation. Make it easier to respond to those comments, too!

4. Brian's Threaded Comments
5. Subscribe To Comments
6. Better Comments Manager

Check out these other plugins.

7. Flexo Archives - if you've been blogging since 2002, you need one of these.
8. FeedWordPress - I used this to import all of my old blog posts from my Planner-based blog. Great if you keep more than one blog.
9. Google XML Sitemaps - Because it doesn't matter what you write if Google can't find it.
10. TD Word Count - Nice to see how many words you've written. Tweak this a little to share your stats with the rest of the world.

I tried out different opening lines in my head as I unwrapped my sandwich slowly. If only scripts had been included in the new-employee orientation kit! I was so preoccupied, I nearly missed his conversation opener.

Without any preamble or obvious shift to a non-work topic, he just started talking to me about writing, journalism, and storytelling. I'd been reading about journalism just the night before, thanks to "How to Write Fast (While Writing Well)" by David Fryxell (good book, would recommend it), and it was fascinating to hear other examples of what I'd just read. And he saved me the trouble of trying to figure out how to ask him about that, too. Wow!

I felt even more inspired when he told me, "You have a good writing style. It's personal and personable." Whenever I hear this from people–particularly people who know a thing or two about writing–part of me squeals with glee and does a little dance. (Thanks to the patient mentorship of people like Stephen Perelgut, I can usually do this without actually squeeing in public.) There's something here that I want to keep honing, there's something I want to get better and better at, and little hints from people like him tell me I might be on the right path.

How did he have such a good handle on my personal interests, and how did he know to offer that kind of encouragement? Thanks to blogs, he could read the stories I wouldn't have thought of e-mailing him. I knew he'd passed by my personal blog before. He'd mentioned it during one of the meetings. He must have dropped by again–wow! And he had taken the time to share some of his thoughts and encourage me to keep exploring writing and storytelling… Wow.

I don't know why people don't mind giving me so many tips and helping me learn so many things. Maybe most people really are just that way, and all it takes is one wide-eyed person with curiosity and and the itch to share whatever she's learning with other people down the road. Maybe people enjoy sharing what they've learned with other people. Maybe people enjoy helping others along the way. Maybe people enjoy using more than just the 20% of their talents that are used in their job description. Maybe they enjoy sharing their years of experience instead of just what their current company asks for.

All I know is that I want to help the people in his company discover and develop those kinds of connections. I want to help as many people in as many companies as I can. That's why I joined IBM to do enterprise social media consulting: because I'm learning so much from so many wonderful, unexpected connections, and I want to help companies help their employees to do even better. =)

and

Ingredients for the sketchblog:

• Nintendo DS Lite (day 2!)
• R4DS kit
• 2GB MicroSD card
• DS Colors
• Wordpress
• Postie
• a POP3 mail account on Dreamhost
• And a fair bit of hacking...

You could see the sketches inline with the rest of my blog, view just the sketches, or subscribe to just the sketches RSS feed.

I'm looking forward to sketchblogging a lot. It's so much fun playing with color... =)

On Technorati: blogging, sketches

Random Emacs symbol: window-live-p - Function: Returns t if OBJECT is a window which is currently visible.

Why am I doing this?

Might be a little crazy to think about it, but I know I'll get a lot out of seeing where I've come from. If I stumble across questions I've asked or things I've reflected on, maybe I'll stop and think a little. If I can make more of my blog content available to Google, maybe I'll come across my old notes when I'm searching for something I don't even know I knew before. And who knows? Maybe I'll even figure out how to get this nicely sorted into a printed book for my mom. ;)

What about other people? What would you get out of this? Maybe random clicking around will help you get to know me. Maybe you'll like the things you read, maybe you won't. It's a chance I take. But if you're randomly clicking through slices of my life, you're probably friendly. =) And who knows, maybe one of these entries will make you think, and that thought will turn into other thoughts, and then you come up with a wonderful idea. Randomness is like that.

And if, while reading, you should happen to stop on an entry that catches your eyes, you may notice how different things are year to year, and how much stays the same.

=)

I wonder what the next five years will be like. Let's find out!

On Technorati: blogging, wordpress

Random Emacs symbol: gnus-inhibit-mime-unbuttonizing - Variable: If non-nil, all MIME parts get buttons.

On Technorati: blogging, emacs, planner

Random Emacs symbol: internal-set-alternative-font-registry-alist - Function: Define alternative font registries to try in face font selection.

• import an OPML file of all the conference registrants so far
• read an aggregation of all the conference registrants
• do the same for all the people who have registered for a particular session

Certainly, speakers with blogs should have them all listed. Tomorrow I'll ask for permission to get in touch with all of the speakers and ask them for blog URLs. We'll put together a page, export some OPML, throw up an aggregator (maybe even just a public Bloglines), and boom! Happy happy happy.

Even more advanced stuff: imagine a small-scale tech.memeorandum running against the speakers, the conference registrants, or session attendees... Imagine doing that with bookmarks, too! Maybe I can convince Pranam Kolari to do something like that.

In the future, people might even want to associate multiple blog URLs with their profile. For example, if they write topic-focused blogs, they might want their business blog to be aggregated with all the other blogs for a marketing session, while their technical blog might be better for the programming sessions. I don't think we're quite at this point yet, but it should be easy enough to build.

Sounds like a terrific tool. I have one month to build this and all the other nifty things I want to make for IBM CASCON 2006! I wonder if my developer sponsor and my research supervisor mind if I do this...

On Technorati: cascon2006, cascon, opml, rss, conference2.0, blogging

E-Mail from Aaron Kim

A backchannel is an informal way for participants to talk to each other in the background while the speakers are talking. Backchannel chat is a great way to find out about other interesting sessions and meet other people who are into similar things. We've also used the backchannel to coordinate our attendance at sessions. ("I'm heading over to session A." "If you're blogging that, then I can go to session B...")

If the backchannels are logged, they can be the start of collaborative notetaking. We tried backchannel transcription at one session during Mesh. People were distracted because the backchannel was projected onto the main screen behind the panelists. Most people have a hard time keeping track of two or more streams of information, particularly as they were both verbal. In addition, the IRC channel used for the backchannel chat also included people in other sessions, which made it hard for many people to separate the messages that were related to the current session. Still, it was a good experiment, and that resulted in a number of side-conversations during the session.

I think one of the things that would be great to have for IBM CASCON 2006 is a backchannel that people can get to through IRC and the Web. I'd love to set up one of those, but it needs to be promoted somewhere so that everyone with wireless can hear about it.

An alternative would be to encourage everyone to liveblog it and to use Technorati or a similar web service to aggregate all the posts tagged, say, cascon2006 and the session's tag.

HEY! There's an idea! If we suggest tags for each session and a tag for the entire conference, then we make it easy for external bloggers to make their posts discoverable. And I can so totally modify the CASCON blog to make it easier for people to "BLOG THIS SESSION" - they can post their content on the session blog and then retrieve it for crossposting onto their blog... That _would_ be totally sweet.

On Technorati: backchannel, conference2.0, web2.0, blogging, cascon, cascon2006

E-Mail from Aaron Kim

So Des can offer exclusive access to content on private categories via his blog, with a full User/Group permission model which allows him to not only provide access to restricted categories but to provide authorship privileges to any user or group. If you're interested in reading more about this powerful security model, check out some of our help pages:

• Multiple Authors
• Using Categories
• Giving Individual Readers Access to Restricted Categories
• Change the "Restricted" Status of Categories
• Add and Delete Trusted Posters
• Add and Delete Trusted Readers
• Add and Delete Users With Custom Permissions
• Manage Permissions and Security for Groups

On Technorati: blogging, business

Random Japanese sentence: トラは猫より大きくて強い。 A tiger is bigger and stronger than a cat.