Jules Says

Blog setup and promotion 101

I've helped several people get their blogs set up over the past few weeks, and thought I'd share with you the basics. I'm mostly familiar with Typepad, Blogger, WordPress, and SquareSpace. Everything suggested here is doable on those platforms without knowing any html, css, or php. I'm sure most other popular platforms will have most of the same functionality, but of course I can't promise that.

Setting Up - Content

Here's what I consider the minimum set to get your blog going:

On each post

• The date. While the date is important, the time of day isn't really necessary unless you plan to be exceptionally prolific. I leave mine on for silly, personal reasons, thank you very much :)
• An obvious permalink or trackback.
• Email this. You definitely want the ability for readers to email your post. You might not be able to specify this within your blogging system. Don't worry, you'll be able to get it along with those Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc. links you see everywhere when you get set up with Feedburner a bit later.

Sidebar elements

• Subscribe. Somewhere at the very top should be a link to subscribe in a reader. I also like having a "subscribe via email" option. Lots of people are still intimidated by feeds, but don't hesitate to subscribe via email. Some platforms have their own feeds, but I recommend Feedburner here as well (covered after the jump).
• Search. I use Google because I trust it and so does most everyone else. As with all widgets, you'll need code your specific platform. Here's the code for Google Search in Typepad.
• Recent posts. You certainly want to show readers what you've written about recently. But I've never found recent comments helpful. If they're aren't many, you look like you have no buzz going on. If there are a lot, you end up with comments out of context, which isn't helpful either.
• Categories or Tag Cloud. If you limit yourself to a handful of categories or tags, it probably makes sense to have a list for navigational purposes. If you tend to have more tags (within reason, of course) I think the tag cloud is really useful. The fact that the size of each tag increases with each reference makes for a great navigational aid. And, with a quick glance at a tag cloud, you can get  real feel for the content of a blog. I'd dig further into a blog with a huge TECHNOLOGY and a small PORN, for example, but wouldn't bother if the cloud showed a large PORN and a small TECHNOLOGY. Honest!
• Archives. Yes. Show your archives. How else will anyone get to your old stuff?

After the jump: Feeds 101, Publicizing, Metrics, and Blog Networks

Zoho Notebook

Consider this a pre-review. If Zoho Notebook is anywhere near as awesome as this video purports, I've finally found my idea clipping/note-taking/collaboration tool. I didn't realize until I saw this that that's even quite what I need, but I'm psyched to try it. It lets you:

• Create multiple types of content
• Embed any content type
• Publish notebooks, pages, or objects
• Track changes
• Share documents
• Collaborate using an interactive white board

I'll let you know how it goes. Watch the video - it's a great demo. It's just over 5 minutes long.

Update: I started playing with Zoho Notebook - so far, so good. I kept reading about a Firefox Addon that lets you right-click on selected text and automatically send it to your notebook, but I couldn't find a download for it anywhere. I fired off a support note (which I was able to do from right in the notebook - nice) and got a reply within an hour. The link was apprently on the login page, which I wasn't seeing since I was already logged in. Oops! That's the second time I've encountered that weird UI glitch - happened with notifications on PBWiki, too. The quick reply (and apology, believe it or not) was much appreciated. Get the Zoho Notebook Firefox Addon here.

Web 2.0 logos, part 3

This third set of logos (click to enlarge to 1200 x 900) are much more polished then set one or set two. There's still a bit too frequent use of the rounded sans serif fonts, and perhaps a couple seem overly simple, but there's some good thought behind many of these marks. When I look at these logos as a group, and try to identify what "the look" is, I'm struck by the fact that print is simply not the big issue it used to be. Some of these logos may never see print beyond a business card. Most don't need single color versions. It's not that they don't work in print, it's that these logos are meant to look good on the screen.

For the first two posts, I created a Jules Says logo in the style of the featured logos. I thought I'd do it for part three as well, but of course coming up with something really compelling and workable isn't simple. The other two I whipped out in a matter of 10 or 15 minutes. Maybe I'll get inspired and do a "real" logo for myself one day, but it's not going to happen in time for this post.

Observations on this batch: I like the Magnolia logo - it's got a very unique feel, and I think it actually would translate into print very nicely. And I have to admit I like the little creatures of Adium, Mochikit, and Reddit. I'm a little tired of the small, generic people as logos.

DRIVE director commentary via Twitter

Last night's Twitter experiment was interesting. Drive is a new Fox show made by Tim Minear, the same guy who made Firefly. It stars Nathan Fillion, the same lead actor. Fox decided to offer director commentary during the premiere of the show Sunday night.

Sadly, the show itself was pretty lame. I'm sure there are some very disappointed Firefly fans out there. It definitely didn't hold my attention well, so you'd think I could have easily kept up with the tweets. It didn't really work that way, though. Twitter is very fast, but it's not real time. Doing standard DVD-style commentary and saying "we wanted to do x here..." doesn't work. By the time the tweet is delivered, "here" has passed. I'm sure sometimes it was the 140 character limit keeping any more descriptive info from being included. If that's so, then perhaps this isn't the right medium (or 140 characters isn't the right cutoff point) for real time commentary.

That said, I think this was a clever experiment. I'm sure we'll figure out better ways to do this sort of thing. We'll look back on this first attempt and why some things weren't more obvious to us. I still think advertisers have to love this sort of thing. They're all scrambling to find ways to deliver ads to people with DVRs. Well, here's one way. Normally I'd record the show so I could watch it later and fast forward through the commercials. Instead I watched it in real time so I could get the commentary, which means the advertisers got my partial attention.

I'm sticking with Twitter. I still believe it (or something very similar) is going to become an important tool.

The screen shot is obviously not the Twitter web site - it's a sweet little Mac desktop widget called Twitterrific.

Previous posts about Twitter

Twitter keeps getting more interesting

A mere month ago I was playing with Twitter at SXSW, thinking there could be some interesting uses for it. Already a couple of interesting new applications have sprung up.

You can join the Drive, uh, flock? covey? murder? Drive is a new Fox show made by Tim Minear, the same guy who made Firefly. It stars Nathan Fillion, the same lead actor. The show and the star had a tremendous following - no doubt they'll be turning out in hoards to test Drive (sorry). Apparently the director of the show is going to serve up commentary via Twitter during the premiere Sunday night. Clever - I'm signed up. Advertisers have to love this. Normally I'd DVR the show and watch it without commercials. Instead I'll be watching real-time to follow along with the tweets.

Dave Armano reports that several media outlets such as Fast Company and USA Today appear to have reserved accounts, while BusinessWeek and Newsweek may have been hijacked by squatters (nesters?) if the silly email address associated with the account are to be interpreted (both are associated with pleasantcreature @ gmail.com). Still, Flicker is a great platform for quick updates from media feeds. Nothing revolutionary here, but it falls into the useful category.

BART in San Francisco uses Twitter to announce up to the minute schedule changes.

What have you found out there that looks promising?

Web 2.0 logos, part 2

I cannot absolutely confirm that these are all web 2.0 companies - I got carried away just perusing all the logos that are starting to look the same, and, in this case, are pretty much cop-outs. Web 2.0 logos, part 1, focused on the many logos - wordmarks, really - out there using rounded and/or outline fonts. There are plenty of those in this batch too. Now we've added some simple graphical elements, too.

There are sound waves, and the talk bubbles. Squares. Circles. Lots and lots of circles. Built-in typographic elements like asterisks and stars. Some of these logos are nearly identical. Del.icio.us, Foopad, and Tilika have the same four-square pattern. Strmz and xanga not only use the same number of squares, there are even similar colors. And what about mozy and orange? Hope neither are in the market for a trademark.

I've noticed there are several “web 2.0 logo builders” out there now, too. That's gotta really piss off a lot of designers... I whipped out this Jules Says mark in Fireworks in a couple of minutes.

Click this image to enlarge it to 1188 x 821.

I understand that many firms, especially startups, can't afford to spring for a design firm to come up with a brilliant logo for them right out of the gate. There's a lot of laziness here, though, and certainly not much that's memorable.

Update:
Web 2.0 logos, part 3

Web 2.0 Logos, part 1

Well, what started out as an observation I thought might make an interesting post has turned into a bit of a project.

Web 2.0 products/services/sites have a definite look. I decided to start gathering some of the logos I thought best represented that look, and many hours later, have ended up with 3 distinct collections.

The logos - more accurately, they're wordmarks, for the most part - in this first collection at right (click to enlarge to 698 x 632) have one or both of these features in common:

• Rounded fonts: ariel rounded, helvetica rounded, vag rounded - no doubt there are others.
• Distinct outlines: strokes of 3 - 12 points - sometimes an outline that makes the entire wordmark look like... well... like a blob.

Overall there's a pretty consistent palette - nothing clashes here. There's enough similarity, in fact, that these all could easily have been done by the same design firm. Neighbors, anyway.

These certainly have what I think of as the web 2.0 look, but the other collections I'm putting together promise to be even more interesting than this batch.

I'm going to create a quick (max 15 mins) JulesSays logo in honor of each style featured.

Have some great examples I've missed? Please let me know in comments :)

Update:
Web 2.0 logos, part 2
Web 2.0 logos, part 3

To Twitter Or Not

There's plenty of chatter going on about whether or not Twitter has any real value. Twitter is sometimes called a microblog. It's basically group SMS with a web interface and social networking features. Sign up, and you have a 140 character limit per post. You can post as often as you want - in theory you post throughout the day: heading to work, at Foo's for lunch, blogging, going to bed. Then you add friends to your network, and you can keep up with who's doing what when. You can see updates via the web, or receive them via SMS or IM. I signed up for a SXSW Twitter group (flock? conflagration? murder?) just for fun. When I sent a Twitter to the group number, it was broadcast on several plasma screens sprinkled throughout the convention center. I assumed I'd also see twitters on my phone from the rest of the group, but I only saw those of the developers and others in my twitter network, which was only Tori. Not too useful. Did I need to know that Jack was in line at Magnolia Cafe at 3am? No. No I did not.

After SXSW, Tori was none too happy. She emailed me:

I’m really aggravated at Twitter. Not at the technology, but at the sheer gall of the Twitter guys who evidently think I want to be on the end of a one-sided conversation. I’m completely convinced that’s what has happened. You sign up, and you get grouped with them, and no one else (unless you go to the effort of adding friends, like we did). Did you ever, once, see one of them respond to anything you had typed?

No. Why?

Because they aren’t listening. I’d even venture to guess they had some flag set so that they see only messages to one another. Meanwhile, I have to listen to their banter, and am bound to a group where there’s no chance of me have any sort of interaction with anyone new, or even participating. Gee thanks, that’s awesome technology, guys.

Put that in your blog and smoke it.

That said, now that I know how to use it, I can see how it could be useful.

• In a workgroup - making that final multi-day push to launch, get the whole group keeping each other up on their project status
• At a conference - keep up with who's going to which panel, where they're meeting for lunch
• Travel of any kind with a group - again, who's where?

Feel free to check out my Twitter page, and sign up to follow or as a friend. You can see that it's not getting a whole lot of use right now, but it's still kind of fun to play around with it.

The Social Library

Not long ago I did a post on Delicious Library - the well-executed book/game/music/movie cataloger for Macs. I'm afraid I'm already switching, despite the fact that Delicious Library has some features I'll miss. I have discovered Library Thing. Kind of makes me wonder if the folks running things got tired of trying to come up with a decent name.

Unlike Delicious, it doesn't allow you to catalog anything other than books. Also unlike Delicious, it doesn't allow me to use my groovy built-in iSight camera. And the Library Thing bookshelf view isn't nearly as pretty as the one in delicious. You're probably wondering why I'd switch, given all the downside.

The Good News

• Library Thing has a universal import feature that lets you import data from just about anywhere, including Delicious Library and your Amazon order history. It's a pretty slow import, though, as you have to get in a queue for batch uploading. The wait time to upload my measly 154 books from Delicious has a 3-hr wait, so it's not something you want to do often. Most of the wait time is lookups ahead of you in the queue, and as the site gets more popular, that will get to be a bit much. Still, I'm glad I could do it. Individual lookups take place immediately..
• You can create a printable version of your catalog.
• You can use a usb barcode scanner to add books to your catalog.
• You can access 81 libraries and universities around the world for lookups.

The Even Better News

• You can tag your books
• You can share your library, find other people with libraries similar to yours, and get recommendations for future reads (you can also play around getting suggestions that Library Thing is pretty sure you won't like.
• They provide widgets for your blog, and even the ability to allow your readers to search your catalog from your blog.

The social pieces of Library Thing appear to be done very well. You can join groups and talk in forums. You can write reviews and help fix errors and tweak entries in the global catalog. Judging by the author tag cloud, it's a pretty literate group so far, with heavy bias toward early 20th century literature and science fiction.

There are amusing stats all over the place - it's a data-lover's dream. A few high points:

• Largest library: 14,908
• Books cataloged 11,017,131
• Top 10 authors: JK Rowling, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, JRR Tolkein, CS Lewis, William Shakespeare, Isaac Asimov, Jane Austen, Douglas Adams
• Top 3 Reviewed Books: Da Vinvi Code, Time Traveler's Wife, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

I figure I'll gradually catalog my library over the next several months. It's something I've always wanted to do - I'm glad the tools are finally ready for prime time.

There's also a LibraryThing blog.

Do we need a social dictionary?

When I discovered that you could type "define:anyword" into a Google search box and get a definition, I pretty much left dictionary.com behind forever, except for the occasional thesaurus lookup. The new Wordsource works similarly - you type http://word.sc/anyword in your browser and get your definition.

Wordsource, however, defines itself as a social dictionary. Anyone can tag a definition and upload pictures to associate with the word. Strangely, they're even encouraging people to attach their own pictures to the word "genius". The definition page itself has several useless facts at the bottom of the page, along the lines of "x people like/dislike this word", "x people can say this word 5 times fast" and "x people think they are this word".  I'm not sure folks who regularly use dictionaries are really interested in frivolity with their definitions.

I think the social aspects here are forced. Gimmicks don't make a community. I'm not even sure  calling this a social dictionary makes sense. If you click on a picture, you view that person's profile (even, apparently, if they've uploaded a picture describing the dictionary entry). There doesn't appear to be any way for people to gather or actually interact.

Wordsource does have one really nice feature - the ability to look up words "starting with" and "ending with".