Blogging panel report

Last night was our Seattle ASMP chapter’s panel on blogging with photographers Patrick Bennett and Chase Jarvis and writing and blog coach Rachel Whalley. Here’s what I learned.

Chase set the tone with his generous attitude about content. "I turned my business inside out. If you want to know what I do and how I do it, here it is. It’s fundamentally based on sharing. Get out of your dark apartment and embrace the other folks in your community."

Patrick wanted to document and share his year in Buenos Aires, and keep his advertising clients reminded that he was still available. Before he left, he was worried whether he was capable of writing in a way that would keep anyone interested. "Joel Rogers gave me good advice when I was wondering if I could do this. He said, ‘You tell a good story.’ So that became what I did. I didn’t write. I told stories."

Rachel has a new business as a writing and blogging coach. She studied poetry in school, but didn't find that fulfilling. "I’m an extrovert," she said. "I get charged up from networking and meeting people. Staring at a blank page of paper doesn’t do it for me. I meet someone, and I can get fired up and write about that."

I learned from Chase how my blog reading habits have affected the exchange of information on my blog. His comment threads go on and on. I rarely read comments on other people's blogs. So I hadn’t understood how comments can function as a conversation. When someone leaves a (rare) comment on one of my posts asking for information, I’d always answer them privately. I never thought of answering them in public on the blog. I never read that stuff, and it hadn’t occurred to me that they might.

Rachel turned me on to Feedblitz as an alternative to RSS. "When I try and explain RSS to my clients, it makes them feel dumb. Lay people don’t understand it." Hell, I don’t understand it. With Feedblitz, people can subscribe to a blog and get the content in their email. More of us understand how email works (well, not how it works exactly, but it generally does without much interference on our part).

The consensus on what not to do: Don’t write about your cat. Ever.

Comments

[Joe]

I certainly agree with the potential effects of more interaction via replies and the chance for expanded details, as well as the sense of community. I can only point to some of my regular resources for this basis - Mike Johnston's TOP blog, Mike Chaney's Qimage forums, and the Strobist blog. Many of the larger forum groups regulars present this as well. Best.

[Matt]

If someone can figure out signing up for feedblitz, then they can figure out how to use Google Reader. I can't imagine reading blog posts in email; with all the blogs I subscribe to, it would be dozens of emails a day. The last thing I need is more email.

As far as generating feeds goes, Wordpress does it for you. I'm assuming most other blog platforms do as well.

[Doug Plummer]

Matt,

Feedblitz is not aimed at you or me. My wife has a blog, Trauma and Attachment, aimed at other psychotherapists, which is not a particularly computer literate crowd. I added Feedblitz to her site. She has to explain to her colleagues, many of whom barely have email, what a blog is. So for that crowd, this might be a workable solution.

I looked at the Feedblitz sign-up process, though, and I agree with you that the process is intimidating if you haven't been through similar sign-ups before. It's still not easy enough, and Feedblitz gets you only halfway there.

And I tried using an RSS reader. Too hard, didn't like it. Didn't like losing the formatting of my favorite sites. I still go through my bookmarks to see what's new.

[matt]

I didn't get hooked on RSS until Google Reader came along. Most of the readers I'd tried before were just too klunky, but Google Reader is pretty smooth, particularly when you drag the subscribe button up into your bookmarks bar.

You still lose the formatting though. This is particularly problematic for presenting B&W photos. A picture that looks great against a black or medium gray background can look burnt out against white.

I think within a year that a lot more office workers will be using company RSS feeds as a supplement to email. Distribution lists just aren't very efficient from a storage perspective, and RSS feeds give you a way to store only one copy of the 'message'. The RSS feed reader built into Outlook is going to drive a lot of change. Once people use it at work, they will use it in other venues as well.

[Rachel]

Doug, I agree that Feedblitz isn't the easiest thing to set up...for the host. I'd rather the techie burden fall on me, however, than on my readers.
If I find a better RSS feed-to-email service out there, I'll let you know. :)

[Doug Plummer]

Rachel, good to hear from you (she was one of the panelists). You're right, Feedblitz is a pain in the behind to set up. Even though it's available as a Typepad widgit, it took me multiple tries to get it to work on Robin's site.

Hey, I think we've now set a record for the longest comment thread on my blog. Granted, half of them are from me, but still. Thanks everyone.