The following article was written by blogging about blogging extraordinaire, Lorelle VanFossen. She has one of the oldest personal blogs in existence, Taking Your Camera on the Road, which began in 1994. She is also the author of the awesome book “Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging”. She and I talked quite a bit about personal blogging back in September on PreviewCast #044, and so I asked her to contribute some more thoughts on the importance of personal blogging. Enjoy! –Douglas

The Art of Personal Blogging

When I started my first website - an online journal back then - it was a combination of technical articles and stories about our life as we prepared to quit our jobs and take off six months to a year to travel full-time around North American. Fourteen years later, and still living on the road, such a site is called a blog - a personal blog.

A personal blog is the story of your journey. No matter where it takes you.

There are a lot of names and purposes a personal blog can have. It can be about your day-to-day life, a sort of online diary. It can be a place where you can rant and rage without censors. It can be a place to tell your stories. It can be an online classroom where you share your knowledge and expertise.

Which makes it hard to define a personal blog as it can be anything and everything.

However, there is an art to personal blogging that makes it work for you and be the success that you want it to be. It begins by defining what personal success is for you and your personal blog.
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Tags: Blogging, content, goals, guest blog, Lorelle VanFossen, Personal, personal blogging, style, tips

Hello everyone,

I’m going to be going on a school-related trip in the middle of February which will force me to be completely away from the computer and the internet-at-large for about ten days. Now, I had considered not doing anything on this blog for ten days, but I’ve changed my mind and decided that perhaps something that I should do is take the opportunity to invite folks to write a guest blog article to be featured here on Webmacster87.info during my absence, just to keep the blog going.

So here’s how it works. If you would be interested in guest blogging on Webmacster87.info, please let me know in the comments of this post and I will send you an e-mail with additional information. I’m currently just planning to run the guest blog articles while I am away (February 14-23), but if I get an overwhelming response, I may decide to expand them to cover the month of February.

If you indicate that you are interested in guest blogging, your post will need to be submitted to me no later than Sunday, February 10th. (Earlier than 2/10 will be great too.) I will be scheduling the posts in advance so that they will show up on here while I am gone and nowhere near the computer.

What kind of content? I would be interested in any guest bloggers who want to write an article about technology and/or teenage life. (You do NOT have to be a teenager to participate–in fact, I’ll probably be inviting a few people that I know who aren’t teenagers to contribute.) Note that unlike Lorelle VanFossen’s two months of guest bloggers, I will not be entirely opening up my blog to guest bloggers; I will be reviewing guest blogger articles that are submitted to me primarily for decency before I schedule it in the posting queue. However, if you are interested, I certainly invite you to join in and relieve me while I am away from the computer.

(Incidentally, I will also probably be doing another one of these guest bloggerthons for another long trip that I’m taking in June, so this will not be the only opportunity.)

Anyway, I just wanted to extend the invitation to anyone who’s interested. As for the trip that I’m taking in February, stay tuned for more details coming in the next week or two.

Tags: article, Blogging, guest bloggers, invitation, Technology, teens, trip

If there’s one way to summarize one of my biggest questions about what was announced at Steve Jobs’ keynote on Tuesday, this has to be the best way. Overall, this year, I was never really excited about this year’s keynote, and there’s not much there to excite me. Time Capsule definitely looks interesting, and (when I can afford it) may actually improve my recent 1.5 Larry-head rating on Time Machine, although I’m not in a position to get it for the time being. I have a number of qualms about the MacBook Air, and as for the Apple TV, iTunes rentals, and iPod touch/iPhone updates, I’m maintaining a solidly neutral stance on those.

Now, hold on Douglas, you’re thinking, why aren’t you coming out and either praising or bashing Apple the way you normally do? Well, for most of these, I can see pros and cons on both sides, so for me, the jury’s still out on my opinions of these. I’m holding off until I get a chance to play around with things before I start to come to conclusions, and I will be sharing these conclusions on this weekend’s “Macworld in review” episode of PreviewCast, and later elaborating here on my blog.

As for trying them out, that’s what I’m going to be doing tomorrow! Indeed, tomorrow, I’ll be going with the Aragon group (about six of us in total, plus chaperones) to Macworld to tour the exhibit hall for the day. This will be my third consecutive excursion to Macworld’s Expo floor, and according to what all the websites are saying, we’ll actually be able to play around with the new stuff, rather than just looking at a rotating object in a bullet-proof* glass case. Which actually sounds exciting.
* I have no idea if the case was bullet-proof or not, and am just making this up.

However, this year, I hope to spend some more time talking to the people whom I really think should be the stars of the show: all of the little developers. (Merlin Mann likes to call the “little devs” section of the show floor Tiny Town.) It’s THEM that make the show possible, because it’s their contributions of their applications that helps the Mac platform succeed. So, I’m hoping to spend more time there this year.

I have one class tomorrow–Calculus, my first period class. After that, the group of us are carpooling up to the Millbrae BART station and taking BART to Powell Street, a block away from Moscone Center (and right next to the SF Apple Store). Last year, we tried to drive to Macworld and had the worst nightmare with parking. We’ll get there shortly after the 10 AM exhibit hall opening, get all checked in, and then have just under four hours to do stuff to our heart’s content. We’ll gather up around 2:15 to head back to BART and catch a 2:30 train back to Millbrae, and then we’ll drive back to school and get back there around 3:30.

I have not yet exactly decided what I’m going to do there. (Well, actually, I have, but I want to save some stuff to talk about in an “after Macworld” blog post!) However, I definitely intend to visit a number of booths. I plan to definitely check out Office 2008; after all, I don’t feel right truly making fun of something until I’ve had the chance to play around with it with my own hands, and I also want to find out, in plain English, what “Special Media Edition” means. I also want to find out if the Omni Group is offering any nice discounts on their new OmniFocus, which sounds like a really exciting app (and did you hear that it won a Best of Show award), and of course come home stuffed with a Macworld 2008 shirt. (I outgrew my Macworld 2006 shirt. As for my Macworld 2007 shirt, in February, it got a huge red stain after an alcohol thermometer broke in Chemistry class and splattered all over my shirt. Yeah, Macworld 2007 was just NOT a good one for me.) Oh, and I intend to gather up as many freebies and handouts as possible! There was some great stuff last year, so I wonder what I can scrounge up this year.

There’s also been lots of other things happening in my life recently, which I’ll try to catch up on in other blog posts, as it is time for me to hit the hay.

However, I will close by mentioning that this is my 300th blog post since I resalvaged this blog back in October 2006. My blog has had a number of incarnations before that, but I’ve never been able to keep a blog steady enough to keep going continuously for 300 full blog posts, which have been put together in 15 months. (You math whizzes can figure out that I’ve averaged out at 20 posts per month, or about 2 posts every 3 days. It’s not quite at one-post-per-day, blog365ers, but it’s pretty doggone close.) Thanks to the many of you who have been subscribing and sticking with my various ramblings. I do this blog mostly for myself, but it’s great to be able to bring you along for the ride and be able to share things that may interest or entertain you.

Tags: Apple, Aragon, BART, blog, exhibit hall, expo, itinerary, Keynote, Mac, MacBook Air, Macworld, News, opinion, plans, School, Time Capsule, Webmacster87.info

You know that WordPress is really getting popular when government uses it. Indeed, the elections office for my own San Mateo County recently (as in a few months ago) launched a blog right on WordPress.com, called Inside Elections: The Blog Behind the San Mateo County Vote, which offers a number of insights behind everything that happens behind the scenes before voting day (which was today, by the way; the polls just closed a few minutes ago). Want to get inside tips on how those new eSlate voting machines work? Want to learn how all those sample ballots and voter by mail ballots are processed? Did you know that if you’re voting by mail, you can track & confirm the receipt and processing of your ballot, or that in San Mateo County, you could have voted on Saturdays October 27 and November 3 as well as today?

Bravo to our County Elections Office for adopting blogging, which can help us, as citizens, understand the process better. It’s one of those things that makes me more proud to be from San Mateo. Now I’m off to start tracking the election results…

Tags: ballots, Blogging, elections, eSlate, Mail, San Mateo County, tips, voting, WordPress

Today, October 15th, is Blog Action Day, a day when over 16,000 blogs on the internet will blog about the environment. Check out the video for more info, and then proceed to my blog post for today.

On PreviewCast #044 (which every blogger in the world should listen to), Lorelle VanFossen and I talked about the importance of blogging in our world, especially personal blogging. However, one thing that we talked a bit about in regards to the importance of personal blogging is that it becomes a journal, an archive, a place where you’re putting down information about yourself and your life so that the archaeologists of the future can go back and learn more about our world today. (That is, assuming that your website is kept alive and doesn’t disappear into cyberspace when your web host turns off your connection.)

But a personal blog can be a lot more about just your boring life. I mean, the archaeologists of the future may be interested in knowing that you got a new iPhone and that your work sucks and that you had to have that godawful oatmeal for breakfast this morning because there were no more Eggo Waffles in the freezer. But for the readers of today, you can turn your blog into more than just a journal of your boring life (Twitter is probably a better tool for recording your boring life, anyway), and actually use it to draw attention to things that you’re interested in, which means that the random reader who stumbles across your blog might also get interested in it as well. Anyone who’s read my blog for a long period of time knows that it redefines the meaning of potpourri.

But how does any of this help the environmental debate? Actually, blogging is probably one of the most powerful assets of the environmental movement today. In the last decade, as we have watched the media become more and more controlled by the corporate powers and less and less of a free press, we have at the same time and at practically the same rate watched the so-called ‘blogosphere’ grow. John C. Dvorak himself says that when a news item breaks, he doesn’t hit the news media first, he hits the blogs. What can the news media say? “Oh, um, yeah, so such and such happened, and it looks bad, and the President has responded to it by saying such and such and meeting these people, and the situation on the ground is still pretty bad, and we’re going to go to a commercial now, be right back.” But blogs can provide someone’s unique, first hand experience. When that guy from the University of Florida got tasered at the John Kerry event, the media was mostly speculatory people watching from afar. However, if you were to hit the blogs, you’d find bloggers who were other students at the event who could give their first-hand experience of what happened and be able to explain some things that didn’t exactly get caught on camera. This is the power of the blogging community and the internet. As the freedom of the press starts to fade away, the freedom of speech is becoming ever more emboldened by the revolution of the internet.

This past weekend, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The so-called “liberal” media went on the attack, questioning the award and what the heck peace has to do with the climate change. (And I could go on a whole justification for exactly what peace has to do with the climate change, but that’s not the point of this article for now.) However, it’s clear that Al Gore’s movie gets credit for really propelling awareness of the climate change. As Stephen Colbert has said, “Because of the success of Gore’s movie, I now believe that global warming is real because the market has said that it is real.” That may be considered a joke, but is not too far from the truth. The climate crisis has become a major global issue not because many people have taken the opportunity to see the film, but also because the film has touched people so much that they have dedicated themselves to blogging about the crisis and raising the awareness. The reason that so many people have done this is because the climate crisis really is a global issue. The climate crisis is responsible for the exceedingly active 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons which severely crippled Florida and the gulf coast and obliterated New Orleans. The climate crisis is responsible for the temperatures of over 90 degrees in Chicago which forced their annual marathon event to be shut down due to dehydrating runners. It’s responsible for the serious droughts in Darfur which is probably one of the causes of the genocide in that region. Everyone, globally, is affected by global warming, and that’s why so many someones are stepping up to raise awareness and advocate for a solution.

The true significance of what the blogging community can do to help the environmental debate has been made manifest by today’s Blog Action Day as bloggers all across the internet blog about the environment and help to raise awareness of the climate crisis. This event is one of the biggest ways that we can spread the word that our planet is turning in the wrong direction and for us, as bloggers and citizens of the world, to offer solutions so that we can overcome this challenge.

Do your part as a blogger and be a part of Blog Action Day today.

Tags: action, Al Gore, article, Blog Action Day, Blogging, Climate Crisis, environment, global warming, Nobel Peace Prize