This post is in reply to rockbigdave's post blogs... why?
Looking at my blog i appear to be a stoppy/starty blogger
over four months September to December in 2007 i made 27 posts
▼ 2007 (27)
* ► December (1)
* ► November (9)
* ► October (11)
* ► September (6)
In the 1st 3 months of 2008 i have already made 26 post
▼ 2008 (26)
* ► March (5)
* ► February (9)
* ► January (12)
As for my varying frequency of posts on my blog, this is down to a few varying factors,
1) How busy i am
If i have lots to do out side of college, or i am not able to get on the internet to read tech news (a lot of my post are made up of tech news) then it means that i don't have the chance to write a blog
2) Whats going on in digital culture and the world of tech?
I often blog about tech news as i have a really fascination with technology and have done for a very long time. I buy stuff magazine (when i have the cash spare) and love reading websites such as digg, ars technica,the register, reg hardware, infosyncworld and probably many more (i'm also partial to the odd tech pod or video cast as i have mentioned in other posts) If not much is happening in the world of tech then i will have less to post about
3) Motivation / Organisation
I often write up my posts first in TextEdit to save me from losing what i am typing as in the past i have been writing up post directly in the browser which has it crashed an i have lost my work. Often i will write things up in TextEdit and save so i can post it. I often want to add pictures and sometimes video, which i can not put in to text edit. So after writing my post up i often go on to the internet to find suitable pictures or start to edit and upload the video i want to include in the post.
while editing the video or looking for pictures i sometimes find i go off task and get distracted from looking for pictures and leave the video to upload but when i come back forget to make the post and embed the video
(Even while writing this post i got distracted by an e-mail that i thought was to important not to respond to)
By the time i discover the blog post on my desktop, i sometimes feel it is no longer relevant or old news so i don't post it.
One such example of this would be this video
while in Newcastle last week i came across a band called The Flytes promoting themselves for a competition. I found them to be pretty good so i took a few pictures and a video on my phone with the intention of making a blog post as soon as i got back to where i was staying. When i got back i wrote up a blog post to accompany the video and the set to editing the video and uploading it. By the time i had finished fiddling around with it in iMovie and got it uploaded, my concentration started to wonder and i thought OK this will still be a good post even if i copy and paste the text tomorrow and embed the video too. I never got round to posting that blog so that was one (good) post lost
Another problem i have with using TextEdit is that i can not automatically insert hyperlinks like i can with the blogger interface (which all in all is no big deal as i can hand code them but it is quicker to auto format them) now i like my blog looking neat and tidy and i think if you hyper link to stuff it can make a post more interesting and more enjoyable to read, so often i will write up a post save it and have all good intentions of coming back and hand coding the links in after a short break. So i gets saved to the desktop and usually i will forget about it. Again when i discover the post at a later date i feel it is no longer relevant to post.
I think the solution to this problem would be to download and app the is specific to offline blog editing (if any one knows of any good ones please let me know about them in the comments)
4)I don't wanna be too geeky
I often have thoughts or ideas for posts for instance;
I speak to a lot of my other friends who are at other universities in various cities thorough out the UK, (some in other countries) on Skype, now thats all well and good but it means i have to sit in front of my Mac in order to be able to speak to them. (which isn't terrible but sometimes a little inconvenient) So i thought to myself ...... my Mac has bluetooth built in, i wonder if buying a bluetooth headset (just the standard ordinary one for a mobile phone) will it pair with my Mac and work with Skype? (I have been meaning to try this out for a while) This week while in the Carphonewarehouse i saw a cheap (£9.99 ECLIPZ Bluetooth headset.) Now not wanting to buy a useless peice of junk, when i got home i looked for reviews on the headset, it turned out that it was a Jabra 125 headset repackaged for the Carphonewarehouse and had fairly decent reviews on the internet. For the price i thought i had very little to lose and bought it. The headset works fine with my mobile phone and to my surprise it also pairs with the Mac and works with Skype. I can use the Jabra 125 to listen to music on iTunes, the only problem i have come up against is that when watching videos on youtube (and other flash video content) there is no audio and the video pauses it self. If i switch to the internal speaks the video resumes it self with full audio (if any one knows why this happens or how to over come it i would be interested to know)
i was going to post that to this blog, but i just thought to myself do people really care that you can pair a bluetooth headset up with a Mac and how many people who use Skype would use the feature anyway if they did know about it? Most people who skype do so because they are using their computer but need to talk to someone at the same time so they probably wouldn't care!
I just thought it was slighlty too geeky and sad to post about the fact i got a bit excited about being able to use a bluetooth headset so i can walk around my house and chat to people as if on a phone for free.
In reflection i think i should have made that post to my tumble blog, a place where i put all my random thoughts, pictures, videos, and links to internet sites that i find useful or interesting
So they are a few of the reasons behind why my blog post are sometime a bit sporadic
(I started this blog post at 1am Sunday night wrote it up in TextEdit. Had the post finished in rough by 10.30am (i slept in between) only by 11.20am had i added all the hyperlinks and tweaked it to a point where i considered it to be ok for posting. You will be able to look at what time it actually made it to being posted by looking at the time and date stamp by looking at the bottom of this post.
When i copy and pasted this into blogger i decided there were final extra edits i needed to make, such as adding target="_blank" to my hyperlinks as i dont want people to navigate away from my blog i want them to spend as much time as possible on there. I also had to edit the size of the embedded video to fit on the width of the blog and had final grammar tweaks to make.
5) As a 5th point you could also say that some times writing a blog post is a long drawn out process, may that is another reason that people don't blog very much?
Or maybe i'm just a blog nerd and like things so look as good as possible ?
Although i don't always get to make as many post as i would like, I enjoy blogging both the reading and writing of blogs, that I would in fact like to be a professional blogger and get paid to review tech items and and what's going on in the digital world.
(After originally posting on blogger there was still a few final tweaks to be made this post was completed at 11.50 almost a full 11 hours after i started writing it)
Monday 31 March 2008
Why I Sometimes Don't Blog As Many Post As I Would Like To
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5 comments:
Wow dude, thanks for answering the question!
I was really keen to ask why people do or don't use something which has, in essence, been layed out on a plate for us to do over 10 months. If anything its gotta be the easiest assignment in history? Mainly from people who don't blog but your post kinda hits the nail on the head for a lot of people I think. Plus dude you blog on Tumblr at the same time.
In reply to your offline blog editing, use Dreamweaver (completely scrap the HTML code in code view and then start blogging inside a 400px table) then just copy all the code except the table code and voila. Alternatively, I think Mac's have a basic HTML editor (Don't ask me what it is called) which should also do the job.
Again, thanks for answering dude. :)
(My last comment, to me, came up in random characters. :s So I've deleted it and re-posting it. (This one) sowiee.)
lol no worries about the random characters we will blame blogger for that one!
i will have to give the dreamweaver (it makes sense with it being an html editor somtimes the most obvious things are the lasting thing you think of)
hopefully i can save myself a whole load of time and effort doing things that way and i hope it will help me get a few extra post out!
Definitely the easiest assignment in history, in fact most of the time i forget it is even an assignment for the course, it has started to be a natural thing for me to do. It's a really easy way to get your work out and seen by the general public and hopefully by someone who will be interested in employing you.
Recently i have been trying to start to comment on other peoples college blogs, partly because that is part of the assignment and partly because i hope it would encourage people to come over and have a look at my blog.
Currently i think you are the only person to have commented on my posts (maybe thats partly because i haven't commented many other people, but i have found a lot of people not accepting comments either) But i raises the question why are people not commenting others blogs what's stopping them?
I really enjoy getting feed back on my post, as often it inspires other ideas (such as this post) and also its nice and encouraging to know you work is being read and appreciated by others
your thoughts on this ?
Exactly the same for me dude. When I get comments on my posts I generally want to blog more. It's a weird feeling but it just happens. :p
Some people have their comments turned off, which is a bummer as some of the stuff they blog I want to show I'm also interested in or want to ask a question. I've commented on a few peoples blogs, Annabeths included but where traffic for the blogs come from I can't tell. Such as if I make a comment on a blog, they hit me back so to speak. Might start posting the URL about everywhere and maybe that will get more hits.
I think it's just become a part of my schedule to blog, as it has with you. Sometimes I don't even blog about stuff that's related to Uni, which is what I guess the blog is also for - to show diversity, but as to why people don't accept or make their own comments I don't know. I guess it leads back to my initial question in my blog. I think some people see it as just an extra thing plonked on-top of us so it's not mandatory, where as me and you for example see it as an assignment yet it's started to turn into just normal life.
I read your blog quite a lot dude, and your tumblr infact. Your really into your technology as am I which is why I think I read your blog alot. :)
Actually, dude. I just googled 'rockbigdave.blogspot' and its come up with some surprising results! Your blog included has more results than mine. :D Give yours a google, this has perked me right up. :D
glad to hear you are reading my tumblr as well as my blogspot blog, alot of randomness goes onto the tumblr,
i try to keep my blogspot more uni and tech related and use the tumblr for everything else
Yep I love my tech, and it's nice that graphics and web design compliments that lifestyle (come to think of it so does blogging)
I saw your comment on annabeth's blog about here new eeePC (i wonder if she will be bringing it in to the studio to let us have a look at it?) when i saw her post about getting an eeePC i tried to find out if it was possible to get a copy of OS X running on it that's how i found out about about about the gOS (a kind of linux os x clone aimed at web people and using a lot of web 2.0 apps) I made a post about it on my tumblr i'm sure you will have seen it.
As for generating more hits the most successful method i have found (it got me 400 hit on my how to video over on revver) is to post it in to your facebook status (I got a few friends to do this for me too, you can reach alot of people using this method, think of a snappy title to encourage people to look at it, i kept it simple with "check out this amazing video" and the url
i think as the year goes on, people on our course will realize the benefits of opening up their blog to comments, (i love the social aspect of the web that seems to be about at the moment)
I have googled my blog a while back ago, and was surprised and please to see quite a few results showed up, it is amazing how something so small and simple can reach so many different places, also i find a lot of my video's that i have put online have been embedded in various random places, thats why most of the video i put online i will drop in to iMovie first and put credits and my blogspot address on them, just so people know the are made by and hopefull it's another way to drive a little bit more traffic to my blog.
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