A cure for the blogging blues

Remember the food pyramid? Did you know that it can help a person not only have a healthy body but also a healthy blog? Suitably tweaked, of course.

I'll let Ariel Hyatt tell you about it.

It happens to me all of the time when I teach artists social media.The face goes blank, the frustration begins to settle in and then the artist says it:

“I just don’t have anything interesting to say.”

REALLY?

I’m shocked by this every time. You are an artist; you do things we mere mortals are totally enamored by: you PLAY MUSIC, you write songs, you perform them in public!

So PHLEEASE, do not tell me you have nothing interesting to say. I ain’t buying it.

All you are missing is a System for Social Media Success.

Luckily, unlike sheer god-given musical talent, social media is a learnable skill.

As I was teaching my system to a client in my kitchen a few weeks ago over coffee and bagels and it HIT me… and so I created:

THE MUSICIAN’S SOCIAL MEDIA FOOD PYRAMID!
Remember that chart they brought out when we were in 2nd grade to show us how to eat well-rounded meals? I have re-tooled it for you so you can now participate on Social Media healthily! And you won’t even have to think about it – just follow along…

You wouldn’t eat only bagels all of the time. They are a treat once in awhile, but they are not healthy to eat every day – and a diet of only bagels would be boring!

Most artists are only serving their audiences bagels all of the time. Plain bagels. Over an over again.

Uninteresting.

We want a burger, or a giant green healthy salad, we want some candy, give us protein!

But you keep serving bagels, bagels, bagels!

These are five things that when used in concert with one another can help you ratchet up your social media effectively and manage it easily.

To read the rest of Ariel Hyatt's awesome post, click here: The Musician's Social Media Food Pyramid

For those of you who don't feel like clicking, here's the gist:

1. Network
It isn't all about blogging, it's about making a personal connection.
Frequency: 3 or 4 out of 10 posts.
- Facebook: Leave a comment (or comments!) and become involved.
- Twitter: Chat up your network! Send messages to people & use their twitternames.
- Blogs: Read other blogs and LEAVE COMMENTS!
- YouTube: Find videos you like, subscribe to the channel and make your own video comments.

2. Promote others
Treat others as you would like them to treat you.
Frequency: 3 out of every 10 posts
- Share profiles, photos and links to interesting articles on your Facebook page and your blog.
- Tweet others as you would have them tweet you (sorry, couldn't resist!) Participate in #FF (Follow Friday) and retweet others tweets. Review books or albums and talk about what effect they've had on you and your work.

3. Curate Content
Frequency: 2 or 3 out of every 10 posts
- RSS feeds: This is my favorite! Every day I prowl through my RSS feeds using Google Reader and select the articles I think are the most interesting and share them.
- Food: You don't have to blog about the same thing all the time. Share recipes or talk about your favorite restaurants. Are you a secret addict of any food reality shows? (me --> Diners, Drive-ins and Dives)
- Media: write a review, whether of a book, a movie or some music.
- Talk about something your audience is interested in. Parenting, sports, technology (the iPad!)

4. Pictures!
Take photos and share them.
Frequency: 2 out of every 10 posts
- Twitter: Use twitpic and yfrog.
- YouTube: Dive in! Instead of posting video replies (see above) post your own video. If you're shy, you can post videos others have made.
- Blog: It makes your blog more visually interesting if you add a photo or two and the best photo is one taken by you that has some personal connection to you. It doesn't have to be OF you -- although it can. People are naturally curious about others. What does the view out your window look like? What does your writing desk look like? Your readers want to know!

5. Promote yourself!
Frequency: 1 out of every 10 posts
Do you have a book coming out? A short story? An album? Tell people about it!

That's it! Oh, but before I end this post, two very important things.
1. Most important blogging tip ever: Whenever you post on your blog or on Facebook, tweet a link to your post!
2. My thanks to the marvelously talented Deborah (www.thelandofdeborah.com) who sent me the link to Ariel's article. Her voice is completely amazing, check out her YouTube channel and her Facebook page. You can also find her on iTunes.

I hope you found something that will help inspire your blog posts. Cheers!

SiWC 2011: Writing for the Web, Rebecca Bollwitt

This post continues my series ... I suppose I can call it a series, but that makes it seem rather more serious than it is! These are my notes from the (wonderful! awesome!) workshops I attended at the SiWC this year. You can find my other notes here:

- Don't Flinch, Robert Wiersema
- The Psychology of Plotting, Michael Slade
- The Inner Journey, Donald Maass
- Getting Started and Heading in the 'write' direction, by Robert Dugoni

Rebecca Bollwitt is Miss604 and has a very popular site about all things Vancouver. I was lucky to be able to take her workshop.

(Disclaimer: These are my notes of Rebecca's talk and so may be in error. If so, my apologies!)

Here are the highlights:
- Best word count for a blog post: 250 to 1,000 words.
- Include photos in your blog posts, photos that are personal in some way. E.g., a photo of your desk, the view out your window.
- Get your website graded at websitegrader.com. (I tried it, it's fun!)
- Register your blog with technorati.com, a site that is to blogs as Google is to everything else.

How to get readers for your blog:
- Read other blogs and leave comments.
- Link to other blogs.
- Use social networks such as YouTube, Flicker, Twitter and Facebook.
- Get out from behind the computer and go to meetups.

If I'm series about growing my blog, how frequently should I blog?
- The important thing is to blog regularly. This may be once a month, once a week, once (or twice, or three times, or ...) per day. The important thing to post regularly.

That's it! You can find Rebecca Bollwitt over at miss604.com.

Your YouTube Video: Turn it into a video game!

I was watching a John Green Truth or Fail video yesterday, for the first time, and was amazed when I found I could interact with the video! "What strange new world is this," I thought. (Really! I sometimes think in Shakespeare quotes, it's strange, I know.)

If you have no idea what I'm rambling on about, play this video:



The wizardry behind this technological innovation are YouTube Annotations. What is a YouTube annotation, you ask. Good question! Let's let the talented folks over at YouTube explain it:

Video Annotations is a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos! Use it to:

- Add background information about the video
- Create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene)
- Link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video
- All of the above!

You control what the annotations say, where they appear on the video, and when they appear and disappear.
- Read More

You might be thinking: Okay, that's fine, but how do I DO all this cool stuff? How do I transform my crusty, boring, video into an interactive masterpiece? I'm glad you asked! If you click here, the Folks at YouTube will show you how to create or edit your annotations. And, I ask, what could be more fun than that? Can't you see yourself Saturday night, alone, at home, furiously editing annotation after annotation? Oh, wait, that's me. :p

Hope you have fun with your annotations!

Related Articles:
- Why YouTube Annotations Can Make the Difference Between Viral and Lame
- Penny C. Sansevieri: Six Simple Ways to Promote Your YouTube Channel!

I'm Listed on Technorati.com!

I don't know why I'm so thrilled by seeing my blog listed on Technorati.com, but I am! I have a tiny, tiny authority of 109 (authority measures a site's standing & influence in the blogosphere and is a number from 1 to 1000, 1000 being most influential), but that's okay.

I would encourage anyone with a blog to list it with Technorati.com. The process is quick and painless and, somehow, very rewarding. Here's how you go about it.

For anyone who is curious, I haven't noticed a significant increase in traffic to my site (technorati is a search engine for blogs) but I just got listed, so who knows?

First apps for your new iPad, 2011 edition

Dwight Silverman from TechBlog writes:

A few months after the first iPad was released last year, I posted a list of apps that new owners should consider installing first. It has become one of the most popular posts on TechBlog, but it was written almost 14 months ago. That’s eons in Internet time, and it’s already out of date.

With that in mind, here’s an updated version of the list. It includes many of the original items, but others have fallen off and new apps have been added. Some of the additions came from solicitations I posted to Twitter, Facebook and Google+. (And thanks to everyone who made suggestions!)

Dwight's list is both awesome and extensive, and I'll give you the link to it at the end of this article, but I thought I'd highlight a few apps I've found particularly useful.

Beat the Traffic HD – Traffic and weather for the iPad. If you’ve got an iPad 3G, it will also tell you how fast you’re going.

This app makes me wish I had an iPad 3G!

Dictionary.com – Dictionary & Thesaurus – The popular iPhone dictionary app is reformatted for the iPad. It’s a large download (grab it via Wi-Fi if you have a 3G iPad), but once it’s installed, it won’t have to connect to the Net to download definitions.

I love Word Of The Day feature on this one. It's intuitive and the advertising isn't too intrusive.

Dragon Dictation – Excellent voice recognition from the folks who bring you Dragon Naturally Speaking. Say what you want to write, then paste it into any application, including e-mail. No, it’s not as amazing at the iPhone 4S’s Siri, but it will make text input on your iPad a lot easier.

I've been playing around with Dragon Dictation for the past week or so, but I find it a bit lacking. In order for it's accuracy to approach something I'm comfortable with I have to talk very slowly and take care to enunciate clearly. (Yes, this is probably something I should do all the time!) That said, for a free app it is amazing and well worth the time it takes to download. It's a fun app, just not as useful for a writer as I'd like.

On the other hand, I've heard nothing but great things about Dragon Naturally Speaking and plan to buy the software. I'll keep you updated on how it goes. I'm interested in whether it will help me write more by allowing me to record sound files on, say, my walk to work and then using the voice recognition software to transcribe the file. (My 6th grade teacher talked about how in the future this would be possible but we rolled our eyes and him and thought he was nuts! Sorry Mr. Schmidt.)

Epicurious Recipes & Shopping List – A beautifully designed, smartly organized recipe and grocery shopping application that includes user reviews of the recipes.

The recipes look scrumptious and I was excited by the prospect of having a grocery list on my iPad, but it seems that the list is linked to the recopies and you can't add items on a whim. If I'm wrong about that, please let me know. For me, this isn't a keeper.

Facebook – At long last, Facebook has updated its iOS app to be iPad-friendly. If you’re on Facebook, you’ll want it.

I'm on Facebook, but I'm a reluctant Facebooker. I love all my friends on Facebook, but some aspects of the site puzzle me.

Feeddler RSS Reader for iPad and iPhone – The best RSS reader for the iPad. It’s particularly good if you have a lot of feeds to manage.

I'm always on the lookout for RSS readers, and after fiddling around with this app for about half an hour, I'm in love! This is the RSS reader I've been looking for.

Find My Friends – Get your friends to install this free Apple app on their iOS devices, and you can see where they are. They, of course, can see where you are, too. It’s also great for families, allowing you to keep track of where your kids’ locations.

I haven't downloaded this app and I don't plan to. The whole idea seems creepy to me, but I see the utility for concerned Moms and Dads so I'm including it.

Flipboard – Feed this app your Twitter and Facebook streams and it extracts links from your friends’ updates, displaying the results in a magazine-like format. This is one of the most innovative iPad apps you can install, and probably the best way to view the information flowing into your social networks.

What he said. I use Flipboard daily and love it. This is a must-have app.

iMovie – Did you think the iPad’s touch-based interface was too limiting for video editing? Think again. It’s $4.99.

This is an awesome app. I've been using to edit videos I've taken with my iPad and it's wonderful. Sometimes the touch interface gets the better of me, but that more of an iPad thing than a limitation of iMovie. I'm almost read to upload my first movie to YouTube and make it public, so I'll let you all judge for yourselves!

Kindle – Amazon’s book-reading app is so much better than Apple’s own iBooks e-reader. If you’ve got a Kindle or a smartphone with the Kindle app, you can pick up where you left off on any of those devices.

I like iBooks, but there's no question: Kindle is great. I do most of my reading on it. No complaints.

Pages – The iPad doesn’t really come with a decent word processor, so if you’re planning on writing anything beyond a quick note or an email, you’ll want this well-designed app from Apple. It’s full-featured and is $9.99.

Pages is excellent, especially since it's now possible to put files in folders.

Speedtest X HD – If you’re compulsive about checking your connection speed, you’ll want this app. The one downside: you can only choose from four testing locations.

After downloading Speedtest and running it I'm underwhelmed. Apart from a rating out of 5 stars it doesn't give much of an analysis of your score.

I encourage you to read the entire article: First apps for your new iPad, 2011 edition

My App Recommendations (all these apps are free):
- Dragonvale. Hugely entertaining and addicting. Beware.

- SmartRecord. You can use this app to record lectures, or post sound files to your twitter account. It also allows you to imbed images. I haven't tried out posting to Twitter yet, but it's a cool idea. Easy to use and free.

- TED: Ideas worth spreading. You all know about TED, right? Folks with something worth saying are invited to say it.

- Yelp. Find restaurants near you and read reviews from people like you.

I love technology posts! I hope you found something new and neat. Cheers.