The New Media Diva

My RSS feeds have reached critical mass. I subscribe to around 400.

That’s a pittance in Scoble terms I guess.

Anyway, I’ve been so slack at checking my bloglines account that the backup has become unmanageable. It’s time to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. I’m deleting all of my feed subscriptions and signing up for new ones.

What feeds do you suggest I sign up for?

I was prompted to check out Tom Regan’s news blog over at NPR when he took over the post of ONA executive director this week. I hadn’t checked it in a while. To my surprise, I found that the news blog had been shut down.

The following is the comment that editorial director of digital media Dick Meyer left about the situation:

This is a delayed good-bye to the News Blog that Tom Regan has been writing valiantly. I apologize that I didn’t post more promptly. I should have.

I’m the new editorial director of digital media at NPR.org so I’ll explain why the blog went away. Simply put, the News Blog suffered because our site doesn’t quite have the resources and social media tools needed to truly develop a big, flourishing community around a blog right now. While the the News Blog did have a solid core of readers and commenters (and some of you have chimed in on its ending), it was hampered by our commenting system and even by a lack of in-house contributors.

Although I hate the fact that the news blog is gone, I have to give credit to Dick for facing up to the problems his shop was having keeping it going.

Way too often, businesses and organizations blogs because of the “cool factor.” Hey, everyone’s doing it so we should too! (Not saying that this is what happened at NPR). They neglect to consider the work that goes into keeping a blog going. I’m certainly a culprit with my private blogs, but when an organization’s is putting its web reputation out for folks to see, keeping fresh content is a must.

Here are some things to think about off the top of my head:

• If someone brings up starting a blog at your org, ask “why.” Define a purpose from the start. Will it be to keep site visitors up to date with what’s going on? Will it be for employees to post their views? If so, have you thought about a disclaimer?
• Think about if you’re really prepared for two-way communication between your org and your site visitors. Don’t just focus on what they may say, focus on if anyone will have time to respond to comments left by visitors. That’s part of blogging too!
• When choosing a blogging tool, choose one that is easy enough for the most non-blog-or-web-savvy person on the staff to use. They may have a ton of ideas to contribute to the blog, but are perhaps wary of complicated backends.
• If someone on your staff *is* blog savvy, get them in on the planning stages. Pick their brains. Let them tell you about the mistakes they’ve made on their own blogs so you won’t do the same.
• How will you get the word out about your blog? Put an announcement on the main page? Send a newsletter? Get folks to link to it?
• Will you invite outside contributors?
• Put one person in charge of the blog. Make them the person who absolutely, positively must update it at least every other day. Allot time for them to do it no matter what…even if another project is looming. Do not depend on other members of staff who are not tasked with blogging to blog.
• Think of the cultural aspect: Organizational blogs are probably more common in the US than in Europe for various reasons. In my extremely humble opinion, formality is one of them. Workplaces are more formal in Europe than the US, at least in “Germanic” Europe. Blogs *may* equal “informal atmosphere” to some, making them uncomfortable. Have a plan to educate them about the blog and its purpose.
• And please, please, please don’t reinvent the wheel. Do not try to write a blog authoring package from scratch unless you are working in some type of top secret environment. There are way too many packages out there that can be tweaked and branded to do this.

Reading over my list, I see more “don’ts” than “dos.” Believe me, I’m very much in favor of organizational blogs. Two-way communication (a la Cluetrain) is wonderful. It’s just that I’ve seen more than one org blog bite the dust because of poor planning. I believe in what org blogs can do (or better yet, what people can do with org blogs (oggs?). But, I’ve been in more than a few situations in which folks have used their lack of planning for a blog, and subsequent failure of said blog, to “prove” their point that blogs are useless.

And that’s just not the case.

So I used CoverItLive to liveblog Senator Hillary Clinton’s concession speech as I watched it. A couple of things to note:

Pros

1. CIL is a great application for those of us who aren’t as adept at liveblogging as some others out there. It’s a cross between straight blogging and Twitter. You don’t have to worry about going through the motions of continuously updating a blog at a fast pace.

2. The interface is intuitive. It’s like being in a chat room.

3. One can moderate visitor questions on the fly.

4. Popping in media like video and pics is a breeze. For pics (but only from Google search it seems and I’ll get to that in a minute), one can just drag and drop. For video, input the embed code from YouTube.

Cons

1. I had trouble getting the interface to initialize on my Mac (I was using Firefox 2.0). I had no problems on Windows. Half way into the blogging, I looked over at the Mac and saw that the interface in the browser on that machine had initialized. I have no idea what happened.

2. The fact that I couldn’t hit the return key to post my comments bugged the heck out of me. I had to keep using the mouse (on both machines).

3. It seems that I could only drag and drop pics into the interface from Google search. I tried dragging pics from flickr and skitch but it didn’t work.

4. A big one here (I mentioned this in a previous post): Since the embed code uses iframes, one can’t embed the liveblogging window directly into a Wordpress blog entry. The window appears as a pop-up. There *has* to be a way around this.

All-in-all, I like the service…especially with it being free (not sure how long that will last though). I just may give liveblogging a second thought.

Note: You can watch the “replay” (just scroll through it).

Update: The embed of the replay seems to work even with iframes! Not sure how, but it does. See below (use the scroll bar on the side):

Session is here.

I get up around 7a. Leave for work around 8a. When I get to the j-o-b, I hit the ground running. Maybe I eat lunch. If I do, it’s at my desk. Perhaps it’s my choice, but I have ish to do.

It’s full speed ahead until around 6-ish, sometimes later. I make it home around 7:30 or 8. When I do, I log onto Twitter (via Twitterific), where I’m greeting with googobs of tweets from folks who have been tweeting…

…all…

…day…

…long.

I think I’m missing something.

I need your help. Please tell me, if you’re a daylong Twitter, please tell me what type of job, or life, you have that allows you to Twitter…

…all…

…day…

…long…

and tell me where to send my CV.