The ins and outs of Blogging Episode 1 [Podcast]

September 30, 2011 by Joe Hackman 7 Comments

Thinking about starting a blog? Check out episode 1 of 3 “Getting Started” on the ins and outs of blogging with my featured guest Gini Dietrich of Arment Dietrich and the Spinsucks blog.

Listen

[audio:http://www.blogtalkradio.com/joehackman/2011/09/28/the-ins-and-outs-of-blogging–getting-started.mp3?localembed=download]

Summary

This episode takes you from “I am interested in blogging” to “I am blogging” with some excellent tips to save you time and get you started on the right foot.

This episode was live on Blog Talk Radio on 9/28/2011.

Browser or RSS Reader doesn’t support flash? Download/Listen to this episode

You can also signup to be notified when I have new Podcasts scheduled by clicking the “follow” button for my show on Blog Talk Radio.

Bye Headup it was nice knowing you

February 15, 2011 by Joe Hackman 12 Comments

Good Bye Headup makers of a Wikipedia info popup information utility are calling it quits on 2/28/2011. Citing lack of success in an Email sent to users of Headup (including moi) early this morning:

Hi there,

Following our previous email, we wanted to let you know that by the end of February we’re going to discontinue the Headup Widget for websites service.
We appreciate the time and effort that you took to use it. It’s been a great experience for us, and we hope you enjoyed the product as well.
There are many reasons for this, but the bottom line is that it just wasn’t successful enough to warrant future development.
The Headup widget will stop functioning on February 28th, 2011.

If you are a WordPress or Joomla user, we highly recommend that you uninstall it from the plugins page before the end of the month.
Other users should simply remove the script from their HTML files.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Thanks for the feedback and support along the way, you’ve all been great.

All the best,
The Headup team.

I use the Headup widget here on my blog to allow people to get popup information on keywords such as Email, Facebook, Notifications, Life, NBC, Community (picked randomly from recent posts). According to the WordPress Codex site Headup has as of this publishing 10,754 downloads. So there are at least that many people like me seeking alternatives. I am going to start looking at alternatives but Wikipop is looking the most promising right now.

“Lack of success” = Lack of Profit

With the pressures to provide everything for free these days, many people are raising the question about free content and free applications. In fact if you follow @GiniDietrich’s blog she did a piece recently about charging for content. In that article she cited a recent Harvard Business Review podcast “Finding Profit in a World of Free” which is a very interesting piece that discusses the topic in depth.

Good bye Headup, it was indeed nice knowing you. Thanks for the free software and good luck to everyone. I only wish that your monetization strategy had worked because I thought you had a pretty awesome tool.

Photo Credit Peter Kaminski

Episode summary Blogger Ethics with Guest Danny Brown (Podcast)

January 20, 2011 by Joe Hackman 5 Comments

Recently Danny Brown to joined me for a discussion about blogging ethics and transparency. Danny Brown is co-founder and partner at Bonsai Interactive Marketing, offering integrated marketing, social media, digital and mobile marketing solutions and applications. His blog is featured in the AdAge Power 150 list as well as Canada’s Top 50 Marketing Blogs, and won the Hive Award for Best Social Media Blog at the 2010 South by South West festival. After reading Danny’s blog for a while I learned two things that compelled me to invite him to join me for this episode:

That he calls things the way he sees them
That he is passionate about blogger ethics

Who better to dive into a topic that some might view as controversial? I knew that Danny would give me his honest answers and would not pull any punches. I really looked forward to chatting with him again, Danny was a part of the PRapalooza panel in early November 2010. Danny definitely lived up to my expectations and if you’re interested in learning more about transparency and ethics in the blogosphere have a listen:

Listen to Blogger Ethics and Transparency with Danny Brown:

[audio:http://www.blogtalkradio.com/joehackman/2011/01/13/blogger-ethics-and-transparency-with-danny-brown.mp3?localembed=download]

Find Danny Brown online:

On Twitter @dannybrown
Also might want to read his recent post about Blog Disclaimers at Dannybrown.me.

Know someone or a group of people that might be interesting to interview? Contact me or @hackmanj.

Why do you blog?

January 19, 2011 by Joe Hackman 97 Comments

Blogger Tag Cloud by Joe Hackman (via Tagxedo) I was reading a comment today from Ileane and she was sharing with me that her daughter got her into blogging. I also learned not too long ago that Gini Dietrich started Spinsucks because she was frustrated by the way that many PR professionals created a very poor impression of the PR industry. This inspired me to write this post, because I suspect the answers to the question “Why do you blog” will be far more interesting than the post itself.

Why do I blog?

I started blogging years ago on my company website in the late 1990’s, I didn’t realize what I was doing would be called blogging one day. I mostly wrote stories to inform my company’s clients about changes occurring in the IT industry that might affect them, and I actually still do that on Facebook and at Managed Solutions. I continued to do that for a number of years and eventually in 2008 I started blogging using wordpress.com on my blog called “Reasonable Ideas”. On that blog I wrote mostly about non-profits and science. This experiment would carry over into my next blog Joegonesocial.com, the blog you are most likely reading this story at. When I decided to embrace social media it was not an easy transition from paranoid IT Security minded guy to the more open and public Internet footprint that comes with being a blogger. In light of that I made the decision to wholly embrace social media and to add it to my “must do’s” in my business. Bottom line, I blog for a lot of reasons but the core (and intentionally vague!) reasons I blog are:

For business reasons.
For personal reasons.

Why do you blog?

I am intentionally not giving a lot of detail about my reasons, I really want this post to be more about you and why you blog. What do you blog about and why? I look forward to hearing about you.

How to use Tagxedo to embed a cool tag cloud on your Blog

January 3, 2011 by Joe Hackman 5 Comments

Have you tried Tagxedo? It’s a pretty nifty little app I spotted on @liendi11’s Amplog recently. While playing around with it I realized that it was more difficult to get the clouds to work in WordPress than one would think so when I found a way to get it to work I also created a video to explain it. The method that I demonstrate shows you how to create a tagxedo cloud that is usable in both pages, posts and even as a widget. The main thing that needs to be modified is the size of the iframe code that is provided in the tagxedo code snippet. Here is the video followed by a live example of the tag cloud.

In the live example of a Tagxedo Tag cloud below you’ll note that all of the links go to the default function in the setup – a Google search page. Ideally a blog specific search should be used. I’d imagine someone will get creative and port it to a WordPress plugin before too long but until now you can see the possibilities. (Note: If you click the tags it will take you off my site and to Google search, apologies I should have adapted it to my site search!)