Blogging: Find Your Online Voice with Monica Hamburg

May 7, 2010

Gnomes & writing will lead to finding your online voice according to Monica Hamburg who just spoke at the Northern Voice conference.

Here are some other Hamburg tips from her dynamic session:

1. Be youself, but you need to clear on who you are: This can be tough for many people. Good place to start: Ask your friends what they think of you. Find the traits that most enjoyable

2. It’s ok to suck in the beginning of writing your blog. Spelling and grammar isn’t as important as you think it is when you’re in the midst of your creative place. Get your thoughts out first and edit later.

3. Compare yourself to other blogs to see what other styles you like.

4. What is good blog writing?

  • Compelling
  • Correct Grammar, spelling & sentence structure
  • As concise as possible
  • Be interesting, be funny (everything is not an anecdote)…have a friggin’ point ;)

    Benefits of initial obscurity:

  • Gives you time to find your voice
  • Gives you opportunity to experiment
  • Freedom to write with censoring yourself

    Other tidbit: Blogging shouldn't suck. Write about things you are passionate about. Remember it's a process. Keep writing, and writing, and writing, you'll get better.

    Finally, thanks to Monica for stepping in for Dave Olsen at the last minute. You rocked the house!

    oh and Dave, the audience was in stitches with your video (pun intended!).


  • iPad in Canada May 28, 2010

    May 7, 2010

    Apple announced last week that it has already sold over 1 million ipads in the US and has had over 12 million ipad apps downloaded. Today, it announced that on May 28th, the iPad will be released in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.

    Pre-orders start online from the Apple Store on May 10, 2010.

    The suggested retail prices released are $549 (CAN) for 16GB, $649 (CAN) for 32GB, $749 (CAN) for 64GB for Wi-Fi models and $679 (CAN) for 16GB, $779 (CAN) for 32GB and $879 (CAN) for 64GB for Wi-Fi + 3G models.


    Blogging ABC’s with Tris Hussey

    May 7, 2010

    Tris Hussey (@trishussey) spoke about the ABC’s of Blogging at Northern Voice today (#nv10), a conference on social media and the internet. Tris began his session with the concept of story telling. Hussey states that blogging is about writing and really isn’t about technology. Technology is just a tool. Here’s a summary the key discussion points in the session:

    If you’re starting a blog, he suggests checking out:
    WordPress.com, Typepad, Tumblr.com, Posterous.com

    Dealing with comments on your blog:
    When people make comments that you don’t like, you can delete them. Your blog is like your living room. You get to decide what is ok there.

    Hosted or Not Hosted?
    Audience Member wanted to know how much technology you need to know to start a blog:
    Find out if you want to host or be hosted? Use hosted if you don’t have any tech experience. It’s extremely simple to use. Someone else takes care of the server. Other option, if you get a host, you will definitely need to buy a domain name. He says don’t use Go Daddy (apparently interface is bad…I use it though and don’t mind it).

    Tris compares a hosted services to living in a dorm, it’s very limited. ie: you can’t use adsense ads on a hosted blog. You have more control with your own host.

    To install WordPress on your own host, you use wordpress.org to download the blog and install on your servers. Note: you’ll need google analytics or woopra (new stats program)

    Costs of hosts: domain purchase, plus approx. $10/month for hosting.
    Host Suggestions: Dreamhost, Fantastico

    Length of blog post: Write until your done…and then edit it. If it flows, but it’s long, that’s ok. Just make sure its an interesting read.

    Frequency of Blog Post: To build traffic on a blog, you need to build 3 to 5 times per week. Tris has tested this over and over again. You cannot really post too much. People will read what they want to read.


    Note: You can only post a couple sentences if you want. It doesn’t have to be a few paragraphs.
    The key it to make it interesting and useful for people.

    How do I make money from my blog?
    Tris, laughs, people don’t make money with blogging ;)
    (TL)You would need thousands of visitors per day in order to pull notable amount of revenue from your blog.

    Search Engines
    “Blogs are like crack to search engines” – Tris Hussey’s quote of the day
    Whether is hosted or on a host, it doesn’t make a difference to search engines

    Blogger – is it a good site to use?
    Tris isn’t a big fan of blogger, he feels that google has abandoned it. It hasn’t been updated very much over the last 7 years, but those that use it feel it works just fine. In summary, it’s not the super-star of blog platforms ;)

    Tags versus Categories:
    Categories are like silverware drawer, the description of your cutlery (ie: knife) is your tag
    Micro level descriptors: Tags
    Macro level descriptors: Categories

    Interesting tidbit:
    People read screens 30% slower and with 30% less comprehension than from paper.

    WordPress 3 will have the capability to put a category as a menu items. Coming next week!


    Just posted – Gladwell debate on social media & business

    May 5, 2010

    Mingleverse kindly streamed the April 29th Gladwell debate @Ceilisvan on April 29th. If you’re interested in checking out some of the discussion, the footage is available on you tube:



    Mingleverse launches facebook app

    April 21, 2010

    Mingleverse, an online virtual meeting place, launched it’s Facebook app today making it possible to converse with your friends using Avatars while on Facebook.com. The app makes connecting with your facebook friends seamless and offers live audio chats, text chatting, and media sharing. For those conscious about their eco-footprint, mingleverse also tracks the carbon emissions saved from meeting online as opposed to meeting in person.

    The images below, show an example of the “invite” friends to chat feature, as well as a glimpse at the actual “mingle rooms”.

    I encourage you to try it out and comment on this post. Let me know if you like it and if you can see yourself using this app regularly.

    For more details on Mingleverse.com, check out my previous blog post on Live Social Media.