My Own Pirate Radio

[This is part 3 in a series.] Hosting a blog is easy. Writing good content is hard. With that in mind, I’ve summarized some writing tips that I try to use. As I said earlier, I’m a newbie to blogging, so I won’t pretend to speak with authority. But this playbook is helping me become a better writer (I think!), and it may give you a few handy tips too.

Write with passion
Life is too short to waste on things you don’t care about. If you’re going to write, write about topics that matter to you. Your passion will show through.

Make it personal
People want to get a sense for the personality behind a blog. Letting your voice shine through really helps establish a connection with your readers. So describe your personal experiences, express your opinions and motivations, and be yourself in terms of writing voice.

Share intelligently and write with integrity
Pretty much everything you write is recorded somewhere online, and it may well be played back to you at some point in the future. So share intelligently. You might not want to go into depth on your lifelong passion for setting things on fire, for instance. Then again, the risk of being revealed is as real for a blog as it is for anything else you write or speak these days. So above all, speak with integrity: align your words with your actions and beliefs.

Use heads, decks, and leads
Jon Udell, one of my favorite tech bloggers and a writer at InfoWorld, advocates this technique from the publishing world:

Heads are titles, decks are subtitles, and leads are opening paragraphs. Writers and editors spend a lot of time thinking about heads, decks, and leads. That’s because writers and editors know that readers usually scan first, then dive in when they’re hooked by one or more of these devices.
…
I put some thought into what that element will contain when I’m writing an item. In effect, the first paragraph element is the lead, or blurb. Sometimes it’s just a plain paragraph. But sometimes it will contain an image, or a quotation, when these are appropriate and useful hooks.

Read more on that here.

Get to the point FAST
Unless you’re writing a story (see below), try to get the point across in the title and the first few sentences. Often I draft an entire blog post, then write the title and first paragraph to make sure they “tell the truth” about the rest of the post. This also works for many other kinds of communications, including email, documents, meetings, and phone conversations. Provide context and a summary up front, then elaborate. This saves your audience time, for they immediately know whether the rest of the content is personally relevant and interesting.

Tell stories
People really love reading stories; we’re wired for it. Here’s an example from my buddy Mike Zintel. Mike often writes in narrative style, and that makes him a lot of fun to read. It also happens to be the way he speaks a lot of the time, and I love hearing the ghost of his voice when reading his posts.

Short posts good, long posts bad
Or, if you write too many short posts, “Long posts good, short posts bad”. The point being to mix it up. Short posts are easier to read but tend towards cotton candy. Long posts pack more punch but require more commitment from the writer and the reader. I’ve found most readers appreciate a variety, and I as a writer, do too.

Personally, I tend to write longer stuff. Must…rein…self…in.

Chunk big topics into small topics
(For some reason I am reminded of my grandmother saying, “Chew each mouthful of food 33 times before you swallow.”) Some topics are easier to communicate by breaking the writing up into parts. Do that. Focus each post on a distinct sub-topic and call it out as such in the heads, decks and leads.

Create a discussion, not a broadcast
I much prefer blogs that invite discussion by enabling reader comments and responding over time to reader feedback. Often the comments are more insightful and entertaining than the original blog post. And as a writer, I learn something new from every comment. Corollary: respond to commenters, and thank them. Comments are gifts; someone is taking time out of their day to gift you with attention.

Others have said it better than I can
In particular, read this article, “How to write a better weblog”. It’s inspirational, entertaining, and offers some great practical advice.

Happy writing!

Update 4/28: Do what works for you. Some of my favorite writers have an approach that is nothing at all like what I lay out here. And that’s good too. Chacun à son goût.

[This is part 2 in a series.] Some people are pretty serious about promoting their blog. I am more laissez-faire about it; I love getting comments and email from readers, and I do keep an eye on reader numbers, but at the same time I don’t do much to drive traffic beyond attempting to write interesting content. For those of you who are more serious about proactively driving traffic, here are two posts you should check out.

1. This nice post by Alec Saunders gives great practical advice on how to get your blog noticed. Alec has been blogging for years, and it shows in his content, approach, and large visitor following. I’m a fan.

2. “The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog”, by Guy Kawasaki. He is a little too mercenary for my tastes, particularly in his use of email addresses, but then as the consumate evangelist Kawasaki probably wouldn’t have it any other way. He also did an earlier blurb on his blog stats, “Total BS (Blog Statistics)”.

I’ve been blogging for about 6 months now. I’m definitely still a fumbling newbie, but despite a few mishaps it’s proving to be great fun and a wonderful way to meet and stay connected with people. A few friends interested in running blogs of their own have asked me what tools I use to do it, so I’ve put together a few posts describing my approach. This first one is about the blog publishing services I use. I’ll do a follow-up later on the hard part: writing.

A word of warning before I dive in: the setup I use is great if — and only if — you want to have complete control over your blog’s content and features, and you are not shy of doing a wee bit of PHP code tweaking. If that doesn’t sound like fun to you, check out blog hosting services instead. Blog hosters do all the heavy lifting for you, and most of them are free. LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace and Blogger are some of the most popular.

Now, for those of you who want all the bells and whistles, on to my config:

Blog publishing: I use WordPress, which is one of the top blog publishing packages. It’s quite feature-rich; I haven’t found myself wanting yet. WordPress is easy to extend with plug-ins that offer new features. And with only a little more work you can hack the PHP code to customize anything else about the blog, since it is entirely open-source. You can host it yourself to get complete flexibility, as I do, or use the hosted version from WordPress.com.

Design. Blog look and feel is currently derived from a theme called “Almost Spring”, which you can find here. WordPress’ main site lists many other themes.

Spam. Blog comments tend to attract spammers. I use Akismet, another free WordPress plugin, to find and destroy spam. It works incredibly well, with almost no false positives. Staying spam-free is easy.

Tags. UltimateTagWarrior is a great WordPress extension that helps you add tags to blog posts and display a tag cloud. This screenshot shows you the current tag cloud for MyOwnPirateRadio:

Tags are a useful way to discover posts, as opposed to text search or looking through chronological archives. The tag cloud display gives you an immediate feel for the topical content. And as a publisher I can add nerdy references like this to my posts: all blog posts related to business models.

Comment Discovery: Brian’s Latest Comments is a nifty little plugin that displays an overview of the recently active articles and the last people to comment on them. Here’s a screenshot:

Statistics: Stats packages help build a picture of which sites refer traffic to a blog, and which content on a blog is most popular. My web hoster offers a popular statistics package called AwStats. I also use StatTraq which is a WordPress plug-in. StatTraq is a little better at giving blog post-level details, so I use it more often than AwStats. I triangulate between the two sets of statistics, since there are often significant differences. I’ve also tried Google Analytics and found it to be slow and inaccurate. It’s a little hard knowing which numbers to trust.

Web hosting: I host my blog with iPowerWeb. They have proven to be a great Web host over the last few years; inexpensive rates, good support, high reliability, and excellent flexibility about what software you put on your server. If you’re looking to build a custom web site of any sort you should take a look at iPowerWeb. Thanks Craig L for that reference.

Email digest. Some people prefer getting blog content via email instead of RSS. To enable this I’m experimenting with FeedBurner Email Subscription Service. I just did a post on it, which you can read here. FeedBurner also promises a few other benefits to do with blog stats and caching; jury is out on that.

Grant Total Cost: $7.95 per month, which is iPowerWeb’s hosting fee. Everything else is free.

April 28 - May 7, 2006
I’m planning to catch some of this.

Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is North America’s largest documentary festival. Each year, the festival presents a selection of over 100 cutting-edge documentaries from Canada and around the globe.

link

           
The impending availability of .NET Compact Framework on the Xbox got me thinking: Microsoft really ought to deliver a handheld entertainment device that supports games, music, and video. Between Apple’s iPod and Sony’s PSP, Microsoft is clearly missing the party. Why not join in with a device of their own?

Now, while this was a moment’s idle fantasy on my part, it turns out The Mercury News has a fairly lengthy March 20, 2006 article suggesting that just such a move is actually in the works. Read it here: “Microsoft’s Plans For Handheld Game Player And iPod Killer”. Unnamed sources only, but I recognize the names mentioned and to me it rings true.

So why would Microsoft do this, seeing as how they’ve purposely stayed on the sidelines until now?

(1) MS has nothing in its stable to compete with Sony and Nintendo’s gaming devices. Yet the growth in gaming devices is currently in handhelds. Chris Nuttall of the Financial Times writes, “Handheld game sales grew by a massive 42 per cent in the US in 2005 - compared with a 12 per cent fall in console software sales - as players took to Sony’s PSP and Nintendo’s dual-screen DS portable gaming devices.”

(2) There are no Windows Media-powered devices that truly compete with the Apple iPod, and that’s starting to hurt. This is a market where MS left it up to the OEMs to come up with something cool. It hasn’t happened. Perhaps the cost competition is simply too brutal; as in the PC space, the low prices on media players are nice for customers but so far go hand in hand with second-rate industrial design. Meanwhile, analysts are predicting 8.8m iPod units sold in the March quarter 2006. That’s something like 4x the run rate for the entire PDA market in 2005. And it all connects back to iTunes and IMusic. Ouch.

(3) While MS does have a presence and growing momentum in PDAs and phones, neither the Pocket PC nor the Smartphone are optimized for games, music, or video. Customers with entertainment foremost in mind won’t naturally gravitate to these devices.

(4) Because they can. Microsoft now has all the ingredients required: two OS variants to choose from (the Xbox OS and Windows CE, either of which would need some transmogrification), the .NET Compact Framework running on both OSes and the most popular mobile device CPUs, and many hard-won lessons from designing and shipping the Xbox hardware. That’s not to say it would be easy to design a low-cost, high-performance, handheld entertainment device that’s - gulp - more attractive to customers than iPod, PSP and Nintendo/DS, but at least it’s feasible. Microsoft would be wise to slant the design more towards the gamer community, as the Mercury article suggests, so as to work from the existing Xbox strength.

Of course, if Microsoft doesn’t want to go to all the trouble and expense of designing and build their own device, there is a much faster and cheaper approach: partner with Apple and port .NET Compact Framework and Windows Media codecs to the iPod.

Now that would be cool. Unlikely, to say the least, but cool.

Links:

• Mercury News: “Microsoft’s Plans For Handheld Game Player And iPod Killer”
• Ferrago: “J Allard masterminding MS handheld?”
• CNET Aug 2005: “PDA shipments near record levels”
• Financial Times reprint: “Simple ideas help developers play to win”
• MacNN: “Analysts look to iPod sales for signs”
• MyOwnPirateRadio: .NET on Xbox Screenshots
• MyOwnPirateRadio: .NET on the Xbox

P.S. My standard disclaimer for Microsoft-related posts applies here: I have no insider knowledge on this topic. My speculations are based purely on publicly available information and my own feverish imagination.

There is now a video availalable of the talk Malcolm Gladwell presented at Rotman earlier this week. I blogged about the talk here. Other Rotman talks including one by Jack Welch are here.

Or, “Gladwell, Godin, Quantum Physics, and Entrepreneurship”.

I love it when seemingly unrelated things coincide in serendipitous ways. Four events over the last two weeks have collided in a particularly delightful fashion.

Thing 1: Malcolm Gladwell (of “Tipping Point” fame) spoke at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management today to a full house of MBA students, alumni, faculty, and some free-riding tailgaters like me. Gladwell is a U of T grad and a friend of Rotman’s dean, so he was on home ground. (By the way, he blogs occasionally; see here.)

Gladwell delivered a thought-provoking piece on creativity, dwelling in particular on the dichotomy between early-bloomer creatives like Picasso who peak near the beginning of their careers with a big bang followed by a years-long trail of quiet thunder, and late-bloomer creatives like Cezanne who continually refine a single theme, working up gradually over decades to finally reach a point of mass critical acclaim. Gladwell postulates that the western business world is increasingly focused on funding only those who show visible potential to be early bloomers, to the detriment and marginalization of late-blooming creative efforts.

He cited HBO’s Six Feet Under as an example of a show that took some years to catch on, and would never have been funded on mainstream TV, but is now extremely popular and profitable with a set of diehard fans. In contrast, mainstream media effectively forces artists down the early bloomer path, typically by funding them to do warmed-up rehashes of recipes that are known to work. Why? The risks of investing this way are visibly lower: the design methods are more formulaic and easier to explain, the market reactions are easier to predict, and the profits arrive (or fail to arrive) much faster. The downside is that we the customers get fed a stream of pablum.

Thing 2: Quantum Physics. Last week I got to spend time with Michele Mosca, an old Waterloo classmate who is now Deputy Director at the Institute for Quantum Computing and a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Mike graciously made time to tour me around Perimeter and talk about their ambitious plan to build a world-caliber organization for pushing forward the bounds of physics. Both Perimeter and ICQ invest in the kind of research that, in many cases, may take 15 years or more before it manifests itself in applications. Perimeter’s initial funding came largely from the personal donations of Mike Lazaridis and fellow RIM executives Doug Fregin and Jim Balsillie ($100M, $10M and $10M, respectively). Talk about investing and innovating for the long term. It was an incredibly impressive experience.

Thing 3: Seth Godin. I finally got around to watching Seth Godin’s recent presentation to Google. In it he talks about moving from “interruption marketing” (ads pushed at users regardless of their contextual wants and needs) to “permission-driven” marketing. He advocates the latter approach, in which customers actually want to hear marketing messages, provided they are personal, contextually relevant, and offered in response to an invitation. It’s a great talk, and if you care at all about how to market a concept, you should watch it.

Godin commended Google for growing their usage organically, by first building a service that was remarkably different and then encouraging word-of-mouth recommendations, rather than by plastering ads everywhere. It’s an approach that takes patience. When it works, it ultimately yields many customers who are insanely loyal evangelists for your product. He also warned Google that they need to move to the next step, and start asking customers for their permission to follow through with personalized, relevant marketing messages about their new offerings.

Thing 4: Entrepreneurship. The March ‘06 Toronto DemoCamp event stimulated some interesting conversation about innovation and entrepreneurship in this region. One of the topics is whether it’s worth spending time reviewing demo ideas that come without business plans attached. I argue it is worthwhile: the demoers may eventually want help turning their ideas into businesses, and everyone else in the room is meanwhile benefiting by listening, learning, and building synergy between the demos and ideas of their own. It’s OK if the payoff isn’t immediate.

Conclusions: In a way, a tech community investing time and energy in nurturing its aspiring entrepreneurs is much the same as a formal organization investing time and money in nurturing and marketing long-term creative work. Both entities have important choices to make about how much attention to invest (attention ~= time ~= money), how risky to be with their investments, and how long to wait for commercial success. Striking the right balance is crucial. And good things - some of which may take a long, long time to develop - are worth waiting for.