blogging
As food issues tend to become more and more newsworthy, it’s nice to see independent bloggers take it upon themselves to spread their opinion and concerns.
LocalDelicious.com is a new blog which aims to get the scoop on local food in and around the Lower Mainland. As more and more people try to eat locally produced goods, this blog aims to provide tips and advice on where to find the best markets, products, events and books.
More info about local food, recipes ideas and gardening can also be found by visiting the Edible Vancouver blog while the Earth To Table blog is a collaboration between chefs and farmers that promotes logical, sustainable, righteous, and above all, delicious food.
Not enough time to follow blogs… No worries, twitter is another great a way to get the lowdown on what’s going on in the food industry. You can follow three of these bloggers on twitter @LocalDelicious, @Edible Vancouver and @Earth_to_Table.
I had lunch with Rob a few weeks ago and we both agreed that keeping up with content is becoming more and more difficult. I only have 54 subscriptions in my Google Reader, yet every day I have 50 or so posts to read and I could easily add another 50 subscriptions. I’m not even sure if the 54 that I am reading are the ones I should be reading and fear that I’m missing out on vast amounts of information and just can’t keep up.
This can be even more challenging if you are starting a web business and not sure if you grasp all of the terminology. How are you supposed to find out which headline will bring more traffic to your blog, or what will prompt your website visitor to buy your product? I could tell you to go and read such and such blogs, but sometimes there is just not enough time to read all of that stuff.
So what can you do instead? How about checking out Sean‘s cartoons? With very simple illustration Sean’s blog is full of advice with accompanying cartoons that clearly explain complicated subjects. I’m not saying that by reading his blog your products will fly off the shelf, but you’ll probably learn a great deal and his cartoons are very clever.
Here is my favourite:
The lesson here: Your users don’t have that many eyeballs. Cut the crap from your site.
The Vancouver International Film Festival has come and gone for about a month now. The way the website is set up makes it very hard to find any information about the films as each film has its own blog. I’ve been poking around their site and selecting films randomly and I finally found a few entries but nothing too exciting. As you can imagine, because their website is not user-friendly, there is no discussion to be found.
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I must admit, I don’t read that many blogs. I currently subscribe to 58 blogs via RSS and I have trouble keeping my RSS reader under 50 new items every day. I made an effort in honour of International Blog Day this week and poked around via some of my regular blogs and discovered some new ones. Here are my four new favourites:
- Bedjump.com – Thanks to Rob from Techvibes, I came across this fantastic blog devoted to bed jumping. I’m not sure how anyone came up with this idea, but the photos are hilarious. If you are looking for a bit of silliness in your life, this is where you will find it.
- Common Craft – The folks at common craft are the ones who came up with the fabulous RSS video. For anyone confused about RSS, this is the one to watch. They’ve recently posted a video about social bookmarking which is very useful.
- Blue Olive Photography – I’ve done my fare share of websites for photographers. I love working with photographers, but most photographers work on very limited budgets. Following a recent wedding I discovered Blue Olive Photography and was impressed with their blog. This is by far the best solution for photographers wishing to maintain a portfolio easily and without the need for a large budget.
- Akismet – It would be an exaggeration to say that I thank God every day for Akismet, but I probably should. Since installing the plugin, Akismet has caught 4,512 spam on my blog alone. Poking around a bit I came across their blog which has some incredible numbers about spam. When will the insanity ever stop?
Happy International blog day.
The third annual International Blog Day is coming up next week. On August 31st, bloggers worldwide will be posting and introducing their audiences to their 5 favourite blogs from other cultures, backgrounds and interests.
The worldwide event aimed at further establishing blogging and in particular spreading the word about valuable and diverse blogs has the added benefit of promoting tolerance. By linking to other great blogs from alternate perspectives to their own, bloggers spread the buzz about blogs they like so that their audiences in turn can discover them and learn.
On the blog day web site, the blog posting guidelines are as follows:
- Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
- Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them as part of BlogDay 2007
- Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blogs
- Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and
- Add a link to the BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org
Watch this space for our own International Blog Day post next Friday.
I don’t know about you, but I’m constantly struggling to keep up with my inbox content. I love receiving pictures of my friends kids, but waiting for them to download can be a real pain in the butt. This is why I looooooooooooooove Flickr. I much prefer receiving a link to a flickr account than a bunch of images. Flickr allows me to view the images whenever I want and I can share the link with my friends and family.
The best thing about Flickr is that it’s free and really easy to use. You can upgrade to a paid account, which gives you more features, but the free account is perfectly fine to begin with. This week following a link from Veerle’s blog I discovered Scrapblog. Scrapblog was created to go beyond photo and video sharing. Their funky application allows you to create “scrapbooks” using your Flickr images and save them online. Just like Flickr it’s really easy to use and Free. I can see kids having a lot of fun with this. There are loads of templates to choose from and the drag-and-drop feature makes it super easy to get started.
Here is my first scrapblog that I created in barely 15 minutes using photos of my trip to France.
As of October 2006, there was a reported 57 million blogs registered with Technorati. Now you may think that this number is huge, but in fact there are probably more blogs than that. This number only counts the ones that are public, when in fact many blogs are private and some are just missed by the counters.
So if there are 57 millions plus blogs out there, why aren’t you blogging or more importantly why should you?
At a recent Northern Voices conference in Vancouver, Richard Eriksson from Bryght mentioned the following three reasons:
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Either you’ve never heard of blogging, or you’re sick of hearing about it. Either way, they are here to stay and they are changing the way we do business. Blogs offer businesses a cheap and convenient way to increase awareness of their company, open the lines of communication with their clients and increase their search engine rankings simply by posting new content. Let’s examine these three points separately.
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