One slightly unexpected but pleasant surprise for me in the launch of the new Brilliant Noise was how energising I found it to have the new website and its blog go live.
Developed with craft and care by Endless and Brighton’s patron-saint-of-Wordpress David Lockie, the site looks and feels right. But it’s what’s to come that I found excited – I realised that I had a real imperative to start blogging more often, as part of helping it come to life. Continue reading
I haven’t ever seen the point in categories for my blog before now (I’m still not sure I do).
But making a virtue out necessity and ignorance, I can’t turn off the category thing in the theme I am using for this blog and rather than having it jarringly state “UNCATEGORIZED” in the byline for each piece, I thought I’d set some up.
The challenge is that my ideas about categories change all the time, its partly why I prefer the versatility of tags to the taxonomy approach.
So rather than focus on topics, I’m going to have categories based around the different ways I am thinking and working on this blog:
: : Now, unless I can say that I am ignoring all the dates in the calendar and renaming them all “J” I am going to have to work out how to fix the number thing in the byline for my blog posts…
Image: Surplus doesn't have to be hard work
Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus is a fascinating and attractive idea, but unless you are a student, idle, rich or all three, there may not be a surplus of energy at all. As Ian Delaney put it in his post “Looking for my cognitive surplus“:
So yes, cognitive surplus. Wonderful notion. And when most people?s working hours are reduced to four a day, as Russell proposed, we might genuinely start to see what those trillion hours can do. But we need time off, too. Continue reading
OK, I’ve been a bad blogger.
It’s been an odd month or so, and may stay odd for some time. It’s been hard enough blogging more or less holding down a full-time-plus-any-other-waking-time-you-might-have-lying-around job. Not to mention my family and a new addiction to mountain biking.
But most of all, I’m the final phase of finishing my first book, my first book that will decimate several physical trees as part of the publication process that is.
So if you’re still l visiting / checking your feed, I’m sorry. I will be blogging again properly once I’ve finished the manuscript. Meantime, I am going to publish a feed of my Delicious bookmarks here. I know some people don’t like that, but I am very active there and I sometimes think of the notes as mini blog-posts.
See you soon, I hope…
Someone (I think Russel) was saying you should blog every dog-eared page. It’s a lovely idea, and I wish I had time to do that (read that as: “I intend to find the time to do that). And every starred item in Google Reader, and everything I bookmark on Delicious…
My favourite blogger at the moment, for style and approach at least, is Andrew Sullivan, because he blogs a stream of thinking, so many things that come across his desk, field of vision, screen, conversations…. It helps that he is a professional journalist who has put blogging at the core of what he does. I still keep trying to find ways to brign it closer to the core of what I do.
I didn’t mean this post to be a plug for it, but I may as well mention that this week myself and two brilliant colleagues of mine – Matt Neale and Tamsin Hemingray – put out a new iCrossing e-book that is designed to help people with Starting Blogging [download a free copy of How to Start Blogging here].
It gave me a chance to write again about why I love this format. Now that the “why aren’t we doing X” corporate marketing spotlight has moved from blogging to Facebook and Twitter, I feel more comfortable with urging people to blog. It sounds less faddish that it once did now. And it really is the most incredible medium.
And as with all the best social computing platforms, the reasons to do it, the reasons I list begin with what it does for you. A space to think.
A few months behind on this one, but who cares?
Lovely short film from Vancouver Film School here about why blogging in Iran is a “revolution within the revolution”…
With a new WordPress blog up and running themes are very much front of mind and I loved tis post from Blogessive with 20 Free Corporate WordPress themes - perfect if you’re planning a professional or corporate blog of your own.