How to Change the World

The Impact of Social Media on Sales, Support, Marketing, and Branding

Over at the Sun Microsystems small and medium business site, I published an interview with Josh Bernoff about his new book (co-authored with Charlene Li) called Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. In this interview he discusses the impact of social media on sales, support, marketing, and branding. He and Charlene are big wheels at Forrester, so this is recommended reading people in any kind of web marketing role. Click here to read the interview to learn about topics such as why the CEO of a publicly-traded company probably can’t write an interesting blog.

How Twitter Made My Website Better

A few weeks ago Chris Brogan published a list of the 100 blog topics that he wished people would cover. One of them was, “How Twitter Improved My Blog,” and I accepted the challenge to write something along these lines. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with Twitter, you can read “The Tao of Twitter,” “Newbies Guide to Twitter,” or “Ode to Twitter.”) Here is my answer to Chris’s request.

1. Twitter made my website faster. One day someone on Twitter complained that Truemors took a long time to load. Out of the twittersphere popped Jason Grigsby, and he analyzed how we could make Truemors faster. Without Twitter, Jason and I would have never connected. It must have taken him hours of research and years of accumulated experience to do this for me. How cool is that?

2. Twitter made my website more interesting. One day Laura Fitton (she is 50% of the reason I joined Twitter) sent me an email because she read a tweet from David Armano just after he witnessed teenagers pulling out an old woman from her stalled car. Unfortunately, the car had stalled on a railroad track in Glenview, Illinois, and they got her out just in time to save her life. Without Twitter I would have not gotten to know Laura, and Laura would have not gotten to know David, and Truemors not have beaten the news wires by several hours with this story.

3. Twitter continues to make my website more interesting. I get several stories each day from the forty people that I follow on Twitter. Also, I follow the New York Times, BBC, and International Herald Tribune Twitter feeds for more story ideas. I know I can get RSS feeds from these publications in my feedreader (NetNewsWire) but watching their tweets is more exciting and efficient. For example, the lag in RSS feeds is about thirty minutes, and at any given time, I have 1,000 unread stories to scan in NetNewsWire.

4. Twitter increased traffic. Jim Long is a cameraman for NBC. He flys around the world on Air Force One covering whatever the president does. One day he tweeted that he saw Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens of High School Musical 2 eating and smooching in Cafe Sydney in Australia while George W. was at APEC/OPEC. Someone picked up this tweet and truemored it, and this brought Truemors tens of thousands of page views. By the way, if you think insipid celebrity sightings doesn’t create traffic, you’re very wrong.

5. Twitter continues to increase traffic. Now I use Twitterfeed to automatically post the “Science” and “Odd” truemors to Twitter every six hours. Michelle Wolverton, who I met via Laura Fitton, has helped me as a virtual assistant on the project. On any given day, Twitter is the third best source of click throughs—trailing only Google and Popurls. Admittedly, some people have complained that I use Twitter to pimp Truemors too much, but my mother always told me that if you’re not irritating some people, you’re not doing anything interesting.

6. Twitter made my web site more true and less rumor. Jim Long helped debunk the truemor of the “mystery airplane” that was flying around Washington D. C. on 9/11. Here’s the commment that he posted:

   OK everybody, move along…nothing to see here. LOL. There’s really nothing mysterious about this aircraft. It’s the Air Force E4-B. A cold war relic, it was essentially designed as a flying command post for the President and SECDEF in times of nuclear crisis. I’ve circled the globe in this aircraft a number of times.

7. Twitter enabled me to make new friends. This is the greatest benefit of all. It connected me to people like Greg, Laura, Jim, Michelle, and Chris that I had not known. They have helped me in many ways, but more importantly, they have become friends, and friends are far more important than page views.

8. Twitter enabled me to re-connect to old friends. This includes Dave Winer (who is the other 50% of why I joined Twitter) and not-so-old friends like Robert Scoble and Hugh Macleod. In particular, Hugh is an interesting case because I had been trying to get in email touch with him for months because my emails to him went straight to his spam folder. With Twitter’s direct messages, I was finally able to reconnect with him. There is something truly elegant about 140-character emails—if only all email were limited to 140 characters.



9. Twitter enabled me to preserve my heritage. This is the best story of all. One day on Twitter Scott Yoshinaga asked me if “Duke Kawasaki” is my father. I tell him that he is. He tells me this story: He and his fiancee, Audra Furuichi, bought a book called Japan: Islands of the Rising Sun at a Friends of the Library of Hawaii used-book sale in Honolulu at McKinley High School. Inside the book was a copy of my father’s certificate of election to the state senate of Hawaii. Apparently this was my father’s book—he was a voracious reader and imparted a love of books to me. And my father graduated from McKinley to top it all off.

   Maybe this doesn’t make my site better, but it makes me happy. Scott is sending the certificate to me, and this piece of my family’s history would have been lost were it not for Twitter. Be sure to check out Scott’s and Audra’s cool manga web-comics at nemu*nemu (Japanese for “to sleep”). And they were kind enough to make a manga comic about me and Twitter!

All in all, Twitter is very useful and a lot of fun. From the outside looking in, it may not appear to be either to many folks, but some things need to be believed to be seen.

Life Remix

I came across a very interesting blog called Life Remix. Actually, the site represents a bunch of bloggers who have banded together to make “enrich people’s lives.”

Here’s an example of the type of articles you’ll find there:

1. How to Work Like the Masters

2. Even Simple Multi-tasking Can Make a Project 30% Late

3. Things Your IT Guy Wants you to Know

4. Why I started keeping a daily “one-sentence journal” (ok, a not-quite daily journal).

5. How Does a Bestseller Happen? A Case Study in Hitting #1 on the New York Times

Do check the site out. It’s a rich vein of gold within the mountain of dirt called the blogosphere.

How to Make a "Comic" Blog

Many people have asked me how I made the trip to Québec blog entry, so here’s an explanation. I used three products:

1. iPhoto

2. Comic Life

3. Skitch

I don’t think one can use this style of blogging too often, but it is effective and fun for “special occasions.” All three products, by the way, are Macintosh-only right now.

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Job-a-matic From SimplyHired

I swear I saw something about this already in this blog, but I can't seem to find it. :-)

SimplyHired is announcing a service called “Job-a-matic.” This enables bloggers to easily (ie, adding a snippet of HTML) to their blogs in order to host a jobs board. You can see mine in the sidebar to the right.

In my case, a limited number of jobs appear in the sidebar. People can see all the jobs that employers have placed in my blog by clicking here. Employers can place a job listing by clicking here.

SimplyHired handles these additional pages as well as billing and collecting. Basically, a blogger’s job is to draw the kind of traffic that would attract companies to place ads. It’s another way to monetize a blog.

For more info about Job-a-matic, click here. Garage is an investor in SimplyHired.

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The Short Tale: Much Ado About Not Much

Talk about unintended consequences, all I wanted to do with “A Review of My First Year of Blogging” was provide some factoids about my blog. However, this tidbit became quite the topic:

Total advertising revenue: approximately $3,350 = $1.39 cpm. (This assumes that I can get Google to pay me. I’ve tried several times during the year to get my snail mail PIN so that I can get paid, but I’ve never received it. I don’t mind Google getting the float...)

Things started to heat up because of Chris Anderson’s entry called “Don’t Quit Your Day Job.” Various reactions followed:

1. AdSense sucks for bloggers.

2. Nobody can make money blogging.

3. Guy’s clueless about AdSense and advertising.

4. What link bait! Guy is so sly... (I wish I was this clever.)

So here’s more info about my advertising revenue and this whole drama:

1. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” This was one factoid in a list of ten. It wasn’t the focus of the posting. Certainly my intent was not to get sympathy, position myself as clueless, impugn AdSense, or find advertisers—all of which happened! Several kind people even offered me great advice about how to increase revenue—the blogosphere never ceases to amaze me.

2. The $3,350 is for all the revenue I got for the year (actually, the total is now about $4,000 because I found some checks) from all sources: AdSense, BlogAds, Federated Media, and Feedburner. I used AdSense for only a couple of months when I just started.

3. I don’t take advertising revenue very seriously. It’s one way to keep score in blogging (Technorati is another), and I’m all for making as much as I can (to pay for my hockey), but it’s not the reason I blog.

4. In case you’re interested, the reasons that I blog are:

   • To increase the likelihood that “two guys/gals in garage” with “the next Google” will come to Garage for funding.

   • To help companies and people that I (a) like, (b) have sometimes invested in, (c) am sometimes advising publicize their products and services. This is also known as “alignment of interest” as opposed to “conflict of interest.”

   • To be able to tell Web 2.0 entrepreneurs how full of shiitake they are if they think that advertising is a slam-dunk business model. Essentially, a Web 2.0 company would have to be 10,000 times better at selling advertising than me before it gets interesting.

   • To test ideas with “reality checks.” How many guys have 30,000-person focus groups?

   • To tap the “wisdom of the crowd.” For example, ideas for my next book. How many guys have 30,000 people providing new-product ideas?

   • To make meaning and fulfill my mantra of “empowering people.”

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A Review of My First Year of Blogging

1. 2,436,117 page views for an average of approximately 6,200/day.

2. 262 posts generated 6,961 comments and 1,937 trackbacks. That’s 25 comments/post and 7 trackbacks/post.

3. 21,000 people receive RSS feeds via Feedburner and 1,457 receive emails via FeedBlitz.

4. Total advertising revenue: approximately $3,350 = $1.39 cpm. (This assumes that I can get Google to pay me. I’ve tried several times during the year to get my snail mail PIN so that I can get paid, but I’ve never received it. I don’t mind Google getting the float...)

   Update: the product manager of Adsense, Rob Kniaz, read this in my blog and got my account squared away. This happened in approximately fourteen hours from the time I first posted mentioned the problem on a national holiday. Life is good...

5. Most linked-to posting (953): The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.

6. Can’t-understand-why-more people-(11)-haven’t-linked-to posting: Ten Questions With Aziza Mohmmand. What a shame because this is the purest story of entrepreneurship that I covered.

7. Ending Technorati ranking: #45. Highest ranking during the year: #35 or so. One interpretation of this self-judged lack of success is that the blogosphere prefers news and gossip to essays although my buddy Seth Godin disproves this theory.

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8. Primary blogging tools: MarsEdit (Dear Ranchero hands, MarsEdit needs the ability to schedule postings), ImageScale, and iStockphoto.

9. Most disappointing realization: After a week, most postings are “gone.” Perhaps people’s expectations of blogs are so low that they don’t consider them reference sources. Hence, I have to write another book. My challenge is that I have three tasks: answering email, blogging, and writing a book, and I can only do two. :-)

10. Speaking of books: my request for ideas generated approximately 125 suggestions. Thanks, guys! I’m leaning towards writing a book called How to Change the World: A Practical Book for Impractical People. I just have to figure out how to make it a curve-jump ahead of, as opposed to repackaging of, The Art of the Start. If you’d like to help, please click here for a wiki for this idea. The password is “kickbutt.”

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Beginner's Guide to Digg

I recently read a great explanation of Digg by Neil Patel of Pronet Advertising. It’s called the Beginner’s Guide to Digg. If you’re a blogger and want to increase page views, you should read it...I learned a lot, anyway.

This cool image, by the way, is from Urlyart.

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How to Use Digg to Get Traffic

I learn something new every day. Little did I know, being the trailing-edge blogger that I am, that Digg is so powerful. I’ve focused on links and Technorati, but there’s a parallel universe of traffic and Digg.

Here’s a good example. This is my traffic log for the first few weeks of September. The spike of 37,366 page views on September 8th is purely because a blog posting appeared on the home page of Digg.

The guy who removed the scales from my eyes about the power of Digg is Neil Patel. He’s written a very informative post called “Using Digg and Netscape to get traffic”; you should read it if you care about traffic. He writes lots of good stuff about blog and site optimization, so consider subscribing to his RSS feed by clicking here.

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Blog Demographics--One Blog's Data Points

If you’d like to see the results of my recent readership survey, click here. A total of 1,631 people responded. These are my ten favorite stats:

1. 39% are outside the U.S.

2. 45% live in households that make more than $100,000/year

3. 58% have no children

4. 24% are a CEO/President/Chairperson/Owner

5. 12% read my blog more than once a day

6. 12% have spent $5,000 or more in the past year on gadgets

7. 52% place comments on blogs and sites

8. 82% of you get asked for advice on technology

9. 39% rarely travel by air for business

10. 31% consider yourself an expert on consumer electronics gadgets

It seems to me that these results would describe most readers of tech/marketing/entrepreneurship blogs if you’re looking for this sort of information.

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BlogHer Pictures

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Had a great time at BlogHer today. Here are the pictures that I took. You’ll see about thirty pictures in this looplet. To see all 113 pictures, click on the looplet. To share this loop with other people, send them this URL:

http://invite.filmloop.com/x?5-FjvzUuJRGnBfajNam41rL8GgqFlIiP

If you see yourself in the loop (or can identify people), please send me the frame number and the blog address, and I’ll link the picture to the blog. The frame of the pictures that are linked turns blue when you mouse over it. If it turns yellow, then the picture simply zooms.

Also, if you were at BlogHer and want to add pictures to the loop, just drag and drop them in.

Note: the linking and adding-picture functionality are available in the full loop, not the looplet that you see in my blog. You get the full loop by clicking on the looplet.

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A few of my favorites:

This is everything that attendees got in the conference bag. It included something I’ve never gotten in conference bag before (see next picture).

Yup, a condom...although I guess I’ve never gotten a bib too.

Saturn enabled attendees to test drive its cars. Kudos to Saturn for doing this.

This is three percent of the Technorati 100: Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, and yours truly. I don’t know who the teenager is. If he has a blog, this may be four percent of the Technorati 100.

Another picture of Robert Scoble—this time with the new Microsoft point-and-shoot, pocket-size digital video camera with color adjustment software built in. Rumor has it this was his severance package.

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See you at BlogHer

Hope to see you at BlogHer. I’ll be there on Saturday, mostly at the FilmLoop table. By the way, FilmLoop is going to give away autographed copies of Sweet Swan of Avon in the gazebo presentation theatre at 1:10 pm. You will be amazed at how Robin autographed the books.

I should be easy to spot: I’ll be one of the few people in the Technorati 100 who wasn’t asked to speak. :-) (Inside joke—ask me about it at the conference.)

Thanks!

About a week ago the design of my blog changed, and I wanted to thank the people who did this for me:

• Javier Cabrera designed the new pages. He is a designer in Argentina. You can learn about his company here.

• Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis of Pronet Advertising implemented Javier’s design. You can learn about their company here.

I could not have done this without these three gentleman, and I love the new look. I hope you like the new design too. Please send in your comments.

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Pew Blogger Study

From Matthew Stibbe, I found out about this article in Salon about bloggers. The source document is a callback survey by Pew Internet that’s located here (how’s that for spreading link love?).

The Blogger Callback Survey, sponsored by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (PIAL), obtained telephone interviews with 233 self-identified bloggers from previous surveys conducted for PIAL. The interviews were conducted in English by Princeton Data Source, LLC from July 5, 2005 to February 17, 2006. Statistical results are weighted to correct known demographic discrepancies. The margin of sampling error for the complete set of weighted data is ±6.7%.

I found these stats particularly interesting:

• Percentage who don’t use traditional sources for news or information: newspaper 17%; television 14%; magazine 34%; radio 24%.

• 62% didn’t have a web site before they started blogging.

• The median amount of hours spent working on one’s blog was two hours per week. (It takes me five hours to write an entry like The Wrong Tale—and that’s not counting the time it took to read the book.)

• 52% said they blog for themselves as opposed to for their audience.

• 55% use a pseudonym for blogging. (So people are blogging for themselves but using a pseudonym to hide their identities from themselves?)

• 59% don’t provide an RSS feed. (If you’re blogging for yourself, you don’t really need an RSS feed.)

• 84% say that their blog is a hobby or something they don’t spend a lot of time on. (This is how I approach my day job now that I’ve started blogging.)

• 65% don’t consider their blog a form of journalism. (I’d say this about my blog too.)

There’s lots of interesting info in this study, so check it out.

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The Ultimate Mommy Blog List

While poking around the BlogHer site, I found what must be the definitive list of blogs for moms. I provide it below. If you know a mom, please forward this list to her. I’m pretty sure she’ll find something of interest. Here is the permalink:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/07/the_ultimate_mo.html

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Note: There is a contingent of readers of my blog who do not like when I write about blogs/blogging/bloggers. I’d guess there’s also a contingent who do not like when I write about non-business, non-tech, non-male subjects. To these readers, I say in advance: “You can never support a mom, much less a mommy blogger, too much, so deal with it.”

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Badgermama “Mom with a mohawk.” Watch Badgermama as she raises a son, lives as a writer in San Francisco and attends PTA meetings where the other moms pretend they’re not staring at her purple hair. Read Badgermama.

BeTwinned “The one-stop internet spot for parents of twins and multiples.” Welcome to an online magazine whose name was inspired by the song, “Bewitched, bothered and bewildered.” Edited by a mother of twins, journalist Diana Day. Learn more about Betwinned.

Busy Mom “Better parenting through coffee.” Busy Mom is 41 years old and has been married to Busy Dad for 15 years. They have three kids: Busy Girl (11), Busy Boy (9) and The Preschooler Formerly Known as Busy Baby (4)... Read Busy Mom.

Chookooloonks: The Journal “A Trinidadian term of endearment, used especially when addressing a child.” A former C-level executive, Karen is a full-time writer and photographer, with a wry wit and a good eye. Chookooloonks describes her daily life as an “Englameridadian," being married to a Brit, and being the mother of a child so multicultural she defies categorization. And don’t miss her other blogs: Blogging Baby, Emerald Market, and The Pan Collective. Learn more about Chookooloonks.

CityMama “Mama ain’t raisin’ no fool.” Welcome to the private site of a 36-year-old hip-hop- and new-wave-music-obsessed, city-dwelling mother of two. You may already know her as professional blogger Stefania Butler (Slashfood, Blogging Baby)... Learn more about CityMama.

Family Living; Hatfield Style Not McCoy style! Jenna blogs about family life, fire and military life, homeownership, broadcasting drama and, of course, “the cutest baby on the planet.” Content also includes photography, book and product reviews and the occasional -- but necessary -- rant. Learn more about The JHatfields.

Fussy “I’m your host, Mrs. Kennedy” An editor-turned-blogger takes on the struggle to live life as a thinking person while trying to get a small boy to school on time without dog biscuits in his teeth. Learn more about Fussy.

I’m Ablogging “Putting the ‘mo’ in ‘mofo’ since 2004;” Meghan is 33 years old, has an 11 month-old daughter, a big, handsome Dutch husband and two dogs. “I live in a rambler in the suburbs and I drive a freaking minivan for God’s sake,” she writes. “What happened to me?” Well, she co-founded Mommybloggers with Jenn Satterwhite and Jenny Lauck, for one thing! Read I’m Ablogging.

IzzyMom “Faking it since the turn of the century.” Meet Izzy, a thirtysomething mother and mildly sarcastic mommy blogger. Occasionally serious, usually funny and always honest observations, stories and rants on everything from body image and preschool politics to motherhood and marriage. Learn more about IzzyMom.

jenandtonic “Like toilet paper stuck to the heel of your shoe.” In this personal, humorous blog, JenB talks about her family, parenting her two-year-old, her personal struggles, television, music and books. Read jenandtonic.

Joy Unexpected “Taking aerobic dancing seriously since 2005.” I’m a 34 year old woman married to the same man for 15 years, mother to two handsome boys and one beautiful baby girl, who was not planned but who turned out to be the Unexpected Joy of our lives. My blog is an honest reflection of who I am and the crazy, yet completely ordinary life I live. Read Joy Unexpected.

Kimchi Mamas “Meet Nina, Twizzle, Irane, Linda, Delia, Weigook Saram and Stefania...” What better name for a blog written by a group of Korean and married-to-Korean mothers than Kimchi Mamas? After all, they say, “We’re a little spicy, plenty fiery, and sometimes? We like to get pickled.” Read Kimchi Mamas.

Mom-101 “I don’t know what I’m doing either.” Liz, a NYC writer hailing from the justly-maligned world of advertising, fell in love with the funny guy from improv class and begat Thalia. “Turns out we got the best one,” writes Liz. “Now if only I knew what I was doing” Learn more about Mom-101.

Mommybloggers “Mom by mom, we are changing our world!” The goal of Mommybloggers is to expose the diversity of the writers who commonly fall under the label mommyblogger. “Love the term or hate it, Mommybloggers are here to stay,” say co-founders Jenn Satterwhite, Jenny Lauck and Meghan Townsend. Learn more about the Mommybloggers.

Mommy Needs Coffee “On a never-ending search to find a way to receive her coffee intravenously!” Welcome to the personal blog of Mommybloggers co-founder Jenn Satterwhite. In between loads of laundry and soccer games, Jenn blogs, writes essays and is currently finishing her debut book. Learn more about Mommy Needs Coffee.

Mom To The Screaming Masses “Picking up your socks since 1992.” Carmen is a stay-at-home mom to six kids. She’s a Starbucks addict and a huge fan of naps. When she’s not scaling Mt. Laundry, cleaning, driving carpool, or cooking, she likes to read and run. Read Mom To The Screaming Masses.

mothergoosemouse Julie has always been full of contradictions. She’s been an honor student, harpist, punk rocker, cheerleader, Air Force officer, record company employee, a wife, and a mother to a Goose and a Mouse. You may need a map to follow her train of thought, but at least it makes some pretty interesting stops. Read mothergoosemouse.

Motherhood Uncensored It’s a no-more-mrs.-nice-mom take on the mom blog. The faint of heart or weak of stomach need not apply. Kristen is taking off her mommy mask and letting it all hang out. Read Motherhood Uncensored.

Mom Writes “Writing to Stay Sane While Caring for Little People with Big Needs.” Mary Tsao is a stay-at-home mother who lives in Silicon Valley with her engineer husband and their two toddlers. In her former life she was a technical writer, but she knows far more people read her blog than ever read her user guides. Read Mom Writes.

Ninjapoodles “Beware the four-pointed paw of death” If it’s happening in Belinda’s life, it’s probably reflected on her blog. A Southerner, Democrat, and Christian, this ”walking contradiction” blogs about her daughter, marriage, family, health issues, showdogs, horses, church, society, and more. And there are poodles. Ninja poodles. Learn more about Ninjapoodles.

Not Calm (dot com) “Yes, they are all mine.” Jen is a 35 year old recovering hard-core Dr. Sears type parent of four kids, ages 3, 5, 7 & 9, who is discovering the joys of NOT cosleeping (well, not much) anymore. She has been breastfeeding for nearly ten years. Yes, TEN. Learn more about Not Calm (dot com).

Notes from the Trenches Fighting the war on tantrums since 1994. Formerly The Big Yellow House. Meet Chris, over-educated mother of six boys and one girl, struggling to stay sane despite the efforts of her children. And yes, she knows what causes it. Read Notes from the Trenches.

Silicon Valley Moms Blog A byte of Silicon Valley life. Welcome to Silicon Valley, where 20+ moms write about being CEOs at work and CFOs at home, where houses are expensive, kids love sushi and have web businesses, and moms are too busy chauffeuring kids to raise a sword in the mommywars. Read the Silicon Valley Moms Blog.

Spot-On.com A social commentary site devoted to showcasing new voices, many of them women: From just west of Washington, D.C. Jeanne Jackson writes about pop culture, raising kids and just how wacky the world can be if you let it get to you. Experienced journalist Deborah Klosky writes about motherhood from a feminist perspective from her ex-pat perch in Valencia, Spain. From Milan, Nicole Martinelli writes about European culture and politics. And, of course, Spot-On Founder and Editor Chris Nolan, a veteran political journalist who decided to stop yelling at her TV set and instead write and publish her own political commentary. Nolan isn’t a mom. But some of her favorite bloggers are. Learn more about Spot-on.com. Coming soon!

State of Grace You may already know Grace from the Hurricane Katrina Direct Relief Fund blog and SFGate. Here Grace blogs about her teen daughter, her happy marriage and her musings as a “rowdy, badass woman in her 50s.” Learn more about the State of Grace.

Suburban Turmoil ...is what you get when you combine a two-year-old daughter, 15 and 13-year-old stepdaughters, an alpha male husband, a braying beagle, a bunch of annoying neighbors and a 30-year-old woman trying to make them all happy and look damn good in the process. Read Suburban Turmoil.

Surrender Dorothy Rita Arens is a writer and mother living with her husband and daughter in Kansas City.  Her magazine articles, fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous periodicals. Read Surrender Dorothy.

Sweetney Muthablogga in residence. Keyboard at the ready, this 30-something SAHM (stay at home mom) ranges far and wide in her blog, from daily life raising a preschooler to music, current events and politics. Read Sweetney.

This Full House “Don’t make me have to use UPPERCASE!” This Full House is a full-frontal encounter into Liz’s life as a mom with four children, two cats, one super hyper sock-eating chocolate lab and too damned much laundry. Learn more about This Full House.

Three Kid Circus “Helping Other Parents Feel Superior, One Blog Entry At A Time.” Witty, warm and self-deprecating, Jenny Lauck takes a humorous look at parenting three young children in the suburbs. Learn more about Three Kid Circus.

Troll Baby “Put some fun in YOUR dysfunction.” A hilarious (and sometimes serious) blog from the point of view of a mother of two boys - one Good Child and one Troll Baby. Read Troll Baby.

Woulda Coulda Shoulda “How exactly did I get here?” Perhaps the Web’s funniest single mom, Mir is trying to figure out what she wants to be when she grows up-despite already being a divorced 30-something with two small, demanding creatures underfoot. She also recently launched Want Not, about her quest to live a fulfilled life without benefit of endless buckets of money. Learn more about Mir and her goals for Want Not.

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Addendum. Here are even more great mommy blogs:

Amalah

Antique Mommy I was 44 when I had my baby. This blog chronicles the joys and challenges of living in the brave new world of hot flashes, sloppy cookie kisses, and trimming itty bitty fingernails while wearing bi-focals.

Babylune. The first phase of new motherhood is an information resource for women recovering from childbirth. It is written by Kate Baggott—a technology journalist—while she is on a reduced-schedule maternity leave.

Business Mom

ClubMom This is the mother lode of mommy blogs. “Best of.” “Featured.” “Directory.” You name it...

Crib Ceiling Krisco is a full time stay-at-home mom to two little cuties. She used to be something. She forgot what. Still somewhat startled at the changes, loving the dollies, hating the housework. (Update: And now, she's working again! Will her old self return? Can she find matching shoes? Will anyone do the laundry?)

Dooce Heather’s clever writing and gorgeous photos charm and surprise readers. In addition to SAHMs, writers, creative types and techies alike can’t get by without a daily Dooce fix.

GwendomamaTrying to keep expletives to a minimum while raising her two children and dealing with the death of The Other One. Wears Birkenstocks, has dirty feet, enjoys music, baking, writing, fine wine, finger painting, and digging sand out of mouths.

Hormone Colored Days Breaking through her hormone-colored daze Kim Moldofsky muses on parenting and stay-at-home moms returning to the world of paid work. When PMS strikes, she takes care not to leave chocolate fingerprints on her keyboard as she rants about our nation’s public schools and how the system leaves gifted children behind.

Little Pregnant (A) Madcap misadventures in infertility, pregnancy, prematurity, and parenthood. Cranky, introspective, frank, and funny, sometimes all at once.

 

Livin’ Large Seven kids, one exchange student, three dogs, two cats, two birds, four goats, fifteen chickens, and a 500-lb. pig named Florence —but who’s counting? Uber-Mama Natalie writes on life, kids, and how she manages her super-sized family without resorting to Valium or a paid staff. Sometimes touching, sometimes funny, always better than a kick in the head. Well, most of the time...

Lucky Mom Happy married with an almost 3 year old, the Lucky in Lucky Mom could come crashing down soon as baby #2 (and last!) is due in less than 3 months. Will her luck run out?

Mama Drama Five Texas mommies dish the dirt on the real down-and-dirty rites of motherhood. The mommies run the spectrum from SAHM's to full-time professionals, from single to married, and from wrangling their babies to strangling (or at least wanting to strangle) their teens.

Mamalogues A younger, more neurotic Irma Bombeck.

Motherload: The MomAdvice.com Blog Mother of two and founder of MomAdvice.com, Amy dishes out her advice for moms on creative home solutions, saving money, feeding your family, and anything else that will help keep your sanity.

Mommy Blog (The) A naked, brutally funny, endearingly honest chronicle of family life beset by disaster on many fronts. Mindy keeps her family together through catastrophic illness, four bouts of postpartum depression, financial peril, familial Waterloo, and job instability.

Mommy Off the Record Here’s Hoping My Kids Won't Need Therapy. A twenty-something mom trying to find the humor in new motherhood.

MomSquawk Blog

My Name Is Mommy A few funny stories documenting one mom's utter failure in raising three perfect children, but some success and joy at managing a pretty happy family...for the most part.

Parent Hacks A collaborative weblog of practical parenting wisdom.

 

Play Is In the Work

Purple Is a Fruit

Quick Serve Kids

Rockstar Mommy

SharpMom

Sundry Mourning

Surcie: A Little Treat, Just Because She blogs from the kitchen table and eats something chocolatey while The Boy Child (age 3) takes the much anticipated Afternoon Nap.

Thrifty MommyThrifty mommy is just her way of showing you how to save time and money without feeling like you are pinching pennies. Great sales both online and at the stores are coupled with time saving ideas to hopefully inspire and challenge you to pass on the tradition of frugal living with your kids.

White Trash Mom

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Ten Questions with David Sifry

Here is an interview with David Sifry, the founder and CEO of Technorati. In this interview he explains what Technorati does as well as the practices of good blogging. Here are his Favorites Ironically, he doesn't post to his blog too often! But, there are several interesting charts there.

1. Question: How many blogs does Technorati check?

   Answer: Currently, we’re indexing over forty-seven million blogs, and the numbers are growing by about 100,000 new blogs each day. You can always see the most up-to-date numbers on our homepage.

2. Question: How do you check them?

   Answer: Technorati works based on a different principle than most traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo. Instead of going out and spending a lot of time crawling the web looking for blogs that have changed, Technorati gets notified (“pinged”) whenever anyone using one of the most popular publishing tools creates or modifies her blog.

   We’ve worked very hard with the folks who create publishing tools and services like Six Apart, Wordpress, Blogger, MSN Spaces, Blogware, Yahoo! 360, Radio Userland, AOL’s Journals and AIM Pages, and dozens of others to make this happen. We make sure that we immediately index the blog whenever a person using one of those services makes an update.

   We do supplement this with some crawling of a few blogs that don’t yet have Technorati notification built-in, but in general, those updates are at a lower priority than the updates that we receive from services that work with us.

   We call this notification system our high-priority indexing system. If you want to ensure that your blog is indexed in the most timely fashion available, drop a line to your blog hosting or tool provider to make sure that they participate.

3. Question: How often do you check blogs?

   Answer: For folks using the high-priority sites, postings are indexed in under five minutes. If your service doesn’t ping us, or if you use home-grown software, you can use our manual ping system at http://technorati.com/ping and ping us each time you post. Then we’ll put you in the high-priority queue.

   If you have a new blog and you use one of the dozens of blog services that ping Technorati, all you have to do is post a message, and we’ll search your blog. To find out if we’ve indexed you correctly, you can go to Blogfinder and put in your blog URL to see if you’re in our index. If you aren’t you might want to drop a line to the support folks at your blog hosting provider asking why not.

4. Question: What can a blogger do to ascend the Technorati 100—or simply write a better blog, for that matter?

   Answer: There are no hard and fast rules, but I can provide a few guidelines that seem to have worked well for the preponderance of the blogs on the Top 100:

   • Post often and post at regular intervals. Ideally at least once a day, or even more often.

   • Figure out what kind of blogger you are. Are you a blogger who loves to collect links? Are you an essayist who loves to argue points of articulate new ideas? Are you a storyteller? Are you more comfortable with video, audio, photos, or text, or all three? Try stuff out and see what you feel most comfortable doing, and then try to stick to it.

   • Link prolifically. Give your readers the benefit of you preparing all of the source materials for them. Also, if you are rebutting or commenting on someone else’s idea or point, it is a sign of respect to link to them. The hyperlink is becoming a new form of social gesture used between people. Tools like Technorati also help you to find out who has linked to you, so when I see a blogger who has linked to me recently, I’m more inclined to discuss his or her ideas and link back to them, driving traffic and conversation.

   • Be honest. There are very few people who can get away with building up personas, and you probably aren’t one of them.

   • Write about what you know. It makes for much more engaging and interesting reading. I love blogs like English Cut, because he knows so much about the world of Saville Row and he writes about it.

   • Be Passionate. Nobody likes boring writing about boring subjects. First find your passion, then express it on your blog!

   • Practice, practice, practice. Your writing or podcasting or videoblogging—whatever will get better as you do it more. Keep it up.

   • Get a Technorati watchlist for your blog and for your name. Know when people are talking about you and be able to respond—either in comments on their blog, or even better, on your own blog, with a link to the other blog.

   • Get a full-text RSS and Atom feed. Make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog. I’d recommend a service like Feedburner to manage those feeds for you and get you stats.

   • Use tagging. Tags are an easy way to create open categories, and they help to make it easier to find your blog. You can get a tutorial with tools here.

   • Claim your blog and put in blog tags. This puts you into the world’s largest blog directory, Blogfinder, which already has over two million entries. And it means that if you write authoritatively about a certain topic, you’ll show up pretty high on the list for that topic. Which means you’ll get more traffic and new readers and links.

5. Question: What tricks won’t work so people shouldn’t waste their time trying to game the system?

   Answer: Oh lots. We’re getting pretty good at finding link farmers—people who create fake blogs that link to one blog or site in order to lift their ranking, for example. Also, we can find automatically-generated content, like syndicated information from other blogs that you violate the copyright to get.

   Another ploy is to try to use all of the Technorati top search terms in a single post, to get people to see that post. This kind of SEO generally doesn’t work for long and it won’t get you lots of respect, which is what you want in the blogosphere.

6. Question: Why does it matter if a blogger pings Technorati when she updates her blog?

   Answer: It means that we’ll be able to immediately add your blog to our high-priority indexing queue to index your blog as quickly as possible. This means you’ll get credit for being the first person to say something, for example. It also means that the people you link to will learn that you linked to them as quickly as possible too.

7. Question: If a blogger finds links that are not on any of the main blog hosting sites, should she manually ping Technorati to ensure that they are counted?

   Answer: Sure, but please ping us with the main page or homepage of the blog, not the article itself. We’re pretty good at picking up the actual article if you give us the main page URL. Don’t be surprised if you don’t see results immediately after a ping—sometimes the sites are not blogs. Also, if you’re using homebuilt software, our spider may have a hard time picking up the posts.

   Occasionally we have a real blog that we falsely classify as spam. In that case, drop us a line via our support mechanism with the blog that you think should be indexed, and we’ll have a look. Our FAQ is here.

8. Question: Why does the ranking number here never match what’s here?

   Answer: Sorry about that! That’s a bug. We’re working on a whole bunch of fixes to that and also to make sure that your link counts and that rankings are updated much more frequently. Keep checking back with us for more information.

9. Question: What do you think of quid pro quo reciprocal linking and blogrolling?

   Answer: I don’t see the harm in it, but I also don’t look at blogging as a game—so if you think that your readers will get something out of a blog that you blogroll, then go for it. I really don’t care if the person links back to me—I’d rather they did it because they liked my writing than because of a quid pro quo.

10. Question: Can’t Technorati put out a widget or browser bar across more operating systems and browsers to more broadly measure which blogs people read so we don’t have to depend on Alexa?

    Answer: That’s a great question. If I find out that there are some great venture capitalists out there who operate out of a garage that would love to see that happen, perhaps they want to put a stack of $100 bills in an envelope and we’ll build it... ;-)

11. Question: On a scale of 1-10 where 10 means that I should check into the Betty Ford Clinic for dependence on Technorati stats, how would you rate me?

    Answer: You’re a perfectly healthy, strapping young man, Mr. Kawasaki!

A Tribute to Harold Keables: "A Dream Is Had By Me."

Harold Keables taught me how to write. He was my English high-school teacher in the early seventies (1970s, not 1870s). I wasn’t that great a student, so he’s probably having a good laugh in heaven watching me write books and blogs.

Mr. Keables used Good Writing: An Informal Manual of Style when I was in his class. While poking around my old school’s web site, I discovered that Dr. Michael LaGory, another teacher at the school, wrote The Keables Guide after Mr. Keables passed away. The book reflects the writing philosophy and teaching method of Mr. Keables.

If you’re interested in writing, I’d highly recommend that you read it. And who doesn’t need to write? Letters, emails, pitches, business plans, articles, web-site content, or, God help you, a blog are all forms of writing. The Keables Guide is in the same class as The Elements of Style and If You Want to Write.

In short, his methodology was to mark up our writing with his red pen, and then we would have to write the original sentence, cite the rule that we broke, and correctly re-write the sentence. Trust me when I tell you that we learned grammar very quickly. :-)

Here is an example of the rules that Mr. Keables evangelized. To this day, this anti-passive rule, well, rules my writing. For example, in the final drafts of my book, I search for every instance of “by” and “be” to look for places that I can eliminate the passive voice.

PV: change passive voice to active. Many passives are easy to correct; just find the thing that is taking the action and make it the subject of the verb:

PASSIVE VOICE: The food is eaten by me.

ACTIVE VOICE: I eat the food.

Often, however, passive voice has no “by” phrase because it is disguising unclear thinking which fails to identify exactly who is doing what to whom:

VAGUE: The ideas are shown using imagery.

CLEAR: Frost uses images to show the ideas.

VAGUE: Without care, errors are made.

CLEAR: Careless writers make errors.

VAGUE: It is felt you are wrong.

CLEAR: I feel you are wrong.

Grammar Tip: The passive voice is useful when you want to emphasize the recipient of the action: “The bridge was constructed quickly.” Usually, however, passive voice is less concise, energetic and natural than active voice. Suppose Dr. King had said, “A dream is had by me.”

Thank you, Mr. Keables, for forcing your system down my throat.

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Top Ten Postings

This is a list of the top ten postings as measured by links. It can always be at the top of the blog as a navigation tool. Please vote below.

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1. 419 The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

2. 250 The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs

3. 155 The Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists

4. 135 The Art of Bootstrapping

5. 121 The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog

6. 118 How to Get a Standing Ovation

7. 117 The Art of Schmoozing

8. 105 The First 100 Days: Observations of a Nouveau Blogger

9. 103 The Art of Creating a Community

10. 72 The Art of Innovation

Plus The Art of the Start Video

There Is a Better Way

A few miscellaneous items for today.

HTML Editor

Perhaps there is a better way. I’ve started to use two pieces of software to do this blog: Nvu and MarsEdit.

Nvu. My buddy Will Mayall turned me on to this product. I now draft in Nvu. It’s the closest thing I can find to the Holy Grail of editing in WYSIWYG mode and then flipping over to HTML. I especially like four things about it:

1. You can select text, go to the menu item Insert-->HTML... and put tags around the selection.

2. In the Source view, it shows tagging in a hierarchical view so that you can see if your HTML arguments are correct.

3. When you’re creating an ordered or unordered list, you can press Shift Enter and create a following paragraph that is not numbered or bulleted.

   In other words, like this.

4. If you use smart quotes and apostrophes in the WYSIWYG view, Nvu automatically converts them to the correct HTML code.

The only things it won’t let me do are insert pictures and post entries. It’s not intended as blogger’s tool--but a webmaster’s, so I can live with this because it produces such clean HTML.

MarsEdit. Yes, I know: I can draft in MarsEdit, so I shouldn’t need to use Nvu. Except that with all my ordered and unordered lists, it’s hard (at least as far as I can see) to tag paragraphs that follow an ordered or bulleted paragraph but should not be an ordered or bulleted paragraph. So my procedure is to draft in Nvu, add pictures with MarsEdit, and then post.

Between NetNewsWire and MarsEdit, Ranchero Software is becoming as important as Microsoft to me. And speaking of Microsoft, I tried using Word in Office 2007 running under Parallels. It’s pretty good as a blogging tool that combines editing and posting. Definitely something to try if you’re stuck in the other world.

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Wireless News Blog

Just found out about Mobility Today. It’s a very useful blog that covers news in the mobile device market. The reviews are helpful to someone like me who loses a phone every three months or so. 

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The Art of Moderating

This is a good posting about moderating a panel by Jerry Weissman. Jerry gets big buck$ for training CEOs for IPO roadshows. Moderating a panel seems to be a popular topic because here’s another one on the same topic by Paul Kedrosky. In case you missed it, here’s my version.

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MajikWidgets

For the past few weeks I’ve been using a widget to enable readers to rank my postings. The company that created it, MajikWidgets, is now open for business. So far, there are three widgets:

• Ranking
• Polling
• Opening a new page from a link

An example of a ranking is at the end of this posting. Here’s a poll:

The company uses a novel “credit system” involving paying a credit for each instance of a widget’s use. You get a bunch for free to try stuff, but eventually you have to buy credits.

We also came up with the concept of “linkware.” This enables a blogger to add a link to the blog of the person who thought of the widget. So, for example, if you use the ranking widget (which I requested from the company) and like my blog and want to help me with a link, you just check a box prior to the generation of your the MajikWidget code. Shareware, freeware, now there’s linkware!

By the way, if you want to ensure that your link is counted, please ping Technorati here.

Here’s an early review of what MajikWidget is doing.

Please check it out. I love what they’re doing...cool stuff from cool guys!

There Must Be a Better Way

It’s been a challenging week for me. The easy part was “outing” myself. That hard part was...I’ll come to that soon, see item #3. I’ll have a more contentive (content + substantive) post in the next few days.

1. Not sure what to make of this. Not trying to show off. But this is an interesting analysis by iNDi Business Solutions of how Guy Kawasaki is kicking Kawasaki’s butt on the Internet. At the very least, it shows what one Guy with a big mouth and a blog can do. Perhaps I should complain to ICANN that Kawasaki Motors is squatting on a domain that I should rightly own. :-)

2. The guys at Jajah have been busy. They just added a FireFox plug-in. With this plug-in, phone numbers that are on web pages are automatically detected and highlighted. When clicked, Jajah initiates a phone call from your phone—landline or mobile—to the desired destination.

3. This was the hard part of the week. Call me clueless. Call me pathetic. But for the life of me, I cannot figure this out. All I want to write my blog entries (while offline) in a more or less WYSIWYG mode. You know, where bold looks bold; italics look italics; ordered lists look like ordered lists; bulleted lists look like bulleted lists; you create hyperlinks by selecting text and adding the URL; and there are automatic smart quotes and em dashes. Then I want to copy the text and paste it into TypePad as HTML without funky stuff happening.

   I spent hours this week trying to find something to do this. I don’t want to learn HTML—this is 2006, so on principle no one should have to learn HTML to do what I want to do. I have tried about ten different programs—all the obvious choices that VersionTracker reveals. Let’s just say that my experience could be a Clint Eastwood movie called, “The Good, the Bad, and the Buggy.”

   This posting, believe it or not, was done this way: drafted in TextEdit, saved as HTML, opened with TextEdit Plus (which is a fabulous little editor), cleaned up, pasted into TypePad, and posted. What the shiitake am I missing? As Steve Jobs would say, “There must be a better way.”

   I know that Word can save-as HTML, but have you seen the resulting file? It would make a posting like this look like War and Peace. For example, the sentence, “There must be a better way” has twenty one characters. The Word HTML file with only the “display information” (that is, less stuff) has 1,122 characters! As Bill Gates would say, “There must be our way.”

   Please send suggestions. I’m so desperate (and I’m so impressed with Parallels) that I would even consider a Windows application to do this. God forbid.

4. Check out this great story about iStockphoto at Wired. It’s called “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.” I love iStockphoto; it is a role model for every startup because it’s outside of Silicon Valley, and it took no outside capital. The picture that you see in almost every posting is from the company (did you think I already had a picture of a jarful of shiitake mushrooms?). If nothing else, “crowdsourcing” is a very clever term. Almost as clever as the new spin on “linkware” that you will learn about next week.

Commenting as a marketing weapon

My buddy at BlogHer, Elisa Camahort, pointed out a good article about blog marketing. It's called, "Strategic commenting: no blog is an island." The author is Amy Gahran (seen here).

This is some text from it:

If your weblog currently doesn't have much of an audience, then an easy way to build an audience is to constructively leverage audiences already fostered by more established bloggers in your field. This means being proactive about building new connections. Strategic commenting is all about taking the initiative.

I recommend reading it because it provides a tactical way to build up readership for a new blog. And you know there's nothing I like more than marketing blogs.

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A few changes

I've been tweaking my blog for the past few days. Just wanted to let you know:

• Check the siderail under my picture. My buddy Mike Johnston wrote a script that displays my Technorati rank plus the number of links I need to get into the top ten. I've found out that caring so blatantly about my ranking really polarizes people (here's a great example), so I thought I'd take "blatantly caring" to a whole new level. :-) I don't know how Mike wrote the script: Will the number will turn negative once/if I reach the top ten? I'd like to find out soon. :-)
• I've started to respond to comments inside the comments. I've found that it's too hard to track a thread, so I'm responding in this new manner. While I'm in there, I'll fix typos too. But I'll never do more than fix typos in the original comment.
• Since I couldn't find a good solution for automated table of contents generation, I added categories. With categories plus the cloud plus the search box plus the archives, I hope you can find old stuff.

Thanks for your support!

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BlogHer

I met the founders of BlogHer today. This is a delightful group of people doing something very meaningful for the blogosphere.

My interpretation of what they are doing is opening up the blogosphere to people who aren't "in the club" ... though I'm not sure they would put it that way. :-) Think: barbarellas at the gate.

I'm going to the BlogHer conference on July 28th and 29th at the Hyatt San Jose. I hope that many of you attend too. Incidentally, if I were the marketing person for a company selling blogging tools or services, I would certainly exhibit at this conference.

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Yes, I'm a shallow Guy, but I'm now #46 in Technorati

My thanks to everyone who has linked to and evangelized this blog. As of this week, I'm in the Technorati top 50 with 3,450 links.

(This fabulous graphic is from Hugh Macleod.)

Some people are perplexed (perhaps even dismayed) with my high level of interest (aka, "obsession") in my Technorati ranking. I provide several explanations to choose from:

1. I am a shallow, insecure person whose fragile ego must be externally fed by whatever validation I can find.
2. I'm a goal oriented person. If I were a quarterback, I would keep track of touchdowns. If I were a winger, I would keep track of goals. If I were a shooting guard, I would keep track of three pointers. I'm a blogger (partially), so I keep track of links.
3. Creating a link is a voluntary act. Presumably, the linker believes that the material is worth reading and therefore created the link. By extension, the more useful one's blog becomes, the more people will link to it. The more people link to it, the higher you rise in Technorati. Thus, your Technorati ranking is a measure of your meaningfulness.
4. I just love rankings.

Thanks for all your help!

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A Poem for All of Us Bloggers

My main man Steve Nipper pointed out this poem to me.

There Is No Indispensable Man
by Saxon N. White Kessinger, Copyright 1959

Sometime when you're feeling important;
Sometime when your ego's in bloom
Sometime when you take it for granted
You're the best qualified in the room,

Sometime when you feel that your going
Would leave an unfillable hole,
Just follow these simple instructions
And see how they humble your soul;

Take a bucket and fill it with water,
Put your hand in it up to the wrist,
Pull it out and the hole that's remaining
Is a measure of how you will be missed.

You can splash all you wish when you enter,
You may stir up the water galore,
But stop and you'll find that in no time
It looks quite the same as before.

The moral of this quaint example
Is do just the best that you can,
Be proud of yourself but remember,
There's no indispensable man.

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