How to Blog: 3. How to write good posts
If you regularly visit blogs, you know that blog posts come in all shapes and sizes. Posts can be long, medium, or short (sometimes really short, like Jim Henley’s renowned one-word post that has collected 1104 comments to date). They go from the one extreme of dry and objective reports to the other extreme of unapologetic subjective, emotional, and opinionated rants.
If you look at lists of popular blogs, you’ll realize that very different types of content can attract a crowd of readers. The difference between a good and a not-so-good post is all in the execution.
Museum art is dead
Yesterday Husband and I went to the Whitney Museum in NYC. In this period the Whitney is having the 2006 Biennial, which is titled Day for Night in homage to François Truffaut’s movie La Nuit américaine. Some of the pieces were outrageous (a large virginal white canvas with piece of dirty chewing gum splattered on it, huge holes in the museum’s walls), some were moving and unsettling (Brauntuch’s shirts, Hannah Greely’s baby), ironic and/or provocative in a sexual (Vezzoli’s trailer for the never made remake of Caligula, Iannone’s "I was thinking of you") or political way (Serra’s Stop Bush, Anderson’s take on Black History, Nari Ward’s Glory).
But what was truly odd and out of place was to see modern art in a modern art museum.
User Research: Don’t neglect the goldmine in your own backyard
A product development process built around the user and the experience is an expensive proposition for many companies. On the surface, companies may reject user- and experience-centric approaches because they appear more expensive (more steps, more people involved, more time); deep inside, taking a user-centric approach is frightening because it requires relinquishing control and embracing a 180° cultural shift.
Putting a lot of thought in the early phases of product design clashes against the "faster, cheaper," "let’s see if it sticks" IT culture. Reaching out to people outside the company to discover solutions, ideas, and opportunities is unsettling for companies in which "the boss" makes all decisions and sets all strategic directions. True user-centered design requires a flatter, more democratic, and distributed corporate structure to work.
Because adopting a user-centered framework requires a cultural paradigm shift we often need to start small and proceed slowly to avoid a massive immune rejection response from the corporate culture. The good news is that in each company there are pockets of user knowledge that designers can easily leverage to get important user information.
Public Service Announcement: Please contribute to my list of friendly, locally owned cybercafes.
I am starting a list of friendly, small, locally owned cybercafes. I have looked around on the net for annotated lists and I could not find anything useful.
So far I have a tiny list of places I have personally visited, but I hope to expand the list with your help. If you know of a cybercafe you like and visit often or any friendly place that offers free or cheap wireless access, please send me a note with the name, address, website (if available), and a brief description of the place. Thank you!
Tags: cybercafe, list, wireless, hotspots
How to Blog: 2. How do I start Blogging?
Typically, people get into blogging by reading blogs. Most blog readers are not bloggers, they just enjoy visiting and reading/listening/viewing content that others create. And this is great: blogs need readers. Some people, after lurking for while, start contributing to the discussion by writing comments to other people’s posts. This is even better: blogging requires participation. Some blogs becomes like coffee shops: nice places to visit and hang out, where one can listen to stories and chat with friends.
But best of all is having your own blog, because you have the chance to create something that is yours, on which you have complete creative control, and at the same time is public. This is the true power and beauty of blogging: a blog is something you create and take care of, like a garden, and other people from all over the world can visit and enjoy.
If you have decided that you are ready to start your own blog, get ready to jump. You’ll find that start blogging has never been easier.
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