But, for the moment, here are five reasons that I blog (cross-posted at Joe Dolson):

1. I like to write.

   I began to write articles during 2005 because I wanted to provide more information about my web design business and what I thought on my website. I also wanted to return to writing — having not written anything more interesting than a set of directions since I graduated from college. The process of writing something is very satisfying to me. Given a choice, I’d quite possibly choose to spend more time writing than doing hands on work with web design, honestly. My blog(s) give me a great outlet.

2. I need to refine my thoughts.

   In the raw, untamed lands of my brain, my thoughts run wild. Taking pen to paper (or, more accurately, keyboard to screen,) gives me a chance to domesticate my thoughts. I can spend my time writing down an argument in order to clarify, for myself, what it is I think. Sometimes, the results are inconclusive. The interactivity of blogging, however, enables me to gain very useful input from others who read what I wrote and provide their own viewpoints. Every refining detail is incredibly valuable to me.

3. I like to ask questions.

   It’s significant that a lot of what I write falls into the general category of “why” or “how.” I like to talk about the reasons for performing a task in a particular way — whether this is a question of search marketing, website accessibility, or some other topic I choose for the moment. In day to day practice, I only get to ask myself these questions — and I don’t always have the luxury of time to investigate further. My blogging provides a venue to ask these questions more publically. I don’t know the answers: but I’m absolutely willing to go out on a limb to make some statement, in hopes that others will make their own contributions.

4. I work alone.

   This is also the reason that I participate in forums — because my day to day work is solitary. I’m self-employed, and spend most of my professional time by myself. Sharing thoughts with co-workers is a valuable habit — having no coworkers, I try to share my thoughts with other members of the same industry. It’s a way of socializing. It may be very much on professional topics, but it enables me to form professional friendships which I would not be able to pursue locked into my home office.

5. I like to teach.

   Blogging is a good way to share my own knowledge. While being open about the fact that there are many specialists who know far more than I do, blogging gives me a pathway to provide solid information with others. I have no way to particularly guarantee that what I teach is accurate, but I’m far from the first teacher to be uncertain. Teaching helps me learn. All in all, the process of blogging is a very effective learning tool: I learn in the writing, others learn in the reading, then I turn around and learn from my commenters, who, with any luck, learned from writing their comments. Hey, it’s just a big educational orgy.

Who I’m going to tag:

• Pierre Far
• Liana Evans
• Mike Cherim
• Nadir Garouche
• Matt Bailey

I can certainly see that it has a huge potential for marketing spontaneity: if your target market is the shopping spree/spontaneous spender type, you may have a winning possibility with Twitter. Woot! has jumped on board, and I think it’s probably got fantastic potential for them. I’m less certain how valuable it may be for others…

The characteristics Woot! has which make Twitter so useful?

• Very short term of availability. If you want to Woot, you need to know what’s up NOW.
• Very technological market segment — Woot sells a lot to gadget geeks. Twitter ALSO appeals to gadget geeks. Match made in heaven.
• Woot appeals to a sense of immediacy: if you make a decision quickly, you can get a great deal. Twitter appeals to the same sense of immediacy in human interaction, by keeping constantly updated about the activities of your Twitter friends.

There are definitely other companies who could benefit from Twitter — any business which makes heavy use of limited time offers, limited inventory sales, or daily featured items could probably make use of Twitter fairly effectively.

Outside of these? I’ve got my doubts. However, with the amount of attention it’s currently receiving in the blogosphere (and the search marketing blogosphere in particular,) it seems likely that we’ll see it applied in numerous creative manners in the near future.
It’s worth watching, at any rate. There’s no question that there will be plenty of very unique applications coming from Twitter.

It’s similar to MyBlogLog, in that it tracks visits to your site. It’s like Technorati, in that it provides ranking of blogs on the basis of popularity and provides links to current and popular blog posts.

It looks interesting — it’s in Beta right now, but I’ve requested an invitation — see what happens and what I can learn!

As a note, the only reason I’ve noted this is because it’s currently at the top of Alexa’s movers and shakers list, having shot up to 5,969 today from a previous ranking of 247,451. On Technorati’s Where’s the Fire, it’s been
described as a “Trafficracy.”

From Spotplex:

Spotplex provides internet users with real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count.

In other words, you can find what is the hot news today, this week, or this month in real time at Spotplex. This is not a list of articles people recommended or voted for, but a list of articles read most in a given timeframe.

It’ll be interesting to see how this works. I feel there’s some risk that what will essentially happen is that the site will show most prominently whatever article is currently being Dugg, Slashdotted, or otherwise barraged by traffic from having gained prominence in one of the other major social aggregators. Still, I do like the absence of a visible vote/bury option: it’s just traffic.

In short: it’s not whether people liked your story — just whether they visited it. (Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is open for debate.)

All posts would continue to be available; I’d simply absorb this blog into my web development blog. I’d do all the appropriate redirects to keep the resource available – but I’d be maintaining one fewer sites.
Life would be simpler.

I haven’t decided for certain yet – but I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.

Running a search marketing consulting company is not actually in my best interest. As a web developer, the majority of my clients actually are search marketing consultants. Does it make sense for me to run a business which competes with my clients? Not really. Especially when I really enjoy the development aspect more.

I still intend to write on search marketing — I think there are a lot of important issues where search marketing, usability, and accessibility intersect and I fully intend to explore those issues. When writing such cross-topic posts, however, I’ve been hindered by choosing where to publish them! I’d rather make that a bit simpler for myself, and send everything to one place.

Anybody who has an opinion on this subject, please do chime in!

MyBlogLog has created a recent stir in the blogging communities by providing an easy way to connect bloggers with their own communities – essentially creating a community of blogs. This expansion of the two-way blogger/commenter relationship into a more three-dimensional interaction has a lot of potential. Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) recently wrote (in a comment):

This is a good example of the benefits of a blog community – not only can blog readers find out about me and my interests, but I have a way of finding out more about my blog readers. And, as I’ve found in this case, readers who are interested in what I am blogging about might themselves blog on topics which interest me.

Not every reader of your blog will comment. Not every reader will have a MyBlogLog account. However, the interesting combination of readers and fellow bloggers creates a unique collaboration. Rather than having pure statistics – knowing you’ve been visited by 48 people, 65 percent of whom used Internet Explorer and so on, you have a small insertion of real human data in your statistics. MyBlogLog can tell you that this person actually visited your blog and that person admires you enough to have added you to their contacts.

Really, it’s pretty cool.

At any rate, I’ve just implemented these statistics, and I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of information I learn about this site.

I know one thing: I’ll get better statistics if I write more articles. Recently has not been my most heavy writing period…

A lot of things are still missing: I’ve got hundreds of redirects to write (can’t do it automatically, since I’ve elected to use a radically different URL scheme), and I’ve got to make certain the site works right…

Nonetheless, for your information, Blogger is a thing of the past.

When you read this, please consider commenting – if for no other reason than to let me know that I changed my Feedburner and other feed settings correctly!

I’ve known for ages that I really need to get my butt in gear and convert to something else (WordPress, most likely, since that’s what I have the most experience with.). Well, with these problems I’ve decided that it’s really just necessary: I can’t effectively maintain this blog with these kinds of services problems. Whether Blogger gets their issues dealt with or not is irrelevant. I’ve intended to do this for a while, I need to do it now.

So, instead of blogging, I’m probably going to be taking my hypothetical blogging time to convert over to WordPress, instead. You will undoubtedly find broken URLs: I’m going to be prepping my .htaccess file to prepare for this, but let’s face it: I’m going to miss things. This is what I’d call a "rush job" — something I’m doing because it’s been thrown in my face, not because I’ve got the time to take care of it.

So this is the last post you’ll be seeing in Blogger. Any luck, and everything will be back to normal within the week.

There’s a lot of good advice in here, and I’m going to go ahead and confess to all the warts of this site (in re: this article, that is) as of this date. After reading this, of course, some changes might be in the making!

Note: I’m not going out of my way to quote or reference the post itself. If you want to know the details of what each point is discussing, you’d better read the original post.

1. The First Impression

   Well…not really. There are several additional pages on this site, but I couldn’t say that any of them are explicitly about me. I think there’s enough information here that I’m certainly not anonymous, by any means – but I haven’t necessarily gone around being particularly inviting.

2. Don’t get seen naked: Never launch a blog with fewer than 5 posts.

   Got this one covered! When I launched this site in March, I had about 30 blog posts already published. So go me!

3. Make sure a link to your RSS feed is available above the fold.

   Nope. Once again, I suck.

4. Make RSS Easier Still

   Ummm…no. This isn’t going well, so far…

5. Offer an email version of your RSS feed

   Man, I’m losing it here…

6. Put chicklets in your template

   Alright, I’m on the line on this one. I don’t, literally speaking, have any social bookmarketing chicklets. Instead, I’m using Ekstreme’s Socializer. I’ve wondered from time to time about the effectiveness of this: the services themselves are much better known than the Socializer, and the graphic intensity of the services draws attention more easily. Still, the possibility is there – I’ll take half credit.

7. Be your own promoter.

   I should do better at this. I rarely submit any of my own work to Digg, don’t maintain my del.icio.us account, etc. So, another missed opportunity for me.

8. Leave highly valuable comments on other blogs in your niche.

   I do make comments on other blogs – and I’d like to believe that they’re valuable. That, of course, is an objective judgement I’m not entirely prepared to make. I could make more comments, but I generally go by the rule of thumb "only comment if you have something to say". I think that’s worthwhile.

9. Reload quickly

   Hmmmm….this one is a bit hard to determine. I don’t think it’s really relevant to me. I didn’t launch with a bang, since my personal business goals entail a gradual ramping up of profile and experience – quick buzz isn’t particularly what I need right now. (A 36 hour day, on the other hand – that I could really use.)

10. Include tons of outbound links in your posts.

    I don’t know about "tons". I’m fully in favor of linking frequently as appropriate: but this particularly advice smacks of over-exuberance. I link well: I find sources which are relevant and interesting and cite them. That’s good enough for me.

11. If you have something to give, give it away!

    What I give away is what’s in the blog: I don’t particularly have anything else. Although, on my other blog, I do have a couple of free PHP/MYSQL scripts which I make available for download.

12. Start real relationships with bloggers in your niche

    I think so: I have real professional relationships with some, and at least some semblance of more casual relationships with others. In some ways, I find this suggestion subtly distasteful: but the key is in the term "real". If it’s a real relationship, then you’re sincere: you’re not just creating some synthetic friendship for business reasons.

13. Submit your blog to blog directories

    Yeah, I suppose. I did that to a couple of directories early on, then lost interest…

14. Submit your blog to general web directories

    I suppose I’ve done that, too. Not extensively, but to a few key places I thought were worthwhile.

15. Leave your blog’s URL as your signature when you participate in forums.

    Yep.

16. Use your URL in your email signature

    Sometimes…

17. Myspace or Facebook members: put a link in your profile.

    Done it.

18. Submit guest posts at other blogs.

    Again, something I’ve done for my other blog, but not with this one.

19. Ask friends for feedback on your site.

    Definitely something I should do – I never have, and I’m sure that this site suffers because of it.

20. Go "Real-World" with other bloggers.

    Thankfully, we’re not talking "MTV’s The Real World", here… I’ve never yet met, in real life, anybody in this industry. Nobody. Not a sausage. In my defense, however, when I started the blog I was living in Austria, spent a month on vacation in Europe, and have only been operating the site in the Twin Cities (Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, if you don’t know) for three months. I’ve been busy!

21. Dress up your comments

    In cute little doll dresses? No, more by clearing and preventing comment spam. Got that handled – to the best of my knowledge, there are no spam comments anywhere in this site. Moderating comments is the most certain way of preventing that problem, and is what I do on this site. If the blog received more comments, of course, this would quickly become unmanageable.

And that’s it.

For what it’s worth, I’m in Rochester, NY – picking up a storage unit full of the possessions I left here a year ago when I was moving to Vienna. It’s always interesting to be reminded of the stuff you’d forgotten about in visiting a storage unit – but the actual process isn’t exactly my favorite experience.