my wrists are killing me.

my wrists are killing me., originally uploaded by cam i am.

Mary, I should be writing conversational correspondence as you do. I like the way you write here in our blog. Trying to follow what the inventor of blogging Dave Winer's recommends, "Blog everyday and read 50 blogs" I got stuck on the "read 50 blogs" part. Since he invented RSS, he's not talking about reading a few posts from 50 different blogs, he wants bloggers to have fifty feeds in their RSS reader and read (or skim) everything that the feed delivers, daily or hourly.

Nowadays, I use Google Reader for RSS, find it to be the best screen reading experience yet. I have over 60 feeds. While some of those are our blog and other friend's blogs who don't post very often, some are audio and some are video podcasts, some are feeds showing me photos as they are uploaded by my flickr contacts, at least thirty of the feeds in my Reader are serious bloggers, many posting several times a day. I'm gaining an understanding and respect for the craft of blogging, studying it as a unique form of writing -- but, finding little time to post.

At my job, I've become the technical administrator of our company's experimental marketing blog, it's a 20% project in a company that doesn't know from 20%. Google is the company that has made 20% projects famous, if you haven't heard about the concept, it is a requirement that all Google employees spend 20% of their work time on a project not directly related to their job. This is to stimulate creativity, inspiration and has allowed Google employees to develop experimental products, some of which got rolled out as Google services -- Google Reader, for one. In our company, having a 20% project is more like "skunk works", projects that you could get fired for spending time on. With the blog, we do have the interest and some backing by management, but it's more like we do it on top of your 100% job. They can't quite get their head around giving the blog any priority.

Besides maintaining the technical (coding) side of it, I'm passing information on to the writers about optimizing the posts for search engine indexing. Last week, the blog editor and I had a day long workshop with a Blog S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) Consultant. We've learned lots of ways to help blog posts get searched and gain a high page rank so searchers for any of our subjects have a chance of finding our posts.

Helping the blog rank higher on search results pages is done by connecting it to other blog's posts on the same subject and getting links to the posts from other bloggers. There's a whole art to this, but basically, it's finding others who blog on your subjects, commenting on their posts and emailing them your post and giving them permission to quote with linked attribution.

To reinforce the incoming links, posts need to be well organized on one subject, expanding on 2 or 3 keywords, whether the post is 1 or 10 paragraphs long. The keywords should be used strategically, in the title, repeated at least 3 times in the post and used as an illustration's caption. It's best if one use of each keyword be linked to other blog's posts built on the same keyword.

If the blogger wants more audience, for whatever reason, then the principals for optimizing posts are relevant.

Making linked quotes or references to other bloggers is similar to annotating citations in research writing and like academic papers, optimized blog posts are published for peer review. What is unique to this literary form, besides the instant publication by authors, is that the author considers marketing and distribution facilitation in the format of the text itself.

Bogging is a fast-paced, more direct form of the familiar literary conversations that has always existed through author's published books and private correspondence. Writers have typically read the work of other writers, whether for instruction, research or inspiration. To some extent, each writer writes in response to what they've read. The process is sped up in blogging with conversations swirling around the blogosphere in a matter of hours.

If a blogger wants to give their writing the best chance to be read, they will attempt to enter an on-going conversation in the blogosphere. An optimal post will insightfully respond to recent statements in several other blogs, drawing previously unseen connections between separate posts adding a big chunk of original insight, creating deeper understanding. After posting, the blogger places a brief summary of that understanding as a comment on the referenced posts, doing so while empathizing their post's keywords. The blogger then emails the post to another related, but unreferenced blog, permitting that blog to quote with linked attribution. When achieved, the repricocity helps readers and searchers find all the blogs.

I have the hope of building some sort of retirement business out of blogging, vlogging, podcasting, collaborative art projects, internet marketing, eBay selling, or what-have-you. My day job at the etail site gives me some insight into web marketing and selling skills, but the social context has not given me authority to innovate, the work-load gives me little time to learn new skills, its integration with a busy retail store allows the business to not be as web-dependent as it would need to be to thoroughly adopt new marketing methods and the family management slows the implementation of the customer-generated content which is now essential to modern, conversation-based marketing.

So, here I am with I an active interest in web business, a professional in etail, a web-media producer, a blogger, but unable to deeply follow through in the many directions my interests take me. I have too many interests, too little time. Living in an expensive city keeps us tied to the day job, being artists, keeps us busy in financially unproductive activities. We are having fun, we spend hours every week producing art, we are following trains of creative thought which have the potential of helping us and others, but I have the nagging feeling I'm not able to follow any one path far enough to reach its rainbow. I fear I will have spent my life being a dilettante dabbler on the edges of many culturally important developments, but never at the center of any of them, never the master of any medium.

Enough whining! -- I'm currently obsessed with using an original, eccentric method produce crazy-looking, (hopefully expressive) panorama views of the streets of my New York, Like these.

Ruth and I are continuing our Sunday painting with a new series, the first of which is based on this study.

I'm creating and maintaining relationships with other people showing their photography on Flickr, like my pseudo-son, Cam, a wonderfully expressive photographer in Spain Maria, an Art School grad student in Chicago Shellie, the beautiful single mother Rebekka with her multiple exposure self-portrait narratives and Steve making dramatic images in the Czech Republic.

Comments

[Mary]

Great shots you sent me, Steve. All of them interesting, but the woman in the mirror with the boxes - Rebekka? is stunning. Also the beach shot, from Cam. Reminds me of Mexico.