danahern.com

Do you ever find yourself giving advice to others that you should really be taking yourself? My colleague Dan Ahern has recently made the switch over to the mac platform and because the fact that he is going to have to relearn everything all over again I figured it was a prime opportunity to start breaking his bad habbits… particularly that of writing really kick ass applications for the web 2.0 world, but taking advantage of none of it. We are talking a man here who writes lifestreaming, clickstream tracking and delicious mashups on a daily basis but doesn’t use any of these services (we are talking not even foxmarks to syncronize books marks people).

So I figured we would start 101, I got him to install the delicious toolbar and started poking him about his blog. We got a decent looking theme installed and set him up with a little flickr rss. I imported the like 5 blog entries he has written in the last 5 years and told him to have a go at it. He did post his first blog entry this year, so we are congrats of that.

But like most starting bloggers he asked “what should I write about?”.

Well thats a good question. I think Dan falls into the same trap most bloggers start off with… they all read like 10 blogs about some topic they are interested in and are like “wow I want to make something like this and get lots of reader!”. I myself have struggled with this issue, should I do a topic based blog? Should I make it all about work? Should I make it all about my hobby? What do my readers want?

So here is my 10 cents on the matter.

Unless you are a professional writer with no other job you are not going to be able to put in the effort/attention/details needed to research and write out well thought articles at a rate that is going to keep readers interested.

That being said, I think everyone should have a blog/homepage. Think of it as your front lawn to your internet life house. If you “work” on the internet and publish any sort of content (code, video, music, art, writing), people are going to want to know a little about you and a little about the things you do. It is of course up to you how much of it you want to put out there, but I recommend trying to be as open as you can, (I am not talking your sex life schedule… unless you want to) commentary on things you learn, events you attend, links to sites you discovered… most likely if it sparks for you it will spark for someone who is interested in the things you do. I have also found a light sprinkle of personal interaction gives your reader a human touch. Again I am not asking you to necessarily share your entire life, but did you just go out and have drinking with some colleagues and discuss a cool topic… share!

Now I know what your thinking… what if I DO want to do the research and write really kick ass articles. Well I would suggest guest blogging on more popular established blogs. If you write a well written article and submit it to blogs for consideration, there is a good chance they will publish it and credit you and link to your blog… they get free content, you get bragging rights! You will definitely get more eyes then if you start fresh on your own, and you basically will build up a following. This method also allows you to diversify your interests without discriminating your audience, ie keep your programming life and your sculpting life separated ENOUGH that it gets the attention of the interested audiences and sucks them in!

So now that I have told you all this, time for me to put together some well written articles and share… gotta walk the walk.