Successful Blog

A Holiday Gift: The 31-Day Calendar of Blog Post Ideas for January

by

A Blogging Calendar to Start the Year

Power Writing Series Logo

It might seem early for a holiday gift, but folks get busy and go traveling. I didn’t want this list to get lost or overlooked. So,I hope you don’t mind that I give you this gift a little early. . . .

In honor of the holidays and as a thank you to all of you, I’ve made a calendar of 31 Blog Post Ideas to Write About in January.

They say there’s no such thing as an original idea. I tend to agree with that on principle, but I also know that the execution is personal.

At the end of some days, we can’t tell where some ideas started or where they end. We have the same ideas at the same time independently. Our thoughts interweave, connect, and influence each other’s thoughts. Our ideas turn into remarkable and thrilling concepts and realities. Humans, who think up ideas, are incredible at doing that.

You’ve had some of these ideas. I’ve had some. Some have been around, it seems, forever. I’ve tried to twist some when I could. Some come with links to example posts — from my posts, from yours and from others.

I hope you find a few post ideas you can use to make your life easier to have more time to live, to wonder, and to explore.

The 31-Day Calendar of Blog Post Ideas for January

Here goes . . .
[Read more…]

Net Neutrality 12-12-2006

by

Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

Why Jennifer Granholm Really Is Helping Destroy the Internet

InterrupT has an interesting post at Michigan Liberal where he argues that a franchising bill that looks like it’s about to pass, HB 6456, isn’t really related to net neutrality. Sadly, he couldn’t be more wrong, and it’s the type of wrongness that is going to lose us our free and open internet. Here’s an email from a knowledgable friend of mine on how these guys work and why it’s not as simple as thinking that we can just put through net neutrality protections.

Net neutrality politics have gotten a shade complex. Here’s a stab at sorting out why it’s important to pass net neutrality in a state, why it must be done in the same package as “franchise reform,” and why it’s critical even though it would only apply to Internet connections in that state.

Let’s start with power. Ultimately, all politics is a competition for the power to change things. Net neutrality pits the power of the cable and phone companies against…well…pretty much everybody else. They are more organized, well-financed and professional in the game of politics than “everybody else”, which explains why they are so successful.

[ . . . ]

What does telco power do when it fails to win in Washington? It goes to the states. They believe they can get the same thing at the state level. They can convince state legislators that build-out and universal competitive cable TV services aren’t important. And they can pretend net neutrality doesn’t matter. If they win in enough states, then they will have effectively outflanked Washington. That’s their strategy. They’ll have what they want, and we’ll have nothing. Worse, when they don’t need things from politicians, there is nothing to extract from them in a compromise. So, they’ll focus all their time on killing good things we’ll try to get politicians to do.

So what do we have to do? We have to go to whatever states they go to. And we have to put net neutrality and build-out requirements into their “franchise reform”. If we don’t, they’ll win. Simple as that.

Want to know what you can do?
MA Bell Monopoly Versus the Free Internet — Tell the FCC Net Neutrality Is Not Negotiable

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Steven Streight Is a B.A.D. Blogger!

by

Blogger A Day Call: Hello is Steven there?

Steven Streight and I were looking forward to our call for special reasons. He lives in the city where I went to University — we’d already emailed about things we had in common. Yet when the appointed time came, the connection didn’t happen. . . . It happened that he was being bombarded with ringing from a crank during that exact time frame.

I tried the number, but I didn’t leave a message. I get self-conscious about such things — I don’t like to bother people. Steven called me later that night, and we made up for the delay with a heck of conversation. Thank you, Steven, for making that happen.

Steven and I started right off talking about how blogging raises the level of conversation. Steven wondered at the fact that the same sentence said in person in a bar has a more powerful meaning when written in a comment box. We discussed how the actuality of seeing the words right there might make them more powerful. The idea that people think harder before they write also came up. We speculated that maybe the expectation that the words had more meaning made it so.

We started with talk of my university. He went to another school, but he spent a whole lot of time at mine. Steven reported that my school was changing the name of the school mascot. The choices, he told me about were dismal — clock, squirrels, gargoyle. All I could say as a writer was YUK!!! It’s a technical term.

You can bet that Steven and I got to talking about Political Correctness. I mentioned that it was happening in school books for ten years before it was even called that. I told him how people actually count how many of every race is represented, that I learned always to show Mom with a hammer and Dad cooking dinner. He didn’t seem surprised. He didn’t seem to like it much either.

Steven said he was late to the Internet, but he’s been here longer than most bloggers I know. His archives go back to 2004. He says he’s about usability and that he’s a direct marketing copywriter. We talked in depth about one of his ideas. I thought it was WAY COOL and would love to be part of it. He thinks about ideas and wonders the way I do.

We talked about emoticons — with noses and curly hair and earings, people and nations, what we think of governments, music, pay per post, what will happen to the blogosphere, SEO attitudes, what Peoria, Illinois is like and places I used to go, including a restaurant with grandmas as waitstaff and a hotel with a grizzly bear in the lobby.

We remembered all of the ways our paths have crossed over the last year — the people we’ve watched, how we’ve changed, how our respect for each other has grown.

Then Steven asked where I grew up and I told him. I had to explain where it was. When I placed my hometown for him, Vaspers the Grate said the coolest thing to me.

“You really are the girl next door.”

Steven Steight made me feel exactly like I was that girl. That was a genuinely, wonderful feeling.

B.A.D. Blogger Quote

We can almost transmit thoughts from one mind to another. Blogging is almost compu-telepathy. —Steven Streight

Stop by Steven’s Blog, Vaspers the Grate, and say hi!

Thanks, Terry, you B.A.D. Blogger!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want to be a B.A.D. Blogger see the. . . a B.A.D. Blogger? page in the sidebar.

Time for Everything: Letting Go to Find Flow

by

A Time for Everything

To everything there is a season,
A time to drive, a time to eat,
A time to type, a time to hear,
A time to connect, a time to reflect,
A time for phones, a time for elevators.
To everything, there is a season — paraphrased from Ecclesiastes 3

A few days ago, Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users wrote about a product called Twitter.

For those of you who don’t know about Twitter, it has one purpose in life–to be (in its own words)–A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? And people answer it. And answer it. And answer it. Over and over and over again, every moment of every hour, people type in a word, fragment, or sentence about what they’re doing right then. (Let’s overlook the fact that there can be only one true answer to the question: “I’m typing to tell twitter what I’m doing right now… which is typing to tell twitter what I’m doing right now.” Or something else that makes my head hurt.)

Click the title to see the product page

twitter

Why would anyone want to do that?

Twitter also a tool for

  • Social Networking System
  • Chatroom
  • Microblogging
  • Multiplexer
  • Group Communicator
  • RSS Feed
  • Salon
  • Meme
  • MLM

For me, that makes it worse. I had seen Twitter, and frankly I hoped that it would just go away. I see it as one of the weird worm holes of an overly plugged-in culture that I’m trying fiercely to avoid.

Kathy Sierra makes fun of twitter for the same reason that I avoided it. We both see it as one more way to fragment our attention in a world that already does a great job of doing so.

Finding focus is impossible when we live in a state of constant interruption. Call me cold and unfeeling, but I don’t care about some stranger’s cat named Fluffy — and it irritates me when that stranger makes a call in an elevator to find out about Fluffy, invading my space, my thoughts, making me virtually invisible — practically screaming that I don’t exist. Exactly how rude is that?

I’m all about finding Flow.
[Read more…]

Net Neutrality 12-11-2006

by

Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

SavetheInternet.com Coalition Calls on New Congress

Companies like AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth and Comcast pushed the FCC to remove Net Neutrality protections last year and have since spent more than $150 million to keep Congress from reinstating the nondiscrimination rules that enabled the Internet to become an unprecedented vehicle for free speech and economic innovation. But in the end, they couldn’t overcome widespread public opposition, and Congress would not pass a telecommunications bill that failed to protect Internet freedom.

[ . . . ]

“We look forward to working with the new Congress to craft a comprehensive broadband policy that will preserve the open character of the Internet,” added Gigi Sohn, founder and president of Public Knowledge. “Consumers were the winners when Congress chose not to pass legislation during the session just ending that would have given control over delivery of Internet content to the telephone and cable companies and, in addition, would have given control of consumers’ use of digital media to the FCC and entertainment industries.”

The more than 850 groups in the SavetheInternet.com Coalition also include the National Religious Broadcasters, the Service Employees International Union, the American Library Association, Educause, Gun Owners of America, Future of Music Coalition, Parents Television Council, the ACLU, and every major consumer group in the country. The coalition also includes thousands of bloggers and hundreds of small companies that do business online.

Want to know what you can do?
MA Bell Monopoly Versus the Free Internet — Tell the FCC Net Neutrality Is Not Negotiable

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE