What’s His Big Idea?
I enjoy watching Jeff Pulver take on life. He’s a guy with BIG ideas. He also makes them happen, This week via email and a couple of blog posts, Jeff passed two of his great ideas on to a few folks that he knows. I was lucky. One of those folks happened to be me.
What’s Your “bestof”?
Friday, Jeff wrote about blog posts he’d like to make “sticky.” His idea seems simple enough — we might all consider it. His thoughts were that we mark certain signature posts with the same tag so that first-time readers could find them easily. After an email conversation, the appropriate tag chosen was “bestof.” Tom Evslin, offered to program something that would tie the posts together — if it rains this weekend. (I didn’t want to hope for rain, but the code will be nice. I’m guessing Chris Brogan, Jeff Jarvis, and Kfir Pravda — all part of the same conversation — might have been thinking the same thing.)
Imagine the value of this “bestof” tagging convention, if it caught on — readers would know to Google a name and “bestof” to find the work that defines a writer’s viewpoint. Reporters and other bloggers could find a blogger’s expertise with ease.
I’m updating the About Liz page in the sidebar to include a “Bestof” section that will include a handful of posts that I think fit this category.
BlogDay2007 Tag from Jeff Pulver
Three years ago, Nir Ofir started blogDay. As he says,
I initiated the blogDay in 2005 with the belief that bloggers should have one day which will be dedicated to discover new blogs and expose them to the world.
blogDay 3 is August 31.
Today Jeff Pulver launched a game to encourage folks to join the celebration — BlogDay Blog-Tag: A Game to Celebrate BlogDay3. He asked me to play. Jeff offers these simple suggestions for how to make it work seamlessly.
[R]ecommend five blogs, preferably Blogs that are different from [your] own culture, point of view and attitude. The goal of this version of blog-tag is for the readers of our blog posts to find themselves leaping around and discovering new voices and Blogs to explore. This in turn will help celebrate the discovery process of finding new people, their voices and their blogs.
When creating your BlogDay blog entry, please try to follow these instructions:
1. List five Blogs that you find interesting and if you can tell, include the city/country where they are from.
2. Identify five Bloggers to tag to join in this game with you. I recommend emailing the bloggers you tag to give them a heads up of you tagging them.
3. Use the tag: BlogDay2007 in your blog post.
4. (Optionally): Contact the owners of the blogs you shared as your “blogs to take a look at.”
I can do that.
- Light Within by sajshirazi
- confused of calcutta by J.P. Rangaswami
- JOHO the blog by David Weinberger
- The D Spot by Dine Racoma
- firedoglake by the firedoglake team
I wonder who Ann, Sean, Chris, Troy, Phil might also recommend as world blogs we might explore.
Thanks, Jeff, for getting me to stretch in these ways.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
Hi Liz,
Thanks for the very kind words. And thank you for being a daily inspiration for so many people. 🙂
I do hope that something like a BestOf tag becomes popular. This way when we visit new blogs we can see the blog posts that help define the blogger. (At least from the blogger’s perspective.) And for myself, I’ve always been troubled that some of my best blogs are hidden from first time visitors as well as my friends and I thought it would be great to have way to easily share the blogs I feel best represent me from various points in time.
Thanks also for helping to share awareness for BlogDay3. When I first heard about BlogDay from my friend Nir, I thought his vision offered all of us a chance to extend our blogging horizons. Both as a way for us to share blogs that we know about, and a chance for us to reach out to friends and ask them to also help build awareness of BlogDay.
Thanks again for everything that you do everyday. 🙂
Warm regards from Long Island, Jeff
Hey Jeff!
How cool of you to stop by. It’s great to see you! Thanks for all YOU do every day. The people you inspire go on to make more friends and inspire more folks and so on.
On top of all of that, your ideas are BIG fun. 🙂
BestOf: Hey stranger, saw the post and figured I’d drop a note. When it comes to ‘best of’ posts, a category would make the most sense in the long run, it was meme’d not too long ago, and there is a WordPress plugin that might be useful too.
The reality is, that if everyone went through the site, harvested their top X posts, and kept their ‘About’ page up to date, it would make everything rather simple. Then again, a simple category works too as long as there aren’t hideous amounts of posts in it. I’d love to know what the best posts are (and especially ones that define a blog), yet a huge list will drive me away.
T.
P.S. If you and Mr. Pulver feel like taking up the meme challenge, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what you find! All the best.
Hi William!
A category would make sense except that it would excourage too many. Don’t you think?
Yep, hideous numbers of posts would ruin it. A huge list is worse than no list at all. I agree there.
I’m not sure I know the challenge.
Hey Liz,
We do it all time with our conversation tag at TheGoodBlogs.
You define the tag and others copy the tag they want to join. We link all the posts together.
You can have as many tags as you want so it doesn’t become one giant conversation.
Check out http://www.thegoodblogs.com/conversation
BTW: that’s how we track the dots.
http://www.thegoodblogs.com/conversation/thegoodblogs/Connecting+dots
Vern
Hey Vern!
The Good Blogs makes the blogosphere such an organized and friendly place! That conversation feature is such a cool part of being a member. I’ve so enjoyed exploring the conversations that I’ve found there — some I’ve only stumbled into. Great bloggers talking are always worth the time to listen.
Thank you for all that you’ve done to make that happen.
Wow Liz, 2 for 1 day today at Success Blog! Count me in.
Now to peruse my feed and find the gems from far away lands. I’m up to the challenge. Troy tagged me too!
Actually, Troy tagged me for something else. Still, this is a great meme 🙂
Hi Phil!
It’s fun to play along with something that connects us all, isn’t it? You’re more than up to the challenge. I’m guessing you’ll have too many. 🙂