I was trolling the Internet tonight (totally out of character for me....I swear *insert sarcasm mark here*) and I came across my mayors blog.
Yes.
My mayor has a blog.
...oh and a podcast.

I almost wept out of sheer joy. Then the initial joy wore of when I realized his blog...well...it sucks.
To his credit, besides the "Paid for by the Slay for Mayor Committee" disclaimer at the bottom of the page there is no obvious and glaring attempts at making re-election bids.

So I'd like to take the opportunity to offer a few suggestions to my mayor on blogging.

1. Stop using a home brewed blogging system where I have to hunt for a search feature

I know someone in your office probably made you your blogging platform (and you probably paid him fairly well for it) why don't you switch now to a more efficient system like Wordpress. Your system doesn't really mesh with the blogosphere that expects things in a certain way. Only 22 bloggers are linking to you after 2 years (according to technorati). Seriously, I'll do it for you.

2. Work on developing your voice.

I'm worried Francis...is that really you or some unpaid intern writing your blog entries? Where is the heart? Where is the soul? Maybe a press release would work better for you...

3. Stop glazing over topics, Mr. Mayor.

When you are writing an entry about hiring more police officers and increasing their pay, don't casually throw in at the bottom a blurb about cutting 4 million dollars worth of jobs from the city offices.

4. Allow comments

All I am asking is that you allow us to leave comments-- engage us! There are plenty of saint louis bloggers out there who would love the chance to interact with you..and heck, maybe even help spread your ideas. Don't want to deal with wacko's and spam? Moderated comments...that is what your unpaid intern is for.

Does anyone else in the performancing community have any tips on blogging for politicians?

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Goggles loss in their appeal with Belgian newspapers-- while I don't understand the newspaper's decision it does provide an information niche that needs to be filled. And who better to fill it than bloggers?
If you are a Belgian blogger this is an incredible oppertunity for you. With all the belgian papers removed from their index you have the potential to be the source of information for belgian gogglers. Imagine, at least a million people in Belgium will be looking for news online (while at work or otherwise) and you have the potential to be the major source for them.

Are there any belgian bloggers in the performancing community? I'd love to see traffic information over the next few months and without the competition that new based blogger in America and the rest of Europe face.

Lucky you.

From time to time I get an offer to go on vacation.
"Let's take the weekend and go floating"*
"Let's take the week off and go to "The Lake"** and just hang out in my boat"

And, actually, both are usually a great time and a way to really relax. Unfortunately, the prospect of catching up is a horrifying task that keeps me relatively sequestered to the city and wifi.
There are a few images burned into my skull that keep me relatively tied to the city and high-speed Internet access:
The Emails
The Blog roll to keep up on
and worst of all...
missing a great story because I was shitfaced on a river raft in the middle of nowhere Missouri.

So my question to everyone here is how do you go out and enjoy your lives and break away from the computer? are conferences the official break time of most bloggers?

my name is Paul, and I am an Internet Addict.

* As I have no idea how popular floating is outside of the Midwest-- essentially it involves taking a large quantity of alcohol, your friends, and a few rubber rafts down a river-- normally you'll end up trashed by 10:30am....and burnt to a crisp by 2pm (who remembers to put on sunscreen when they can't find their left shoe?)

**"The Lake" is Missourian speech always refers to The Lake of the Ozarks, even if you have a small lake just down the street.

In my last article I wrote about the big players (and some of the smaller players) in the Social Bookmarking world. There are a number of other services that exist and I thought it would be best if I threw these into the ring as well. I'm just going to focus on a few others for the sake of this article (though, I am sure with every keystroke I commit over here 10 more are being born..."If they can make digg for only 900 dollars. imagine what we could do with 10 grand!")
And without further ado here is the breakdown on the small-time players in the social bookmarking game.

feedmelinks - the layout isn't all that great. Usability is a real issue. I don't like having to ask myself "Is this a text box?" Also, I am not 100% sure who the target audience for this site is but judging by the homepage picture I'd say Insane Clown Posse fans.
Markaboo - Markaboo does not use a voting scale, so I can only assume that your posts are by age (the newer ones at the top) And actually I'd doesn't seem to be all spam. Really, only 10-15% spam (from actual site owners trying to draw traffic but I doubt "This is going to be the best designer directory EVER!" is going to pull many people-- call me crazy.
LookLater - While it is a bookmarking site it is not a social bookmarking site. You create your own bookmarks (it doesn't seem to be tagged at all) and you can come back to them later. I'm not 100% sure why anyone would need a site like this.
Shadows - It may be irrational but I actually like Shadows. It isn't nearly as mature as Newsvine but it is cleaner looking than a lot of the other service. The major problem is the usability is terrible. I can't imagine average users picking it up like I can with reddit.com or newsvine.com it just doesn't have the same ease of entry. The biggest tags on the site are "Blog" "Design" "Software" "Tools" and "Web" so you have a pretty clear concept of what kind of people are using the site.

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7 Social Bookmarking Tips

For Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us

1. Write something about the service. LifeDev.net got a great second wave of traffic by producing the stats from his first wave of Reddit traffic
2. write innovative "Top 10" Lists
3. Present some sort of strange or unusual study on sex
4. Give a summary of a new piece of technology that makes geeks say "cool!"
5. write something about Israel/Palestine/Lebanon
6. write something controversial. The political spectrum of the readership on these sites was much more diverse than I originally guessed
7. Don't assume Digg readers are the same as Reddit readers-- in general they read very different things. For home work look at the homepage of both sites. There is crossover, of course, but just because Digg liked your story don't expect del.icio.us or reddit to care
8. This is the most important: Be an active part of the community. Make friends. Don't just promote your own work.

On my last post Mr. Markus Merz left a comment stating:

A big deal would be to get listed as a news site for Google News. If you produce original content that goal is not as difficult as it sounds first.

And this got the old wheels a-turnin' and I thought to myself "What is original content" and after minutes of deliberation I've broken it down into three broad stroke archetypes: Unique Ideas Being Presented for the First Time and Unique thoughts about Another's original ideas and Me Too! Ideas.

Unique Original Ideas

• A New Process for your field
• An explination of findings from a study you conducted
• Revelations you've had in your life
• Experiences unique to your situation
• Breaking News

Unique Thoughts on Another's Ideas:

• Using a tool in a new and creative way
• Editorializing an event in the news or responding to news
• An analysis of someone else's new process/product
• Book Review
• Interview a Person

Me Too! Ideas

• These are not really ideas at all
• The easiest entry to perform
• State the same piece of news everyone else in your field is presenting
• Can be avoided with a bit of thought

Without Unique Original Ideas why should anyone read your blog? I'm sure it has been said in 100 other places but before you hit the publish button ask yourself a few questions: Will my readers get value from this? Am I offering a unique perspective others cannot provide? Is this the best entry I can post today and if so is that good enough?

Are there any types of blog posts that I've missed out on here? Obviously we all try to offer Unique Original Content but how often do you think you actually do it?

I read a recent post on Performancing.com that a number of bloggers weren’t using the social bookmarking sites available and since I have been active on a few and a lurker on the rest I thought I would give a breakdown of the sites I have linked to from this blog.

First of all, in Wordpress I use WP-Notables to make the system – its easy and takes little to no thought. Just activate the plug-in and add the 1 line of PHP into your comments.php for your theme (or anywhere else you want to drop the links).

1) del.icio.us – strangely enough this is the site I am the least familiar with. It is pretty straight forward but until recently was mainly focused on technology and technological issues– apparently they have expanded beyond that now. The system is fairly strict– don’t try setting up 10 account on the same IP and voting yourself to the top– they will be on it rather quickly. Also, the frontpage is controlled. (If by editors or by friend groups has never really been determined but the top posted contribute the majority of the posts on the front page.)

2) Digg.com — Digg also amazingly started as a tech geek site as it still primarily focused at that group. Digg’s user base seems to be about the same people that you will find on myspace– a young somewhat savvy audience– again something like 60% of the posts on the front page are from the top 10 users– so the system is rather difficult to break into.

3) Spurl.net – While it isn’t my intention to “rip on” any one site it seems to me that Spurl is completely over run with spam– the things that make it to the top “hot sites” seem to be garbage. I may be wrong about this but there doesn’t seem to be any sort of commenting system which makes other sites so appealing. .Commenting is a major part of social networking.

4) Wists.com is a social shopping bookmark site– it allows you to simply and easily create adds– so easy in fact that the entire page is flooded with ebay ads. I don’t know if real people even use this site.

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