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Power Blogging: More Structure For Your Bookmarks?

[beginner + intermediate] When you search for material to write about, do you bookmark stories of interest? If so, do you use folders, or even nested folders? Do you apply any structure to your folder scheme?

For power blogging like Om Malik and others, knowing more than you write is wise advice. The best summaries come from reading as much as you can on a topic and condensing it into a single post. Not easy if you’ve never done it before, but you can turn it into habit. Here are a few suggestions:

  1. Get the right tools:
    1. Use Firefox. They’ve got a great bookmarking system, and you can “bookmark all [open] tabs” in one fell swoop.
    2. Get the All-in-One Sidebar plugin for Firefox and keep it open to the bookmarks. It’ll appear at left of your browser window.
    3. When you browse with your fave RSS reader (e.g., Bloglines, Newsgator Online Edition, or Google Reader), you can drag and drop links of headlines into your folders.
  2. Browse through your feed subscriptions and save links into a single bookmark folder. The overall objective is to collect more than one link for each topic so that your summaries have depth.
  3. When you’ve collected links, you can start grouping them in a single pass:
    1. In your current “check this” (or whatever) folder, create some nested folders: trash, later.
    2. Now, as you click on each bookmark and glance at the web page, without reading the article past the headline and first paragraph, if you were to write the same thing, what would your post title be? Make a new sub-folder with that name (sibling folder to trash and later).
    3. Continue through the list until you’re finished, but if you come across a related piece to something you handled earlier, drop it into the existing folder. If there’s a bookmark that you can’t use, drop it into the trash folder. Or if you can’t think of an angle, put it into the later folder.

You now have the basis for writing a whole bunch of original summary articles. When you’re ready to write:

  1. For each story folder, browse or read each bookmarked page.
  2. Write a summary of each page, if necessary, or make a note in your mind of how that story differs.
  3. Write up a summary of the topic in your own words and link to your references in the body of your post.

This only one method I use to write summary posts, but I find it not only helps me structure my writing time but helps spark inspiration.

Are You A Digg Traffic Junky?

Everywhere I register online I am always me. My username is always a variation on “Chris”, “chrisg” or “Chris Garrett”. Right back to my BBS and Usenet days up to now. The only time I can think of where that has not been true has been Digg.

I have nothing against nicknames, people use them for a variety of reasons, not least because their real name is already taken. That said many people have pseudonyms on Digg because they want to stealth-promote their websites for the traffic boost. The idea is you can seem an impartial third party who just really finds the viagra-pr0n-ipod blog particularly fascinating. This is bad for any number of reasons but I realised it could be killing Digg by removing trust from the community. If you take trust out of any activity surely you are in danger of destroying the social fabric of that activity?

I think Bloggers especially are in danger of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. So many of us are hooked on the sweet sweet Digg traffic high that we are using Digg for what we can get out of it and the whole system is being subverted. We need to stop this Diggaddiction before we all become junkies.

An addiction in itself is not necessarily that damaging. It’s the side-effects of that addiction that trouble me, the ever-increasing desperate attempts to recreate the initial Digg-effect hit. The manic dependency on the high and the temptation to create an army of sock-puppet Digg accounts. The eventual Digg meltdown where half the “people” you meet on the site are fake.

From now on I am going to treat Digg no different to any other online community. I have registered as chrisgarrett (feel free to friend me). I will Digg up your stories if I find them interesting.

This is not me being all fluffy-bunny-blogger-transparent for the sake of it! Of course I am saying all this for completely selfish reasons. I enjoy Digg immensely and find it incredibly useful as a resource. Several times a day I check in with Digg to see what interesting new sites have been posted up and to take part in the discussions. The entertainment and research value of Digg would be incredibly damaged if the promotional aspect gets too much influence.

I just don’t want to see Digg full of spam.

Where’s the WTF’ing RSS?

I’ll be the first to admit that maybe I just don’t get Technorati’s WTF, Im still trying to work out what the purpose is and whether it’s really useful, but one thing I did notice, is that there is no rss feed!

If im understanding this right, it’s popular topics at Technorati anotated by the community to “explain the buzz” — and if that’s right, then why can’t I get this in Google Reader?

Do tell…

Five Minute Podcast: All Google, All the Time

Five minute podcast (no production, one take, one subject, five minutes) on using Google exclusively for day to day blogging needs and why this freaks me out a bit.

PS: Im working on the format. There should be a nice little flash player, and I cant work out why it wont show. If I dont get boed off stage I’ll have that fixed for next time 🙂

Do let me know what you think.

Snap Respond to my Anti Preview Anywhere Post, but Popups Still Annoying

Snap’s Jason Fields has responded to my anti SPA post which got Dugg and consequently garnered unexpected, but appreciated support in the broader community.

In a nutshell, our product is intended to enable users to “look before leaping”, saving many people a wasted click. I will however be the first to admit that this is a product that some people don’t like, and this is why we have made sure to include a simple method to opt-out for those who don’t like it (click the ‘options’ menu in the upper right of the preview bubble).

While there are certainly others who agree with some of the comments here, there are literally thousands of people signing up for SPA every day AND we have served more than 100+ million previews since the launch of the product – and all of this for free.

We are improving SPA almost every week with features aimed at giving site owners and end-users greater control in how to implement (and indeed “if” to implement) and interact with SPA. In the weeks to come, we will be:

(1) Making improvements that will reduce the confusion about whether a link is SPA enabled, or not.
(2) Make it much easier for a site owner to point SPA to a particular type of link.
(3) Enabling the site owner to totally customize a link, image, css, etc.

We here at Snap are acutely aware of the issues described in these comments and we have several enhancements scheduled to release over the coming couple of weeks that, in different ways, will address them. Rest assured that your viewpoints have been informing, and will continue to inform, the ongoing development of this product.

This is all well and good Jason, but the inescapable truth is that popups are annoying., and no amount of hopeful evangelistic cosmetcs will change that.