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Reading Books Still Important?

Daniel Scocco over at Daily Blog Tips has an interesting question worth pondering, one I’ve been thinking about myself lately and that is, is reading books still necessary? Daniel makes the case that even though there are books concentrated on a specific subject, we now have access to wikis, forums, blogs, and social networks which all provide a huge amount of information without having to turn a page.

I think reading books IS still important. Not only from the literacy standpoint, but also as a form of necessary brain food. Reading a physical object such as a book allows your mind to concentrate on one thing while generally, reading stuff on the web is hard due to the large amount of distractions competing for your eyeballs. The problem I have with reading books is that for starters, I never seem to have any time to dedicate to them. Also, I can’t help but think that I would be reading more up to date information about the particular subject if I were reading about it online. I have an entire bookcase that is filled with interesting books where I have yet to read the first page.

How about you though? Is reading books still necessary?

Personal Branding: How far will you go?

There’s a thought piece on Seth’s blog – its a rather short exercise on choosing your profile photo for a social network such as Facebook. Whether you agree or disagree with what seems to be a trivial pursuit of credibility, he speaks truth in the overall scheme of marketing.

What I’m trying to say is that before we dive into the deep (“duc in altum!”), have we determined how far we’re willing to go? There are two kinds of bloggers — those who blog for the sake of keeping a journal, and those who are in it to market themselves in some form as a means to building a business. The latter brings in a greater sense of responsibility in keeping a certain demeanor online. Should this brand that we’re developing for ourselves emanate in Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube? How far are we willing to share of our personal lives? Will we put photos of family on Facebook, or will we keep our profile as a professional brand. How personal should our Tweets be? Do we add everyone on Facebook to increase our “net worth” or do we limit it to actual people that we know?

Of course, you have the outliers — those that can manage to merge their online work and personal life together so well, their personal life becomes part of the brand.

Something to think about: it’s how much we are willing to sacrifice that may determine how far we’re willing to go with branding ourselves online.

Free StudioPress Themes And Support

Brian Gardner who is most well known for his WordPress Themes is offering up a special deal for those looking to fight breast cancer while also receiving themes and support for free. Here is the deal:

I am offering a free StudioPress theme + support package for anyone who donates $50, and a free Pro Plus All-Theme package (all themes + support) for anyone who donates $150.

On August 7th 2009, Brian will be walking 60 miles for the Chicago Breast Cancer 3 day walkathon. Before he can participate however, he will need $2,300.00 for the event. So if you are looking at getting one of those sweet themes Brian has developed while at the same time, supporting a noble cause, now would be a good time to act.

How To Say No To A Friend

Skelliewag has a great post on one way to politely tell your friends no

There is a way to turn the experience into a positive for both people. Next time you have to say ‘No’, recommend someone else to help.

Make this someone you know online (or offline) or someone you would like to get to know. Not only are you giving the person a helpful recommendation, you’re potentially sending a new client (or reader, or viewer) someone’s way.

Not only does this make perfect business sense, but it’s a great opportunity to network with people as well.

Working From Home – Still A Possibility

Elance, a website specializing in online work released their April edition of the Elance Online Work Index which is a ranking of the top skills businesses are seeking on the web. The results are based on data from more than 100,000 jobs posted on Elance. The top skills in demand include: PHP, MySQL, HTML Graphic Design, Writing, AJAX, Adobe Illustrator, WordPress, Photoshop, Flash and Blogs.

Some other notable trends include:

  • Open Source on the Rise: The overall trend of businesses migrating to open source technology solutions is stronger than ever with PHP (#1) programming now topping the Index followed closely by MySQL (#2). Demand grows for a variety of other open source skills including Joomla (#18), Drupal (#48 – up 10 spots), osCommerce (#49 – up 20 spots), Ruby on Rails (#73 – up 27 spots), and Linux (#74 – up 13 spots).
  • User Experience Paramount: With more pressure than ever for companies to compete based on a world-class user experience, hiring trends show accelerating interest in technologies that deliver and enable great customer experiences, such as HTML (#3 – up 3 spots), Flash (#10 – up 2 spots), AJAX (#12 – up 14 spots), JAVA (#16 – up 13 spots), and – the biggest mover on the list – Actionscript (#56 – up 43 spots).
  • Social Media Rising: Social media continues to gain mainstream traction with companies that want to connect with customers, drive traffic, and become part of the conversation with customers, partners and prospects. Demand for professionals skilled in developing for Facebook, Twitter and blogging applications is growing. WordPress (#15) and Blogs (#19) crack the top 20, while Social Networking (#38) moves up 6 spots, Facebook (#61) is up 10 spots and Twitter (#93) makes its debut on the Index.

The bottom line is, people who are skilled in certain areas of tech who are having a hard time finding full-time jobs due to various factors such as lack of previous experience, travel expenses, etc., seem to be having better luck performing specialized part-time jobs for companies through sites such as Elance.

How Do You Use Social Media to Help a Good Cause?

On Mashable today is a list of five social media campaigns that focused on helping out the needy. Gradon Tripp and Matthew Knell give the skinny on several (mostly Twitter) events that mobilized communities and asked people to do their part in contributing to good causes.

Campaigns like these would mostly leverage on the popularity and authority of social media movers and catalysts. I’d call it one’s social media pull. After all, if you have thousands of Twitter followers, it’s easy enough to get hundreds of those to heed the call to give or contribute something. But would charity campaigns work for social media users who may not be so popular?

I would think that no matter how small your effort may be, it would still count. Be it small or big, the fact that social media is being seen as bringing about change in how fundraisers are conducted is a good enough indicator of the potentials. I remember one time when people pitched in to help a blogging colleague pay legal bills (for a blogging-related lawsuit). We started small, but those little trickles resulted in something significant enough, and was well appreciated. And that was before the time of microblogging. Imagine how even more viral a call for help like that would be in this day and age.

Have you done your part in helping others through social media? If you have plans to, or if you have a running campaign, tell us about it, and we’ll help spread the word.

Does “blogging” equal “sloppily written”?

It always irks me a little when someone throws out a generalisation about blogging, or bloggers, or turns their nose up at the term “blogging” because they feel it somehow demeans their writing.

While I take John Gruber’s point that “the entire… ‘pro blogging’ industry… is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient,” I still wonder at the snobbery some seem to have towards the medium even when they’re publishing using it.

On the Blog Herald today I reported on authors using blogging to promote books and engage with readers. Award-winning author Patrick Ness has decided that he prefers to call his blog a diary because “blogging… to my mind always implies ‘sloppily written'”.

Now, Patrick can call his blog whatever he likes, but I take issue with the notion that any collection of writings assembled together as a blog must by nature be poorly written.

Good and bad writing exists in every medium, be that printed books and magazines, online web sites, forums or blogs.

Perhaps it’s the ability to instantly publish on most blogs, plus the sheer number of them in comparison to other formats, that leads to the overarching perception of low quality. Yet it’s the immediacy and sometimes untidy nature of blogging that should be its greatest charm. Of course there are some highly professional blogs, but there are also many unpolished but passionate sites. They might not win a Pulitzer prize but they’re essentially what blogging’s all about.

Blog Owners Must Be Vigilant

Reading an article on the Business-Standard today out of India reminded me that as a blog owner, I must remain vigilant against malicious threats to my community. The article discusses how blog commenting systems are becoming a great place for spammers and malicious users to publish links via the URL field which takes end users to sites where they download supposed codecs which turn out to be trojans.

Blog comments, instant message spam and malicious text ads are leading drivers to send users to these fake codec websites. Shantanu Ghosh, vice-president, India Product Operations, Symantec noted that attackers often use blog comment fields to post such links. Quite often, these comments have some catchy phrases to entice visitors to click on the link. By one estimate, about one in five blogs are spam blogs.

As the owner of your blog, it is up to you to make sure that no malicious links get past your eyes and end up on the blog where your community could be at risk. Be careful though clicking on the URL links that commenter’s have in order to check out their legitimacy as you are putting yourself at risk. Here are some tips. Don’t open those URL’s in Internet Explorer because most bad scripts have been written with IE in mind. Secondly, use a FireFox extension called NoScript which disables any sort of scripting from taking place on the website. Overall, keep a keen lookout for anything suspicious and if you don’t feel safe clicking on a link, simply de-link the comment author before it’s published.