Aussie Bloggers

Blogging is, I think, a two-dimensional operation in more than the obvious ways.

Sure – text, pictures and videos are necessarily two-dimensional. But what about the picture inside your head? You may know what a blogger had for dinner last night, but do you know how he treats his friends? You may know the ins and outs of a certain shall-remain-nameless person’s shoe collection, but do you know her heart?

That’s a big statement to make, you might say. Sure, there aren’t enough words or minutes in a day to share everything, but does everyone really hide a huge chunk of who they are?

I think so. I honestly do. There are too many good reasons to do so. Friends and family who read the blog, and could be hurt by some disclosures. Concerns about identity theft. Not wanting abuse from complete strangers who trawl the blogosphere searching for people’s vulnerabilities. Cyber-stalkers. Haters. Trolls. Just plain pains-in-the-arse.

Does that make blogging a bad thing, or a dishonest one? Nope. I think any sharing of information – be it personal or impersonal – is great. Just never make the mistake of thinking that you know someone inside and out from what they post on a blog. Because your picture’s two-dimensional, and there’s a whole ‘nother side to them that you’ve never seen.

As much as I enjoy blogging leaving it behind for a few days for a winter break with the family is even more appealing, We are not wandering far and the weather may be cool but a cosy house among bushy hills, close to the ocean is certainly appealing. My two boys are now grown and, although still living at home, tend to go their own ways, even within the house; usually to their TVs or PC’s. Our paths often only cross at feeding times.

This weekend we are going to have our “quality time together” winter break. Winter is good time for us to go away together as we are more inclined to stay together in front of roaring open fire, chatting and playing card and board games and go for the occasional bracing walk by the sea..

Living relatively close to the busy city of Melbourne I sometimes dream of residing somewhere less crowded and closer to sea and mountain..Next week I will be living in the area I would choose to live, if it were practical; a part of the Mornington Peninsula just outside of Melbourne that I didn’t discover until years after I started living in here. Travelling by the highway I always bypassed these coastal areas of Mount Eliza, Mornington and Mount Martha.. It reminds me very much of the upper north shore of Sydney where I used to live. Being city girl born and bred my ideal location is not somewhere rural but rolling hills, rugged coastline, and a beach on every cove and at least a good smattering of houses

photo by Long Zheng

www.visitmorningtonpeninsula.org

Apart from the sea the 17 different Markets held throughout the month, Australia’s largest antique centre with art and craft galleries coffee shops and restaurants galore are very appealing. If this leaves you unimpressed there are also over 200 vineyards, 18 golf courses and you can take a swim with seals and dolphins. It is not far to the metropolis to get an occasional hit of large shopping malls or far from open countryside and the quiet surf beaches to completely get away from it all. Of course the skies are not always as blue as in these photos but you can’t have it all and nowadays, unlike when younger, being close to family is more important to me than living in more exotic locations.

It seems I cannot completely get away from the subject of blogging as I want to let know about a new Flickr browsing site I came across last week, CompFight ; which I used while searching for images for this post..It is a definite time saver as you do not have to use Flickr’s advanced search features to produce the results you want and more thumbnails per page are displayed.. Type in a keyword and the results are displayed via quick loading thumbnail images. Hover over these images and the pixel size of the full image is displayed. If the keyword does not provide you with what you want then you can do a text search. A particularly useful feature is being able to search for Creative Commons images only, so that you can be assured that you are not breaching copyright if including images in blogs. The image below shows the site’s search box – with the options available to you below.

Where would your ideal place to live be if you had the choice?

Well maybe not quite the epicentre of blogging but we do have some active bloggers who regularly meet and share ideas. Every month there is a bloggers meet-up (in fact there’s one tonight – 21st May – upstairs at the Brass Monkey, Northbridge from 7pm) and there was a Barcamp Perth 2.0 earlier this month. (more on Barcamp – Live blog)

We’re apparently hosting the World Blog Awards in August… although where this comes from is a mystery… maybe it’s wishful thinking.

What’s not wishful thinking but in fact reality is the Edge of the Web Conference – November 6-7 – in Perth. It was announced at BarCamp and has a lot of people excited about it.

The Australian Web Industry Association is proud to announce that Perth, Western Australia will be getting it’s very own world-class web conference event: Edge of the Web 2008.

More details will be announced as they are confirmed, but mark 6-7 November in your calendar now. We have an exciting lineup of local, national and international speakers on both technical and business topics – including accessibility, usability, information architecture, code, marketing with social networks, and much, much more.

You might be wondering why I’m not more fulsome in my descriptions of BarCamp 2.0. Surely, you are thinking, Cellobella wouldn’t have missed such an exciting event on her doorstep? Surely she would have signed up at once! Surely such a blog savvy individual such as she would have been possibly even presenting!!

Well stop calling me Shirley.

Dear reader, I fully intended to go, I really did. I signed up on the wiki even. Not to present – there were plenty of others already lined up for that honour – but just to go and experience an unconference. Unfortunately I had a terrible cold and spent the day in bed feeling sorry for myself and making my family suffer.

I’m a terrible patient – especially when my plans are thwarted.

I lay there imagining Central TAFE full of excited geeky types… the nerdy ones with thick glasses and green or brown tee-shirts, baggy seated jeans… the oh-so-cool Web 3.0 types with funky hairstyles and skinny rectangular glasses (they all look like Elliot Spencer in my mind) … and the Bloggy types – harder to categorise – I’m thinking a cross between Bloggy Hell and Karen Cheng – or maybe Mad Goat Lady crossed with Rotto Bloggo?

They are all sharing ideas and coming up with amazing web business plans and getting very enthusiastic about the Edge of the Web conference in November.

And there are sandwiches…

Did you go? Am I close?

The following technique for problem solving or debating is an oldie but a goodie in my opinion.

It’s De Bono’s six thinking hats. I came across it years ago in a work environment and every now and again I still use it to clarify my thoughts or form an action plan.

It can also help to dispel emotion and see things more rationally. Something happened to me just recently and I used the six thinking hats to problem solve. It reminded me of its effectiveness and I thought that there are plenty of blogging situations where it might come in handy.

I should say that this is an overview and I’ve probably adapted the meanings and the technique over the years to suit myself so if you’re interested in learning more there are plenty of resources online.

The basis of it is to look at something in six very distinct ways. Coloured hats are used as a symbol for each way of thinking as follows:

Red hat = emotion. Use it as an outlet for your feelings, passion, irrational thoughts.

White hat = information. Use it to gather the facts.

Black hat = logical negativity. Use it to define logical, rational reasons why something won’t work or you shouldn’t do something.

Yellow hat = logical positivity. Use it to define logical reasons why something is a good idea.

Green hat = new ideas. Use it to generate new ways of thinking.

Blue hat = overview and processing. Use it to review what you’ve learnt and formulate a way forward.

A couple of weeks ago a client of mine wasn’t getting the results they wanted and I’d been working at trying to improve things. I received an email highlighting some unfavourable figures and my first thoughts were all emotion based. I was upset that the client was unhappy, resentful that I’d been doing the best I could and anxious about what was going to happen. The six thinking hats helped me to get it into perspective and come up with a way forward. I worked through each hat one at a time and by the end of the process I felt much better, in fact pretty good about the whole thing.

There are always problems to be solved and decisions to be made when you have a blog and plenty of times when emotions take over so it can be useful to have a structured way of seeing things from different perspectives at times. Most people tend to favour one of the ways of thinking as well so it can be useful to deliberately change that mode to get a different or more complete picture.

It is great to see the amount of brand new bloggers joining in the Aussie Bloggers Forum community, as well as some who have not yet started but want to learn more before they take the plunge. I have recently read articles which foresee the demise of blogging, its popularity being overtaken by the newer social media applications and microblogging but I do wonder if this will be the case.

As I see more and more people starting to use the internet for public communication; stepping outside of their existing circle of friends, family and contacts to discover new people, interests and opportunities, I can also see more of them taking up blogging. These newer applications are very likely stepping stones on the way to them owing their very own communication portal, a blog. The social media sites will continue performing the same function for bloggers as they do today. They provide additional methods of communication with your current readers, ways of cementing contacts and developing friendships and opportunities to raise your profile and get your blog better known.

Unless, in the unlikely event, that one social media application attracts the majority of internet users and adds enough features to allow us to create our own individual and distinct homes on the web then the blog will survive. As more interactive features become available for social networking sites, more functions and flexibility will also be added to blogging software.

I can think of many ways in which running your own blog, be it personal or business, has the advantage over other types of application to create your own home on the web.

• If you host on your own domain or use an online blogging platform that allows customization and addins (e.g. Blogger blogspot) you have control over your design to make your blogging web portal look distinctly yours.
• With a platform such as WordPress and the newer Majestic, you can create virtually any kind of site. The actual blog can be peripheral to the rest of the site and different pages can perform different functions. Blog software can be used for such diverse areas as podcasting, photo galleries, community sites or online sales.
• You are free to add the features you want, not those dictated by external media applications.
• Widgets and plugins already allow us to integrate much of our other internet activity into our blogs and these are becoming more advanced and flexible. A blog can even be used as your own personal aggregator, bringing in your feeds and your messages from other sites.
• Direct communication methods can be integrated into a blog to complement the comment functions by adding contact forms, chat applications, messaging, audio and video functions.
• If you are aiming at making money from your site, you can incorporate your own choice of advertising options.
• Files can be made available for download in such forms as photos, documents or e-books.
• A blog can be made public and viewable by all, made available for a select few to read or even completely private and used as a way of organizing the information from your online life.

This is only a short list of what I see as some of the main advantages of owning your own blog over using other applications. If you can think of more please let us know.