It's Friday and we're letting our hair down. Today we're going to have some fun talking about how blogging is changing and what are the five things you should at least try in 2008. I should, too.
I limited my advice at The Blog Herald to things that are either emerging or have been sort of forgotten in the excitement of the new tool that was blogging even one year ago. Now it's time to take another look at them.
For example newsletters, digital photography sections on a site, even a new content area on a sub-domain are ways of diversifying for your readers. This year I may try more podcasts. I did not add this to my list at The Blog Herald because it is already a well known and popular way to share information online. However, perhaps you can add it to your list of things to try to diversify how you present content and information on your blog.
If you occasionally read a more spontaneous voice out of me it's all Twitter's fault. Although the jury is still out on that tool overall, I still think it worth checking out. I won't say more about it here, but look for a post coming up at one of the blogs I contribute to. One that no doubt will be a good conversation, with your help.
The screen shot you see here is from Pageflakes and was developed by Steve Woodruff who aggregated the feeds of several bogs on marketing, social media, advertising, design, writing, customer experience, social media, public relations and marketing tips. He created a niche portal for people interested in learning more about these topics. That is another good way to get the word out on your blogs and site.
Believe it or not, I have had no time to play around with my iPhone yet. When I purchased it, they threw in three personal training sessions at the local Apple store. I wanted to have the chance to use the phone a little before booking the first one. Now that I'm ready, I will explore mobile blogging while I'm at it. Just before the holidays I noticed a few Twitter friends using Utterz to do just that -- Todd Jordan (Tojosan) and Steve Garfield (stevegarfield) have both posted while on the road.
Steve is also a video blogger, he posts on Seesmic, which is a recent community driven video social software start up by entrepreneur Loic Le Meur. Bloggers have been using it to chat via video. Laura Fitton, Matt Dickman and Jim Long also make heavy use of video. [hat tip to Joe Cascio on video editing]
Are many of these tools time hogs? You bet, especially as you're ramping up and learning about how to use them. I will be trying a couple of them this year. How about you? Now, as I said in my post at The Blog Herald, put that Twitter down and step away from it.