Writing Online

A digital camera (or even a cell phone), a crash-course in editing, and a can-do attitude is all you need to expand into the video world.
Ready, Aim, Shoot: How to Join the Digital Video Revolution
RELATED: How to Pitch: Washington Post Magazine

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Everything I Really Need to Know about the Web… at the Greensboro News-Record. “Seventeen years ago, Robert Fulghum wrote a thin self-help book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, that rode the top of the bestseller lists for weeks. I am working on a speech in which I use his book as the outline. The working title: ‘Everything I really need to know about the Web, I learned in that book.’”
101 Blog Tips I learned in 2006 at Daily Blog Tips.
And a tip at The Copywriter Underground: “Deb Ng’s Freelance Writing Jobs might be the most-visited writer’s blog. It’s a well-deserved distinction given the amount of time she puts into finding and listing freelance gigs. This time, she put together a list of blogs worth visiting,”
How to Build a Digg Culture on Your Blog (ProBlogger): “Many don’t believe that getting on Digg is worth much because the traffic is so fleeting however I think there is much more value for smart publishers than just the initial burst of traffic.”
And finally, The Best of Copyblogger (According to Time Magazine’s Person of the Year).

Last week Gawker posted an acerbic but helpful guide to some cliches to avoid unless you don’t mind your blog blending in with all the others out there run by 15 year old girls/snarky overgrown hipsters.
Still not sure though if your blog post passes the cliche test? Daniel Tsadok prepared a helpful Cliche Detector that you can run your writing through before you post. And guess what: this posts passes with flying colors. (although that, technically, is an actual cliche.)

Bloggers: want to see how your sites stack up compared to the likes of Brian Williams and that smokin’ Anderson Cooper? The Baltimore Sun invited some experts to evaluate the blogs of various TV anchors (password required.)

Word up, yo. Language-spotting is the new fashion-spotting. And this guide to online language on Gawker is. The. BEST. EVAR. OMG! You will wordgasm at its condescending (yet, right on) goodness.

Over at Copyblogger: The Five Essential Elements of an Influential Blog.
eMoms at home: for those of you considering starting a blog but not sure of your focus, tips on choosing a topic.

Promoting Your Blog–advice from Blogger itself!
At Bad Language: how to blog like a pro (with some new tips I haven’t really seen covered in other venus.)
I didn’t even know that this was something bloggers needed to concern themselves with, other than possibly content, but at ProBlogger, tips on optimizing your blog for Christmas (no word on the other holidays).
From Aviva: 21 Surefire Tips for a Successful Blog Launch:

Don’t get seen naked: Never launch a blog with fewer than 5 posts. In the blogosphere you typically get just one shot at impressing a visitor or fellow blogger. Too many new bloggers throw up two posts and then start working on promotion. In the world of blogging, you are selling yourself and your writing. If you can’t give people a fully dressed picture of what your blog is all about and what type of writing will be on it, then why should they throw a link your way, or subscribe to your RSS feed?

10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers at Copyblogger.
More computery than bloggy but I’m posting this in a frustrated response to my own computer: Help for a Slow PC at Yahoo.
Want to get on board with a new web creating system? Weebly is in Beta and accepting signups, if you like trying out new tools. Also, QuickBlog lets you…well, you can probably guess.
If you’re a little more advanced and have a good grip on RSS and how it works, check out this interview with Avinash Kaushik, Director Web Research and Analytics, Intuit, on measuring RSS and blogs.
And a whole lot more in the blog tag area at Ask Metafilter.

So I’m not important enough to merit my own Wikipedia entry, but I’ve interviewed tons of people who have. I know this because sometimes when I’m bored from vanity Googling, I’ll vanity Wikipedia search, so my last name will come up with some of the authors I’ve interviewed. I figure that I should make my interviews more easily accessible, so over the last few weeks I’ve been going through the ‘pedia and putting in links to interviews that I’ve done with people who have their own entries. And while it’s not driving tons of traffic over, I did notice that I have gotten some from people checking out Augusten Burrough’s entry.
So see if you can add yourself to the references of other Wiki entries to boost your own traffic–but use good sense about it, because you don’t to suffer from the horrible shame of having your entry deleted for being too frivolous.

For you other bloggers, this was passed on to me by Unbeige‘s Alissa:

Hopefully you’ve heard of The Polling Place Photo Project, an open-source journalism experiment with huge support from the design community. The PPPP is going to collect photos taken by you, voting America, of your polling places. By capturing the many variables in the democratic process, it will hopefully illustrate how much voting reform we need before the next major election.
This effort is sponsored by AIGA, the largest organization of designers in the country, who have partnered with NewAssignment.net, a citizen journalism site founded by Jay Rosen (with support from Craig Newmark of craigslist). AIGA started an initiative named Design For Democracy after that one, um, dubious election to attempt to redesign the ballots, voting machines and standardize the voting process in general. They are still battling major bureaucracy, as one might expect, but if enough people provide adequate documentation this year, it might aid their cause.
If you’re a blogger or have any way of amplifying this message, please spread the word!
More information and upload your photos here.
A post by Jay Rosen on HuffPo about it.

A post on Design Observer.
And <a href="http://www.designfordemocracy.org

“>more info about Design for Democracy.

How to Generate High Quantities of Content for Your Blog (ProBlogger)
7 More Sure-Fire Headline Templates That Work at CopyBlogger (I think that that might be an example of one)
The 8 Free Things Every Site Should Do at Squidoo.
6 Tips to Increase Traffic to Your Blog from Cameron Olthuis.