September 2008

Last week I brought myself a new toy, the Bamboo Fun. And boy I’m really having fun doodling with it, what you see above is my first rather poor attempt at drawing Angie.

Click the image for a larger view if you want. Drawing while looking at the screen is really strange, but the Bamboo itself is awesome and cheap too.

I brought the Bamboo because I wanted to get back into drawing a little bit, I really enjoyed art at school amongst other things like drama. These subjects were the only ones that brought me any happiness.

Speaking of drama, excuse me for blowing my own trumpet here but I was a bad-ass actor in school. Not only did I lead in various plays, but I directed and scripted them too. Did I mention I also played the part of Jesus?

Which leads me onto my second new toy. Celtx is a open source i.e ‘free’ tool for writing screenplays. Celtx is Windows and Mac compatible which is great for me.

I have a bunch of short stories ideas and scripts, written in everything from my old Nokia phone, to notepad and the now defunct Sophocles. I’m hoping to write a couple of short scripts and upload them to Celtx’s Project Central for the critics to marvel over.

More on that later.

I don’t know about you, but my daily news feed is pretty much full of Chrome right now. I feel almost sad writing this post because it’s as though I’ve become part of the collective by writing a post simply with the word Chrome in it.

As sad as that may be, it led to an interesting conclusion. And that is, the smaller blogs that I’ve subscribed too didn’t mention the word Chrome at all. In fact they did exactly the opposite! And you know what? It was a breath of fresh air and made me think about values.

Adding Value

How does one add value to their blog? Well the first thing that sprung to mind was not to regurgitate the same tosh the top blogs do. This is something I’ve tried to do since the beginning, only downside is my posting schedule is not as frequent as I would like.

Secondly, I realised in order to achieve this value I needed to do a lot more research, and that means adding a lot more blogs into my RSS Rolodex. So lets start by sharing with you some of the more interesting topics I found around the web this week.

• Book Trailers

We all know about movie trailers, but how about trailers for books? That’s exactly what COS Productions have done over at You Tube. I think the idea is the rather cool, some of the trailers are kinda tacky but it’s an interesting concept.

• The LFL

More commonly known as the Lingerie Football League. I think this is out right hilarious, is there anything America wouldn’t do?

• Bill Gates & Jerry Seinfeld in New Microsoft Ad Campaign

To commission a $300 Million Dollar advertising campaign and not even mention your company’s name ‘once’ seems rather odd. Perhaps Bill assumed everyone knows who he is, other than that the Ad was pretty cool.

Update

Actually Seinfeld mentions Microsoft once, now that’s value for money.

Sharing your content by making it easier for your visitors to bookmark and distribute your content with like minded people around the web. Is a great way to increase rankings, generate buzz! and promote your website or blog.

If you are using a blogging platform like Wordpress, there are a bunch of plug-ins you can download and activate free of charge. Once installed you’ll see neat little share-it buttons like the ones you see below this post.

Popular Share Software

The most popular share-it software has to be ShareThis and AddThis. Both are available for Wordpress as plug-ins or the less than manageable copy and paste variants. But which software do you choose? And which services do you want your content shared on?

If tracking how many visitors shared your content is important to you, then I recommend you try either of the above. As both ShareThis and AddThis offer free analytics as part of their service. If analytics are not that important to you then I recommend Sociable.

Be Sociable

The reason I preferred Sociable over the other two was simple. Sociable is non-intrusive, customizable and available as a standard Wordpress plug-in. I wanted to keep the design at J.T clean and I dislike Ajaxy buttons that expand and take over precious real estate.

aideRSS Rocks my Socks

Secondly I use a great RSS analytics package called aideRSS. If you’re not using aideRSS then I highly recommend you give it a try. Basically aideRSS tracks the popularity of your RSS feed by using what they call PostRank™.

PostRank™ ranks each article on relevance and reaction and you can judge which posts or content you deliver to your visitors where the most popular or relevant across the web.

Using aideRSS you can also view who digg’d, twitter’d, and bookmarked your content. Hopefully they’ll add other social services in the future but for now those options are available to you.

Which Services to Choose

This is a tricky one and there really isn’t any right or wrong. The choice is after all up you, I touched upon the importance of not overwhelming your visitors with too many options here. But if you’re really stuck I found a great article that discusses the most popular ShareThis data.

Using that research I whittled down my services to 11 choices. Strangely enough they don’t provide a MySpace button yet, but I found a temporary remedy here. Also including Twitter and Pownce was a no brainer for me, but you might decide otherwise.

Ultimately the choice is yours but I hope this information was somewhat useful in your quest to share your content like a pro.