Today's IPO - How I Blog

IPO? Input, process, output.

Yes, most technologists have a thing for acronyms. I hang around a bunch and get caught in the lingo from time to time, although I have more fun translating this to everyday English. Making sense of it all. Explaining what it really means to you.

  How do I blog? Let me count the ways. Simplistically, as part of my normal daily life, I have lots of input opportunities. I let them get tossed around in the gray matter. Then somewhat regularly, I let the outputs flow. Sometimes, there is a queue to get out. Sometimes, the well seems dry. More often, there is almost too much to come out and they get clogged fighting for attention time to form coherent sentences.

Inputs come from RSS feeds. I use Bloglines as my reader of choice. I started playing with the Goggle Reader but had some trouble with it in the time allocated on that day and it got put aside. Some day I'll go back to it. In the meantime, there are multiple folders set up in Bloglines. I have one folder for "my vanity feed". This has the Technorati searches for variations of my name and my blogs as they get referenced by others on the net. I have one folder for the Ho'ohana Community. I have one for the PodCamp blogs. I have a "discoveries folder" for places that I find that I want to write about on the Hitchhikers Guide. Once they are posted, the feeds get moved to another folder (where it makes sense) or to the default Hitchhiked folder. My "Must read" folder is the largest and has been growing over time. I probably should cull it because realistically I do not read all of them, even once a week. (I could, and probably should, do a full post just with my Bloglines folder structure.) Aside from RSS feeds, Google News is a good source of what's happening. I get the Boston Globe delivered daily and that is a diminishing source of info.

I was surprised when I counted up the newsletters I do receive regularly. This will also be the source for a separate posting so I won't go into great detail here. But there are over 25 that I get delivered via email over time; a couple daily, some weekly, some monthly, some irregularly.

I spend very little time watching TV but radio is a good source of info almost on a daily basis. News, weather, sports scores and of course music.

Books and magazines are major sources of input. A few of the key books are referenced here. I have a top ten book posting in the works that should get completed before the year end. (By also announcing it here, I know that you will help to keep me on track to complete that one.) I can be a voracious reader. My book reviews can be found here. The train time helps. I need to balance the reading time between the books and magazines so the magazines don't get too stale. Runner's World, FastCompany, National Geographic, and the revamped Motto are the primary subscriptions.

We are fortunate to have a live performances venue with the Circle of Friends Coffeehouse right here in Franklin. I attend the Lowell Folk Festival each July, about a forty-five minute drive away in Lowell (MA). A little further away (Stanhope, NJ) but worth planning for every two years is the Dodge Poetry Festival. All of these events provide plenty of food for thought.

And then of course, there is daily life here in the Sherlock household. I commute into Boston daily via the train. My wife teaches kindergarten. My two daughters are in college. Other family members and friends also provide sources of things to talk about. Some intentionally, some unintentionally.

As the image depicts, all these inputs get processed internally before becoming outputs in one form or another. My primary blog software is Blogger. I do contribute to 100Bloggers which is in Word Press. This JJL blog is in TypePad. One tool that I really like to help me simplify my posting process across these platforms is Qumana. I write in one tool and then I can post to each platform with a simple click. For those where I cross post, this makes it ridiculously easy. Within seconds, the multiple posts are sent. The draw back is that if I want to schedule the posting or to keep it in draft, then I need to use the platform software. But it is still a very handy tool.

Another primary tool for me in tracking the comments I write is CoComment. I am able to keep track of what I said where. As others join in the conversation, those are joined in to the same conversation stream. This conversation stream is then available as a plugin to all the readers of my blogs to see what I comments I make and what else is being said about those comments.

For posting pictures, Flickr is easy to use. (Except that the Blogger gradual move to beta has broken this feed for now. You used to be able to "Blog this" picture on Flickr and post directly to your blog. The feature still works except for Blogger.) I used Tabblo frequently for the Dodge Poetry Festival pictures. Rather than multiple posts one at a time from Flickr, I was able to combine like-themed photos and post them all at once. Tabblo also has a nice integration with Flickr. Post the photo to Flickr and sometime later, it is available to use in Tabblo.

As I get into podcasting, I am using an MP3 player to record or if I have time at my desktop, I use Audacity. Either way, Hipcast currently is the platform I use to upload and post my podcasts from.

At the end of the day, the various inputs get processed and hopefully make some sense when they become an output. I look forward to reading how you do your "blogging" thing. If you would like more information on any of the tools I use, please let me know.

The podcast version of this is available here.  8 minutes, 40 seconds.

Steve Sherlock is your collaboration teammate who believes commencement begins everyday.

Comments

[toni]

Wow Steve, I think I just learned so much by reading your laundry list of all of the sites, programs and other IPO's (did I use that right?) you have in your life. It is no wonder that all of your blogs are so informative and captivating to read.

Mahalo (thank you) for starting this topic and allowing all of us to share our knowledge. I am off to go try some of these sites and programs!

[Rosa Say]

Steve, I know it’s a recent thing for you, however can you share how you’re deciding what to podcast? What do you feel is better written versus said, and when do you feel doing both is the best bet?

[Steve Sherlock]

Toni, thank you. I know you are new to this blogging thing but this post should provide a few sources to consider as inputs and outputs. From what I have read of you thus far, your "processing" is doing just fine.

Rosa, that is a good question. Currently, I have chosen to record the longer posts that I prepare. I have plans to go back to do some older posts that I think might be the most useful to have the recorded version of. The prominent one on that listing is "How to read this page" which describes how my blog page is set up.

Recording does take extra steps and is not something I have gotten to be very quick at just yet so I don't do it for my normal, short quick posts. I don't have that "extra" time required.

I also want to explore "mobile blogging", a feature where you can effectively create a voice message that gets posted to your blog. The integration of the telephone and the blog should help make that easier for some of the short posts.