Ian M RountreeLanguage, Communication, Community and Sustainability

Tonight’s #blogchat was set on managing and maximizing sidebars!

Personal note; no one’s appreciated my fun ajax-based sidebar at all – I may end up removing it after all.

Link of the Week – The 5 Types of Blogs – Which One Suits You Best? (Ink Rebels)

Mack Collier made a good point about sidebars: if we accept them as global metadata carriers, they need to reflect the motivation of the blog itself. Monetized blogs are expected to have ads, archival blogs are expected to have massive navigation capabilities. Think of who you’re writing for – friends? Business? Money? Information?

Mack also made another point – widgets from external services increase load times drastically. Consider this when adding your seventh or eighth “Fan This” box.

The general, immediate consensus was that having some very key information above the fold in your sidebars is a big deal. @amydpp and @tsudo, my apparent twin, mentioned the following which NEED to be in the beginning of every sidebar:

• An RSS button
• A search box
• Email subscription box
• Social networking icons

I agree – this if nothing else will be forcing me to change my current theme.

I asked about 2/3 column testing and left or right handed layouts. @JDEbberly suggested it would make a good topic – I may write about some wireframing things later. @jfavreau suggested hir use of 3-column layouts reduced usability.

Well-designed sidebars act as access points to the archive of the blog – proper cataloguing considerations need to be taken.

@WaynesBNP uses WP Greet Box to make sure the subscribe button is always visible to new visitors.

This led to the great Breath of Inspiration for the night – sidebars really must be global metadata. What you put there is a very good indicator of how you see the reader moving around your space.

This means that post- or page-specific metadata needs its own place, and that has to be respected as well. Author names, categorization, tagging, etc – even related posts, are very important for archival quality Information architecture is a bigger deal than most people give credit for. @erinloechner mentioned, to this point, that related posts in a post’s meta space are a good idea, and can do a far better job than tag clouds.

On that note, tag clouds are so 2008. Give them their own page, with your blogroll, or get rid of both entirely.

What do you think? Are you paying enough attention to the Table of Connections that is your sidebar?

Transcript for the night from WTHashtag, courtesy of Mack Collier.

Also – make sure you join the #blogchat Group on LinkedIn!

this week’s #Blogchat Participants’ List courtesy of Ksenia Coffman.

Image by solo, with others.

Tonight’s #blogchat had Chris Brogan on as guest host – and Mack Collier thankfully prefixed the chat with a post explaining the flow. Thanks for that, Mack – as you said, #blogchat certainly can get batshit-crazy-fast, and no one expected tonight to be any different.

For the uninitiated – here is Mack’s exegesis of #blogchat.

Stanford from Pushing Social also shared a video on how he sets up for #blogchat that’s worth a watch.

Self-promotion: People! My copy of trust Agents is still up for grabs! Share a Skip1.org related story and win the book (with a little thank you note from me!)

The Planned Topic: How to Use Other Social Sites/Presences to Grow Your Blog.

This is a big one. We’ve identified that it’s far easier to grow your audience in one place by being active somewhere else – growing your subscriber base by using Twitter, finding new LinkedIn connections on Facebook, and so on. But just how do we go about that? Chris Brogan cohosted #blogchat tonight, to talk about exactly that thing.

First: How do you decide which sites you should be active on in order to help your blog?

- Targeting helps – Chris shared FlowTown, a targeting tool I’ll be playing with this week. The base of Chris’ advice during this portion was that finding sites to become active on requires two things: defining the goal of your blog, and finding out where your customers are. If your customers are mostly toastmasters – go be a toastmaster. It makes sense.

The flow is fairly simple, really; identify your goal, and find a niche that goal serves. Look at places like AllTop.com for conversations already in motion. Once you’ve found one, involve yourself. Be the elbow, the helpful newcomer – and really get into the conversation. And please, please (Chris asks) “never shove your updates around the web. Be selective, be specific, be unique. Make each network its own beast.”

Second: How to decide whether to make one of the sites you’re involved in, into an Outpost for your community.

Once we’ve targeted properly, and begun to engage, we need to formalize our outposts and differentiate them from the street corners where we hold conversations. So, we pick outposts by relevance; converse, engage, be in th enetwork. Occasional “conversion forks” (Chris’ term) are the way to go.

Give others the tools to succeed. No matter what tyour goal is – thought leadership, building a channel or media property, or sales – your job on the web (and in life, right?) is to help others succeed at what they do. Your products should back this up, and so should your every action on the social web. Chris’ golden ratio for this is 12 actions for others for every 1 action promoting yourself.

Remember to pick your communication style discretely for each network. MySpace has a different accent than Facebook does, and a different one than Twitter does as well. As much as we don’t want to be shoving our updates around everywhere, we don’t want to duplicate everything either. this can be a deciding factor in whether or not you want to really engage in an arena. Cross-pollination is one thing – heck, even I use automation for some of my sharing – but we should remember to make clear distinctions when we’re using these tools to reduce our workload, rather than trying to appear ubiquitous.

A side note: We’re the special cases here, guys. You and me, the bloggers in the room, we know things other people don’t. We have arcana about conversational flow and reciprocation. All the talk in the world about outposts and goals, media properties and voice in communication style… It’s all arcana. We have two options: We can treat it as arcana and guard it like spies – or we can pull the veil and let everyone in on the wisdom. Which are you better at doing? Why?

The night’s transcript, from @MackCollier

The 250 top participants’ list from @KevinLyons

Drop any further questions for Chris Brogan on his blog – here, as per his request.

Join the #blogchat LinkedIn Group!

Conclusions? What else can we add to this?

UPDATE: @tsudo collected far more semantic details directly from Chris here: Insights into Social Media Marketing

Image borrowed from the awesome Guerilla Freelancing Blog.

Tonight’s #blogchat was Open Mic! Anything goes! A reminder – here are the details about #blogchat, from the Mack himself.

First off, @salamicat asked – how do you build your blog’s audience? It turns out @prosperitygal has a radio show, which is awesome, but for the rest of us – a lot of cross-platform promotion is in order. Promoting blog on twitter and Facebook is much easier than promoting on your own space. If no one’s around, who can hear it? Organic growth through 360 degree engagement is the key.

(In an aside, Nic Wirtz and I joked about Social Media Daleks spouting ENGAGEMENT! ENGAGEMENT! – we’ll explain this week.)

Then @cherylfenton asked how big a deal comments were. Of course, there was a lot of discussion about how to go after comments, but at the end of the day, comments are only handy if you’re looking to foster a discussion. Otherwise, writing for comments – or even encouraging them – is useless for some “hard declarative” posts.

There was a question about exploring archives – I’m a huge proponent of this! For you WordPress people, there’s a plugin called Insights – gives you an in-blog search right on the post page to allow for easier archive searches. very handy, especially for drill-down referencing.

There was also a question about self-editing. I wrote something for this – but decided it needed to be redacted. (consensus; self-editing is good until you hit publish. Then, it’s “Typos Are Forever”)

15 minutes in and I’m lost! Tangent time! 3 Guest Post coupons into the water!

Oh yeah, organized posting times. I try to drop at 8am, 4pm or 10pm, and retweet the posts during the remaining available slots of those beofre my next posts. I spent the last week dropping posts at 4pm, and saw a significant increase in traffic. This week, it’ll be 7:30am as a control to see if the time actually meant anything. @danperezfilms tweets his posts hourly and sees good uptake – I may give this a shot too, but keep worrying it’ll annoy people. Would it annoy you?

And then this happened:

@MackCollier: If you got invited to speak at a major SM conf, what would your topic be? Make that your next blog post #blogchat

What a challenge! I may just take it up this week.

Open Mic night is always unpredictable. this week, people were going nuts – in the best possible way! Unfortunately, my head exploded halfway through, meaning I missed the storm of awesomeness.

So, yeah. I totally lost track of the chat. What kind of gold did I miss? What else can we add to what we learned?

TweepML Participants’ List for #blogchat, July 25th 2010

What the Hashtag transcript for #blogchat, July 25th 2010

Image by Tanki.

Tonight’s #blogchat topic was using other blogs to build your brand and blog presence! I’ve been doing a lot of noodling over guest blogging and community blogging lately – especially given the last few weeks’ worth of twitter chats – so this discussion was exceptionally apropos of that.

Let’s dive in!

Tonight’s chat was co-hosted by Geoff Living. Geoff is an author – whose second edition of Now Is Gone is coming out in 2011 – and an accomplished blogger, among other things.

The first half of the night was focused on a blogger finding opportunity in other blogs than their own, and how we can use guest activity to grow our own home bases.

This link from @LorneDaniel started the night off well - Guest Blogging Benefits and Best Practices (PR20/20)

Geoff used some pretty esoteric examples of guest blogging – for example, he’s a CNN iReport writer, which is interesting. Usually when we think of guest posting, we think of writing for other blogs in our verticals, not for big businesses like CNN.

@MackCollier asked: Why guest post?

Geoff’s responses had to do with promoting nonprofit work, avoiding placing yourself at odds with partners, and needing to establish thought leadership in a hurry. This last piece seems like another esoteric secret, but think about it; if I write primarily about building communities (which will become a major focus of my writing in the coming months), and you write about business development… If we write for each other’s blogs, we can establish a link between the subjects, and make it a no-brainer for our readers to trust the both of us with each others’ subjects.

My question was: Which comes first, asking a guest to post on your blog, or posting on someone else’s?

@MidnightMogul answered – to paraphrase – build a win-win either way, consider whether you need more content or more exposure. We need to learn to avoid the no-give situation as thoroughly as we avoid the no-win situation.

@BillBoorman shared a note about fitting in without blending in, which is a real clincher for guest writing of any kind.

@GeoffLiving shared a tip that many big blogs are built on expert guest content mixed in with regular reporters. (here)

Important question from Mack – does the audience of the blog you want to guest for expand your own audience? Sadly, I missed a lot of the answers to this.

Apparently, 40-50% of Geoff’s pitched stories go to virtual press on other blogs having been sent for review – better than book publishing, worse than we’d have expected.

A note from a few participants; Building relationships through comments is best for individual bloggers – less so for community blogs like Mashable. Comment relationships carry great influence, but little mass credibility.

Another note from many people; Making it known you’re looking for guest bloggers – or are willing to guest blog – is a good way to get out there, better than a direct pitch.

Splitting the difference between writing for yourself and writing for others – @BillBoorman says write for yourself, which is a good ideal as well.

In the second half,Geoff talked about his personal blog and how it has affected his business.

I brought out the #ReadItAll Week challenge – Justin Kownacki didn’t guest post on each others’ blogs, per se, but it was cross-blog promotion none the less, and has been working out well so far. The challenge itself starts tomorrow – so we’ll have that as a case study in the future as well. Here’s my Read It All post, and Justin’s pre-challenge primer.

Of course, @JustinKownacki himself appeared immediately, and made a note that if we’re not blogging about a subject (especially on non-personal blogs) we’re all just sharing miscellanea. If we’re guest-blogging miscellaneously, it gets even muddier, which is a bad thing.

Oh yeah. Provenance and content – again. Sigh.

Rehash and regurgitation isn’t the SEO killer. Verbatim replication withpout the benefit of provenance is. Sheesh! One of these days I’ll be writing a streak on SEO for bloggers, and trust me, provenance will be a big deal in that series. Content strategy will NOT be.

My how we hate the ubiquitous. @BLOGBlokeTips brought up the perspective that ubiquity of our content can be beneficial – which is true. However, be aware; ubiquity lends itself to exhaustion better than scarcity.

Did I miss anything? I’m being silly – I missed things. Share what’s missing, by all means. We’re all ears!

Participants’ List from @KevinLyons – TweepML List of #blogchat Participants for July 18th 2010

Transcript: What the Hashtag Transcript for #blogchat

Image by oddsock.

Tonight, Ann Handley guest hosted #blogchat – so I’ll warn you right now, these notes will not be complete. Ann’s a prolific tweeter and a very engaged person, so I’m not surprised at all that the chat went swimmingly, and was very busy.

So, here’s a little background. Ann is Twitter’s front-person for Marketing Profs, a marketing resource concern. She writes her own blog at, of course, AnnHandley.com, and is publishing a book later this year with CC Chapman called Content Rules.

That said, here we go!

The official subject was “Creating and Managing Group Blogs” which is fairly hot-button these days, given corporate blogs, and massive news blogs like HuffPo, Engadget, Mashable and so on. Getting started is often easier than staying started – so it was good to see the advice come out on this.

First: Creating a Group Blog

First question from Mack Collier – How can a company tell if they should have a single-author blog, or a group blog?

Ouch. Good way to start. A lot of the discussion here reflected last week’s chat about developing a voice, or identifying authors on company blogs. The real killer term from Ann herself was (to paraphrase) “Frame of Approach” – which speaks volumes about her own approach to content. Consensus follows; there’s a big (BIG) gap between directed writing and the general approach of a group blog from an editorial point of view.

Next:

I asked what “top three” steps a group should take before setting up a blog and launching. Got some fairly good responses;

from @PushingSocial – @ianmrountree – #1 decide problems to solve, #2 identify perspectives to offer, #3 assign perspectives to the champion in the org #blogchat

from @jb140 – @ianmrountree I’d say first & foremost you need to have a writing strategy of what keywords you want to use if for in SEO #blogchat

from @pheffernanvt – @ianmrountree 1. platform/blog description 2. agree on categories/topics per blogger, 3. editorial calendar with schedule, process #blogchat

An interesting range, actually – I think I was expecting more planning, less perspective. Still, I agree with most of it; content strategy IS planning IS SEO, IS so much of blogging.

Onward!

When I got back from my jaunt into reply-ville, the chat was talking about editorial mandating.

@Nedra – Daily Fix is a community – how did MarketingProfs manage that?
- By being a part of the community.

Next: Managing Groups in a Blog

@MarketingProfs: Cultivating community: By IDing people who are active. One of my best tactics is to lurk in the comments, see who’s already there.

Who’s “already there” is a big deal. We’ve seen how important this is all over. Ann also mentioned “Social Prospecting” which is such an awesome idea – tapping active commentators to contribute, finding out where else people are active – looking for the good writers and asking for the join is a big deal and can be aided by simply making yourself available.

On making it easy for them to contribute:

@MarketingProfs: At the risk of name-dropping, that’s how Arianna Huffington got George Clooney to blog. (Made it super-easy.) #yesshetoldmethat #blogchat

Sound notation, given the crowd.

Finally, a personal note. Communities cannot become echo chambers. There has to be discussion and collaboration in groups, not sycophancy; without like perspective, communities cannot function. Riddled with sycophants, there are two options; spiral of descending quality, or sudden enigmatic explosion of popularity followed by a spiral of descending quality. Playing into the curve of praise is a bad idea for one person – even worse for groups.

I’ve missed things – I know I have. What did I miss? Share your thoughts, by all means. We’re in this together, right?

Participants’ List: TweepML Participants’ List for #blogchat July 11th, 2010 – @marketingprofs

What the Hashtag: Transcript for #blogchat July 11th, 2010

ADDENDUM!

Mack shared this list of tweetchats and it’s dreadful and awesome. Bookmark it!

Hey all! Nothing new for this blog today – but I did want to direct you toward my notes from the thoughtwrestling tweet chat, #twchat, which just went live at the thoughtwrestling blog!

Notes from #twchat for July 7th, 2010 – Idea Completion

The major question of tonight’s #blogchat is one that keeps coming up all over the place – how should corporate bloggers identify themselves – by name, or should they remain anonymous?

It’s a difficult question to answer. The web both embraces and despises anonymity in equal measure; identity and obfuscation both have their uses, if you’re respectful of them.

Before my notes from #blogchat, I thought I’d share some articles – one from TED, and three of my own.

Prominent notes on anonymity: m00t speaks at TED about anonymity on the web.

My take on anonymity in general: Anonymity on the Web – Privacy, Courage and Anonymity – The Webspace/Realspace Divide in Courage

Now, the notes:

There was a little discussion with @prosperitygal about the differing advantages and challenges of multiple personas on the web versus simply maintaining multiple presences – it’s a challenge either way, but the voice here is the key.

The wide concensus early on was that multiple authors should be identified on company blogs. This sentiment split by the end of the night – some people like @SbuxMel advocated for personality and passion, citing a Starbucks customers blog‘s lack of both, despite its lip service to varied authors. I mentioned there’s a big difference between writing a blog that’s worth subscribing to, versus writing one that’s worth bookmarking. Tricky difference, but an important one.

Others (myself included, mostly) brought up the disadvantages of varied identity on company blogs. If the favored writer goes away, what happens to the blog? Similarly, a personality only helps if you have one; Identifying yourself to an audience only helps if the audience identifies with you, more than just identifying you alone.

What didn’t get much talk, was the actual differences between a company’s voice and a varied personal voice. Identifying authors is one thing; addressing their personalities as compared to the company’s planned marketing voice is quite another. The process is difficult, certainly, and doesn’t get a lot of the right kind of attention.

From Monsanto, @JPlovesCOTTON mentioned Monsanto sends interns to blog at big events, for ground-up experience – which I think is brilliant, both from a guerilla content point of view, and from an experiential point. How else to gain this kind of experience, having your work out there, than just to do it? Segregating official channels from the varied voice, here, is useful and appropriate. Here’s the blog JP mentioned: Beyond the Shows.

One of the last things I noticed was a discussion of challenging your audience. I agree with this – but how to define challenge? Is it bringing direct calls to action? Inviting discussion? Challenging an assumption? How a company does this speaks volumes about its culture. However, there’s no silver bullet for challenge. What’s appropriate for a pharmaceutical company is not the same for a farmer.

The overwhelming argument I need to bring up is that identity of company bloggers isn’t the core issue; how a company approaches blogs is. It’s not what, it’s how. The assertions of so many participants were that all bloggers for companies should be identified. I agree, there are benefits to this, but also cautions.

Especially in smaller companies, where blogging isn’t a full time position, identifying a blogger is a mixed bag of snakes. If five web designers blog for a company, and identify their work, what happens when clients begin to request a favourite designer to work on their projects?

Bonus Round: “Blogs are a medium, not a genre!”

Apparently, people are touchy about what they blog. @GeoffLiving opined that blogging was mutually exclusive from writing – I disagree. Blogging is a medium, a method of writing or publishing, not a genre. The same way fantasy fiction is a genre independent of books, movies and so on, short-form opinion writing is not an exclusive product of blog publishing software.

When I mentioned I wasn’t expecting to spark such a kingdom-genus-phylum argument, @elizabethonline called me “the Linneaus of the Net” – I’m not sure whether to be amused, or expect it was a sardonic remark. Either way, funny.

What do you think? How strongly tied should blogging be to identifyable authorship, especially in corporate environments?

Participants List: TweepML #blogchat for July 5th 2010.

Transcript: What The Hashtag transcript for #blogchat, July 5th 2010.

Last night we had our first run of Thoughtwrestling Twitter Chat, under the hashtag of #twchat. Given that it was the first run, there was a nice small crew, and a lot of levity – I like that. Mostly people getting to know everyone.

We talked about a number of small creativity-related subjects – from collaboration to emulation and more. I didn’t take detailed notes, unfortunately, but I do have a transcript for you to read, and a TweepML list of the contributors.

Transcript of #twchat from June 30th, 2010: First Run

TweepML list of participants for #twchat June 30th 2010

We’ll be doing the same again next week, Wednesday 8pm Central time.

Note: I’m posting this here mostly because Thoughtwrestling is on a Canada Day theme today, and I didn’t want to interrupt that. Next week, we’ll plan better, and Notes from #twchat may end up there instead of here. Or, edited versions in both places.

I asked a few questions on Open Mic night for #blogchat this week – so I hope you’ll forgive me if my Lessons from Blogchat today focuses on what I got back for those.

Question 1: @jeffjarvis blog post today made me wonder: How important is provenance to researched blog posts?

Crickets. No response whatsoever. Got a question from @prosperitygal about what I called researched blog posts. Ah, well.

Well that blew that. clearly, I’ve been asking the wrong kinds of questions. Here’s what really stood out:

@billboorman asked if bloggers consider micro-blogging to be a valid form of blogging. Unfoortunately little response – this is an interesting question.

@OrganicSpider – swiftly becoming one of my favourite participants – made a note about tools for blog measurement, specifically Google Analytics and WebCEO, which I agree with. I’ve got some more notes on blog measurement here: Taking Advantage of Easy Metrics, Hack Analytics: A Participants’ Guide.

@justinlevy made a comment about long-form posts being the bricks of a blog, filled in with snackable mortar posts. We’re in agreement here; pillar content has to be the stuff that holds up the remainder. We all have them, too – those four or five posts per quarter that really light up the numbers and keep you wanting to write more.

I asked Justin about editorial calendars – here again, we’re on pace. Justin keeps a calendar about a week our (which is my preference when I’m on the ball) and an idea file. Having seen this from a number of bloggers, I’d say it’s a good practice. Keeping a scheduled post buffer instead of an editorial calendar can help you address events that pop up as needed far more effectively, without breaking your pulse.

Question 2: How much weight do bloggers put toward trusting another blog based not only on the subject of the blog, but the author’s stated values?

Now thar be dragons. A lot of people seemed to agree that values not matching with the blog’s article content was a good reason for ceasing to read a blog. We shouldn’t be surprised about this one at all.

What got my goat was that people showed a distinct disconnect between values and blog subject matter. If a political blog doesn’t match your values, you simply don’t read in the first place. However – if you’re a liberal thinker reading a tech blog written by a totalitarian… No beef? Not a criticism; I’m actually kind of amused. I agree that subject matter has more to do with values displayed than declaration of values, but somehow, I was expecting a more vigorous response.

At this point I thoroughly lost track of the conversation. There were some posts about writing for yourself, blogging being essential to economic success in some industries. Lots of good stuff, I’m vaguely aware. Unfortunately, there seems to be a density problem in Blogchat after a while, and the Retweets take over the chat. Not that that’s inherently a bad thing – it just means keeping up becomes difficult as the echoes roll in.

Had an aside with @AmidPrivilege about pillar content as well. We agree, the term “pillar” content is a misnomer – a blog is not necessarily a temple. But then, all buzzwords exist entirely as intentional misnomers to direct shared understanding toward a complex subject.

Wow. That was a mouthful.

At 9:06pm ct, @MackCollier posted the transcript here: Transcript for #blogchat, June 27th 2010 – Open Mic Night

No sign of Kevin Lyons – if someone posts a list of participants, I’ll add it here. One of these days, I’ll figure out how to do that myself, I’m sure.

Looks like a participant lost! TweepML #blogchat participants 6/27

What do you think? Have I missed something? Please weigh in – keeping the dialogue open during the week is a challenge, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

… I had the pleasure of getting some advice about asking for comments from Mack and from @LisaPetrilli – who has a very provoking post about making the ask here: What I Learned about Networking when I Asked a Stranger for a Kidney.

I’m going to be digesting that one for a while.

Tonight’s #blogchat was all about blog design. It seemed like an awesome subject, having just finished off the first iteration of my new theme, but honestly the pace was a little too quick for me to really pull much out of it. Not a lot of moderation either – a very real conversation. One of the reasons I dig #blogchat so much is the varied tone – tonight was no different.

Above the fold is Manhattan.

I missed who said that one, but I agree – so much of our design attention is spent on holistic approaches, UI design and the damnable details that often when designing any website – especially a blog – we can forget to consider the depth of peoples’ viewing environment. Of course, this leads in to; are you designing for phones, or the iPad?

No one brought up accessibility concerns like high-contrast CSS sheets, screen reader design or anything of the like. I’m not surprised, honestly a little disappointed. But that’s something for another day.

Blogrolls are a waste of time.

So what do we replace them with? Blogroll pages, with details and reasons for why to follow a blog? I like that, but I’d offer going one step further; we do roundups all the time of blog posts, topics and so on. Why not do monthly blog roundups as well? Share the new, boost the consistently relevant? It’s all in the details, right? Organic and real is better than dropping a link on a sidebar. That much I agree on.

TweetMeme button and Fb like buttons – pros and cons?

None listed, opinion only. Not much discussion on this, but honestly – I leave a Facebook like bar on my posts and it never gets clicked. I had a TweetMeme button on my posts for two months and had no significant change in traffic or visitor behaviour. Why include details that do nothing for my visitors? TweetMeme gone, Fb bar likely to go away too.

Stupid design hacks: Styling Disqus comments.

@OrganicSpider asked about Disqus comments and styling – and here’s the answer. The awkward thing about disqus is that the styles are rather bland, and may not play nice with all blog themes. However, thankfully, Disqus comments follow a css style, which you can get by viewing the source on your blog. Style the disqus-related IDs and Classes and you’re set.

@JoeManna asked whether this should be done in Disqus settings or on the site CSS – I think this kind of thing should be carried in a theme style, honestly, mostly because you can better align the style with the remainder of your theme. Sure, you may miss some of the snazzy new images and changes Disqus makes to their comments systems sometimes – but especially if you’re using a dark theme, or some wacky avocado-shade colouring, you want to make sure the details align for a number of reasons.

All of the code for Disqus styling can be attributed to “.disqus_thread” thankfully, so it’s fairly simple to work down in the page source and get everything styled out. If I hadn’t included this, it would have meant white text entry boxes, and white entered text. Bad for comment writers.

Dates for blog posts, SEO for blogs.

Design seemed to fall by the wayside here – as soon as SEO comes up in any bloggers gathering, it seems to trump anything else, including good writing practice. People, seriously; if you write good articles, useful to people, which encourage subscription, sharing and comments – that IS your SEO backbone. This combination is one of the reasons – aside from updated content – that Google likes blogs so much lately. Not just updates, but relevance and encouraged user behaviour. Seriously.

As always, it was a good hour. And I’ll be on next Sunday night as well – wouldn’t miss it.

Mack boogied out at 9pm sharp to prep for a flight early in the morning, left the usual transcript: #blogchat transcript, June 13 2010
Naturlich, @KevinLyons also posted a participants’ list: TweepML #blogchat Participants list.