Chris Hardie » blogosphere

Upcoming conference for Indiana bloggers

Chris — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:24:10 +0000

Are you a blogger in Indiana? Are you interested in learning more about blogs and blogging? Consider attending the upcoming Blog Indiana 2008 conference in Indianapolis on August 16th and 17th, 2008. The event is a 2-day blogging and social media conference that aims to promote education, innovation and collaboration among Indiana’s fast-growing blogging community. The lineup of sessions looks great (even if it didn’t include me as a presenter and panelist, and even if it wasn’t sponsored in part by Summersault). You can learn about blogging basics, legal issues, corporate blogging, monetization, podcasting and videocasting, analytics, and much more.

The cool part is that the conference is only $49 for both days, and even cooler, I’ve got a 15% discount for you if you use this link to register. If you’re interested in blogging and social media at any level, I hope you can make it.

Congratulations on having your first diary rescued

Chris — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 02:47:07 +0000

There is a strange and unique destination out there in the political blogosphere called The Daily Kos. You may have heard of it – it’s been called everything from one of the most defining websites of the modern political debate, to an analog of the Klu Klux Klan. I suspect it’s actually somewhere in between (but for those who don’t like encountering ideas they don’t agree with, be careful about clicking through, you may find yourself uncomfortable).

I recently tried an experiment, where I took a couple of my blog postings from here, and cross-posted them on an account at Daily Kos. As a result, I got to learn about the strange culture that’s evolved on this headline-making site. For example, a posting there is actually called a “Diary” (not a diary entry, just a diary). And there’s apparently a whole crew of users of the site who go through reading the hundreds of diaries posted throughout the day, and they “Rescue” them, which means they highlight them for the rest of the users of the site to read. Apparently, I hit the Kosian jackpot of having my first two diaries ever rescued and discussed. Most interesting was how many people commented on the entries compared to their life on this site. I suppose that when you’ve built a critical mass in an online community, the content gets a lot more attention, no matter its quality.

Anyway, it was fun to know that a site read (and often condemned) by various national political and media figures had, for a brief time, a little linkage to my self-indulgent ramblings.

Now, slackers, how come I can’t get 33 of you to comment on a blog post here?

Trying out blogging

Chris — Wed, 16 Apr 2003 03:09:25 +0000

I’ve resisted the weblogging phenomenon as long as I could, mostly because I knew I would obsess over doing it right once I started. You’re now reading the initial stages of that obsession: announcing that I’m blogging within a blog. Okay.

Anyway, it’s not my intention or desire to spew random and intimate facts about my personal life that might make both of us uncomfortable next time we see each other. Rather, I’m looking forward to using one of the most casual mediums available to publish whatever thoughts I’m tossing around on a given day without committing to writing a formal essay or publishing a whole separate web page on my site. Maybe this is a product of laziness, but I wasn’t doing a lot of public writing anyway, so let’s see how it goes.