Tips from Wired Magazine
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006This month's Wired has some interesting how-to's and tips for making life easier. Here are some I have already started to follow:
Make Your Blog More Popular: (Guy Kawasaki has a better version of Dave Sifry's answer to this question:
Post often and post at regular intervals. Ideally at least once a day, or even more often.
Figure out what kind of blogger you are. Are you a blogger who loves to collect links? Are you an essayist who loves to argue points of articulate new ideas? Are you a storyteller? Are you more comfortable with video, audio, photos, or text, or all three? Try stuff out and see what you feel most comfortable doing, and then try to stick to it.
Link prolifically. Give your readers the benefit of you preparing all of the source materials for them. Also, if you are rebutting or commenting on someone else’s idea or point, it is a sign of respect to link to them. The hyperlink is becoming a new form of social gesture used between people. Tools like Technorati also help you to find out who has linked to you, so when I see a blogger who has linked to me recently, I’m more inclined to discuss his or her ideas and link back to them, driving traffic and conversation.
Be honest. There are very few people who can get away with building up personas, and you probably aren’t one of them.
Write about what you know. It makes for much more engaging and interesting reading. I love blogs like English Cut, because he knows so much about the world of Saville Row and he writes about it.
Be Passionate. Nobody likes boring writing about boring subjects. First find your passion, then express it on your blog!
Practice, practice, practice. Your writing or podcasting or videoblogging—whatever will get better as you do it more. Keep it up.
Get a Technorati watchlist for your blog and for your name. Know when people are talking about you and be able to respond—either in comments on their blog, or even better, on your own blog, with a link to the other blog.
Get a full-text RSS and Atom feed. Make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog. I’d recommend a service like Feedburner to manage those feeds for you and get you stats.
Use tagging. Tags are an easy way to create open categories, and they help to make it easier to find your blog. You can get a tutorial with tools here.
Claim your blog and put in blog tags. This puts you into the world’s largest blog directory, Blogfinder, which already has over two million entries. And it means that if you write authoritatively about a certain topic, you’ll show up pretty high on the list for that topic. Which means you’ll get more traffic and new readers and links.
Improve Your Home Movies (also useful for making video podcasts).
Clerks II director Kevin Smith has this handy advice for improving your next low-budget flick.
Shoot from more than one angle. Get as many shots as you can from as many directions as possible. This is called coverage, and it makes your film more visually interesting.
Use music as a band-aid. You can’t cut your unintelligible mother-in-law out of a birthday party scene by saying, “The running time is a bit long.” Instead, dub music over her. Set anyone to the right song and they come off looking pimp.
Remember that, as with most things, content is king. No one wants to watch a two-hour video of your vacation. But you can dazzle viewers with five Michael Bay, cut-heavy, chopped-up minutes.
If you’re starring in home porn, keep your ass off camera, particularly if it looks like mine.
Stay well lit. Indoor shoots have big problems with backlighting and shadows, so film outside as much as possible.
You’re not making a real documentary, so don’t be afraid to tell people what to do. If someone stutters or slurs, ask them to say it again. This is especially helpful with kids.
Good sound is important; your built-in mike just won’t cut it. Get an external microphone – a nice shotgun model that you can mount on the camcorder. That way, you won’t have to rely so much on music.
Tidy up Your Desktop
I was advised by the guys at the Genius Bar at Apple to clean up my desktop (which normally has about 50 documents on it.) They told me that the computer reads each of these as another application and that it slows things down. So I have moved everything into my documents folder and created aliases on the desktop to access those things I need now. Things are zippier.
Get Things Done
Wired references a list from productivity Guru David Allen. I have my own similar system.
- I use a moleskin notebook to jot down ideas when I am away from my computer. When I am at my computer I use Notetaker, a mac program that is really the best of its kind. I also tag and file every possible link I come across in my del.icio.us account.
- Then I keep a running to-do list in Notetaker that I process daily. I go through my notes and prioritize the things that need to get done by moving them to the top of the running list. Notetaker refreshes this list daily and deletes any completed items.
- I regularly review my notes on projects and my delicious links to make sure I am not missing anything.
Back up your files on Gmail
Download a nice little shareware program called gDisk (mac) or Gmail Drive Extension (firefox extension for the pc crowd).
And here's a tip of my own:
Start using Flock as your default browser. I have written previously about why I love it. I am still infatuated.
