Alphablogs

Here are some amazing blogging statistics collected on the Blog World Expo site. (The big enormous Blog World Expo will be held in Las Vegas this year.) These stats are American only, and don’t even touch the Canadian, or world-wide blogging universe. When I checked their links for the sources of their stats, some of them are of earlier reports, such as Pew dated 2005! So extrapolate that to the present. When I started with wordpress.com, there were already 60,000 bloggers there. Now, we have 3,392,124 blogs with 93,184 new posts today. And that’s only wordpress.com.

So if you are thinking about starting a blog, or have heard about it and wonder what it’s all about, don’t wait any longer to join this tsunami wave of participation. Blogging is no longer a rare or unique activity, it’s decidedly mainstream.

Look at these Blog World numbers!

As you can see, these days I’m intrigued by the whole multilingual theme. So I thought I’d finally do something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while – write a bilingual blog post.

This was inspired by the German blog Blogschrott who asks bloggers who twitter to explain why they use Twitter. As you can tell from my last post, I’ve been reading more and more German Twitters – I get the impression that it Twitter is just now becoming quite the interesting tool over in Germany.

So this is what I’ll do. First I’ll answer the questions in English, and then in German. (They won’t be exactly the same – I’m not applying for a translator’s job here Here we go

Why do you use twitter, where do you find meaning in it?

One of my prime motivators is fun, or a sense of pleasure and excitement. Every time I open my twitter page (I only use it in a browser), I’m happy. I like the visual appeal of both my site and of seeing all these neat avatars. I like the wittiness, intelligence and social consciousness of my Twitter friends. So the meaning is mostly pleasure – intellectual pleasure, sense-pleasure, and the pleasure of making and nurturing connections.

What do you tweet? Personal stuff, internet news, or a mix?

Anything and everything. It’s pretty impulsive (one of the other reasons I like it) I’d say 60% of the time I ask myself, is that of any interest to my friends? I do more and more retweeting, that is, passing on info that one of my Twitter contacts tweeted about – for example, a reminder to schedule cancer check-ups. There’s also little Twitter conversations. Lately, I’ve been posting a “global earth” motto every day, and a reflection on it, inspired by a list of things to do to become more globally and earth conscious that a friend had sent me a propos Earth Day. Once or twice a week I might mention one of my posts. Oh, and I also enjoy writing Twitter haiku, which I call twaiku – like this one here.

How do you use Twitter? Do you use a plugin, etc.?

As I said, I only use it via browser. I don’t even have the little Twitter widget on my blog anymore. I already spend way too much time on the computer, if I start using more than one medium to access something as addictive as Twitter, I’d never sleep!

Now for the German version:

Warum nutzt Du Twitter, wo liegt für Dich der Sinn?

Was mich motiviert is Spass, oder sagen wir mal Freude, oder ein gewisser Sinnesgenuss, eine gewisse Reizung. Jedesmal wenn ich meine Twitterseite oeffne (ich benutze es nur in einem Browser), freue ich mich. Ich freue mich darueber, wie meine Seite aussieht, und ueber all diese coolen Avatars. Ich freue mich ueber den Humor, die Intelligenz und das Sozialbewusstsein meiner Twitter-Freunde. Der Sinn liegt also in Freude – in intellektueller und sinnlicher Freude, und der Freude daran, neue Verbindungen zu machen and zu unterhalten.

Was twitterst Du? Eher private Sachen, News aus dem Web, oder ein Mix aus beidem?

So ziemlich alles. Es ist recht impulsiv (ein weiterer Grund, weshalb mir Twitter gefaellt). Ich wuerde sagen, 60% der Zeit frage ich mich, ob mein Tweet meine Kontakte interessieren wuerde. Ich “retweete” mehr und mehr, das heisst, ich gebe Information von meinen Kontakten weiter, z.B. hier, eine Erinnerung fuer Krebsvorsorgeuntersuchungen. Dann sind da auch kleine Twitter-Unterhaltungen. Neuerdings twittere ich auch taeglich ein Global Earth-Motto, und einen kurzen Gedanken darueber, inspiriert durch eine Liste, die uns hilft, mehr global und umweltfreundlich zu denken, die mir von einer Freundin fuer Earth Day geschickt hatte. Ein oder zweimal die Woche erwaehne ich einen meiner Blog-Artikel. Oh, und ich habe auch Spass daran, Haiku zu schrieben, die ich Twaiku nenne, hier zum Beispiel.

Wie nutzt Du Twitter? Über Twitter.com direkt, oder über ein Plugin? Wenn ja, wo liegen die Vorteile des jeweiligen Tools?

Wie gesagt, ich benutze nur die Webseite. Ich habe noch nicht mal mehr das kleine Twitter-Widget auf meinem Blog. Ich verbrauche schon viel zu viel Zeit mit dem Computer. Wenn ich mit einem weiteren Tool anfinge oder auch meinen Handy benutzen wuerde fuer sowas verfuehrerisches wie Twitter, wuerde ich nie wieder schlafen!

Image by smitty

Returning to the English is not the only language” theme, through my Twitter friend @Lotree I just came across a new Twitter meme (or tweme – you can see them all here; on Twitter you will see them identified with a # hashtag, like this one). They are German “Twitterweisheiten” or “Twitter wisdoms”. I quite like them so I’ll translate them here:

Sprachspielerin (“language player”, of the female sort, with her blog here) says

He who sows tweets shall reap a thunderstorm.
As you shout into the twittersphere, so shall it echo back.
There is no tweet unless you tweet it.
I tweet that I tweet nothing [leaning on Socrates]
You cannot step twice into the same tweet. Or: Everything twitters.
The tweet is the goal.

Lotree, a “reader and information broker” with his blog here)

More truculent than a tweet are often a tweet’s followers.

Werkstatt (“workshop” – a social science guy from my hometown Munich whose blog is called knowledge workshop)

And why Twitter and not, rather, Nothing? That is the question. [leaning on German philosopher Heidegger]
Whereof you cannot tweet you must keep silent.
Everything you can say you can say as a tweet. [leaning on German philosopher Wittgenstein]
Nothing is twittered as hot as it is cooked.
Where there is a tweet there is a way.
The next tweet is always the hardest.

rrho who lives in Berlin and has a blog here

Where there is one tweet there is more.

textundblog (”text and blog”) from Hamburg, a Spanish translator, among other things. His blog is here.

Speech is silver. Tweet is gold.

PickiHH Tina Pickhardt from Hamburg, who’s into CRM, with her Blog Themenriff

A hashtag does not a tweet make.

bosch who waxes intelligently at Boschblog:

Before the tweet is after the tweet.
And of course after the tweet is also before the tweet and vice versa.

jati - Jan Tissler, a journalist from Berlin who blogs here

The really interesting things happen bewteen the tweets.

Iranerin, an Iranian feminist in Hamburg, who has been blogging since 2004. Read it if your Farsi is good!

A life without twitting is a life without pleasure!

(Amusing little sidenote: I was just about to publish this when I realized that I had gotten my languages mixed up and capitalized the word “blog” throughout - for a momen I was confused … how do you write that in English again?)

It’s been a busy month, with all the activity of spring - new projects brewing and more to do than time to do it!

I recently interviewed Social Media Evangelist/Consultant and woman-about-town Monica Hamburg about one of her areas of expertise: Crowdsourcing. Check it out here in the YouTube version:

One thing this video doesn’t convey is Monica’s terrific sense of humour. You can find out more about that side of her through her blogsite(s). Contact Monica here.

Looks like this will be one of those “mark your calendar” events in Vancouver.

Bridging Media: Addressing the Challenges - this Saturday, March 29, 2008, 9:45 am - 3pm

Aimed to provide a bridge between the two communities of film/television and interactive/social media, I think this event comes just at the right time. The expertise we have here in Vancouver is remarkable, and the panelists assembled for this event have a lot to share in the short time they have available, so it looks like the whole day will be power-packed.

The tools are here and easier to use than ever, and the panelists are articulate and experienced in the slippery ever-shifting world of web/mobile/social media. Its free, its informative and it can change what you think you might know about social media, and more. Plus there is a door prize: a free pass to nextMEDIA, just before the Banff Television Festival.

Want to know who’ll be there? Go to the registration site and take a peek.

And did I mention that lunch is sponsored? Yes it is a free lunch!

Brainchild of Megan Cole and Erica Hargreave, the event now has a terrific team putting this together, with good will and sharp skills:  Cinci Csere, Monique Trottier and Monica Hamburg. I’m really glad to help out with this event and be in their company!

Here’s the latest installment in our ongoing video series. Isabella Mori talks about what goes on in the mind of a blogger, and  I play a little with the camera as she speaks.

Today you can find me over at Reader Appreciation Project, where I wrote a guest post on appreciating those readers who we sometimes forget – fellow bloggers.

Reader Appreciation Project is a great blog that concentrates exclusively on how to best appreciate and interact with our readers. Example posts treat topics such as

• How do readers feel about monetization?
• How far do you want to go with pleasing your readers?
• Stepping outside your blogging niche.

Most posts are followed by a good comment conversation. If you’re wanting to build more and deeper community on your blog, Reader Appreciation Project is a great source of information.

As you can see, our Alphablog media dog is learning fast! He’s been reading some Barrington Nevitt, an old colleague of Marshall McLuhan’s. (Yes, he can read. Why not?)

One of the themes at Northern Voice this last weekend that stood out for me was wikis.

OK, what’s a wiki?

A wiki is a website where users can add, remove, and edit every page using a web browser. It is astonishingly easy for people to jump in and revise pages – it’s even easier than blogging. The advantages of wikis are

• Good for writing down quick ideas or longer ones, giving you more time for formal writing and editing.
• Instantly collaborative without emailing documents, keeping the group in sync
• Accessible from anywhere with a web connection (if you don’t mind writing in web-browser text forms).
• Your archive, because every page revision is kept.
• Exciting, immediate, and empowering–everyone has a say. (Thanks, O’Reilly)

One of the most successful wikis I’ve used was for planning an event with people who usually only use email. Most of them were people who were not very tech savvy at all and yet the wiki worked perfectly, making this volunteer-run event run smoothly and collaboratively. I’ve also used wikis as online document repositories when using email was not useful (e.g. because multiple versions of a document needed to be accessible to a number of people). Wikis are wicked!

Matt Mullenweg, the “inventor” of WordPress, the blogging software we’re using here, had lots of inspiring things to say in his keynote speech on Saturday (go here for the full audio version, or here for a quick text taste of it). What stood out most for me, however, was when he said that collaborative open source efforts like wikis should be our vision for the future – not just for our technological future but for so much more.

What if, he said, every new bill of law that is passed goes through a wiki process, where citizens collaborate on law and order? Wikis offer a possibility for true demoracy.

That got me to wonder. Are there governments using wikis for true citizen collaboration?

Quite a few people write about it (e.g. “Government 2.0 comes to Ottawa”). Not many of them link to examples. And most of the examples are dead links. However, there was one that I found, in New Zealand, thanks to Open Innovators. A Police Act review was done with the help of a Wiki. This is part of the ParticipatioNZ project. On Monday, I emailed the project asking them for access to the wiki to see what’s going on inside but haven’t heard back from them. So far it looks very interesting though. I’ll keep you posted!

(Image by kbaird) 

We’re here at Northern Voice, the blogging conference I’ve been looking forward to for weeks. I haven’t done a lot of live blogging so I figured to get myself into the groove, I’ll start with asking participants to sign this online guest book:

Simon Koldyk - ScribbleWiki - WOOT! NORTHERNVOICE

Richard Eriksson - Just a Gwai Lo - Northern Voice 4 Life!

Alex Waterhouse-Hayward It’s a weblog

Pete Quily Thanks for running the Vancouver blogger meetup Isabella!

Jan Karlsbjerg Roedgroed med floede

Erica Hargreave - Always good to see you and get a hug Isabella!

Megan Cole - not the stripper from Louisiana… the *other* Megan Cole.

Arieanna Schweber - Swearing at the **** servers.

Ianiv Schweber - Taking pictures of Arieanna swearing at her blogs.

Tim Bray - happy to serve as the human foghorn at the live-sculpture session.

Carol Browne - and blogger for the Vancouver Metroblog - first time attender at this event. So far, so good!

Gene Smith - T minus 3 hours until I present

Luke Closs - Hells yes!

Ingy dot Net - I couldn’t get the umlaut.

Greg Andrews

Tim McAlpine (my blog)

Mary Brennan

Tzaddi Gordon

Beth Snow

See guys… I told you the sun shines sometimes in Vancouver! Thx for comin’ to Northern Voice. - kk+

Ahoy from UBC - Moosein’ along and stoked for the learning - DaveO

at nv - enjoying the moment and clicking through - superNova K

nv is why the web is beautiful - markmayo

Loosing the Moose for 4 years — James

More moose! Travis Smith

I am enjoying being at the conference. Being a blogging network was my favourite so far. mmccrae@yahoo.com

The Moose is definitely loose! - Mike Kelly

Northern Voice is a living community indicator and lives in the culture of love. Where else can you find the intersection of geekdom and love? Go NORTH! - Nancy White

Looks like a great spread for lunch. I hope they have a plan for the leftovers including Foodrunners or composting. Al Pasternak

Lunch at Northern Voice was nothing short of phenomenal! Jim Benson

Such an interesting crowd here, all twittering live! Megan Moser, megan@thinksalmon.com.

So inspiring… so many interesting ideas and people… MJ Ankenman

So glad to be back with the Moose! Inspiring and lots of great new ideas! Carol Sill

Glad to be Smarter than the average blog and blogging from Northern Voice Dumont Walker

I love events like this, and signing this guest book is a wonderful example of fresh thinking. Thanks Lloyd Budd.

Tak for alt! Tinfoiling

Yule Heibel — great to be at this conference, I get to meet Roland, yeah!

Werner Bahlke — es ist wunderbar wieder in Vancouver zu sein!

Rahel Bailie - enjoying my first Northern Voice conference. It’s a new conference model for me, one which I find refreshing.

Tanya (aka NetChick) - Loving seeing everyone! Great to see you, too, Isabella. Go blogs!