Alphablogs

Recently, we’ve been assisting one of our clients’ blogs, Coal Harbour: Living on the Urban Waterfront start a series of posts on luxury hotels in Vancouver. In my journeys through the internet in search for useful material on the topic, I found an interesting blog, Vagablond. I’d like to tell you a little about it because it shows yet another twist on how you can use blogging.

This blog focuses on travel, food, wine and shopping – and it caters to a very specific audience. Here’s what they say in their “about” section:

At Vagablond, our team of editors, writers and designers are all frequent travelers who live and work all around the globe.

We are determined to bring you the best and most interesting news, information and directory listings for web sites, articles and resources related to fashionable travel, food and wine.

• We’re selective. Unlike other travel blogs, we only select a handful of writers to offer stories about upscale travel, food, wine and shopping.
• Second, we’re elitists. We are now only publishing articles with an upscale, fashionable, stylish travel slant about the best restaurants, hippest boutique hotels, most posh spas, coolest gadgets, best foods and finest wines.
• We’re growing a global audience that wants and expects to read this kind of content.

I admire the clarity and specificity of this. No ifs and buts. Maybe they’ve taken to heart ProBlogger’s suggestion to have a mission statement for your blog – always a good idea.

This approach to blogging could easily be adapted to different circumstances. For example, I could see this working as a platform for professional experts (call centre consultants or engineers, just to name two examples) as a form of professional journal.

Vagablond is really a type of online magazine, providing specific information to a specific audience. A paper-based magazine requires an immense amount of effort, capital and time. An online journal such as Vagablond is a perfect alternative to that.

(P.S. If you’d like to see what Vagablond has to say about Vancouver, click here)

To those who are regular bloggers, blogging help may seem unnecessary, but if you are new to it, or don’t feel computer-savvy, blog help is a must if you want to communicate this way.

You might think the old joke about jogging applies here: “I have someone who does that for me.” How can anyone blog for anyone else? This has been a topic of conversation among bloggers, and there is much to be said on the side that adamantly insists that the people who are blogging should express themselves personally, without intermediary. But time restraints, or computer problems, for example, sometimes mean that blog help can be needed.

Over the weekend I met with a client who has some extraordinary art work that she wishes to show online, and what better way to do that than by blogging? The hurdles to be overcome are many, not the least of which is simply navigating the blog software and finding out how to save the text. Some of what she wrote had not been saved actually, so luckily she had a backup of the writing that could reproduce the blog postings that had been lost. Then we had the obstacle of the image size. After going through the learning curve of the scanner and finding out how to use it, she learned how to scan her artworks, and how to save them, then I came in to help make them ready for upload. Each piece is very beautiful and the images are extremely symbolic and meaningful. They work very well on the screen, as the light passing through the textures is very compelling. Because they were saved in quite large formats, we went over the ways to make the images smaller, and more blog-ready. In the process we discovered that there were many areas still to be determined in this blog-to-be, many parts still to be done, and definitions of the relationships between the static pages and the blog postings, as well as header information were still to be worked out.

Just because the blog software like wordpress is so easy to use, and wordpress.com makes it so very easy to do, we mustn’t make the assumption that this means everyone will have the patience and interest in developing their own blogs. Experienced bloggers have all been there, learning how to post images, how to make the most of the blogosphere, and how to best communicate in this medium. It is a continually expanding area of expertise, always shifting. That’s where we come in with blogging help and assistance, at whatever level a client might need it. We can offer that experience to new bloggers, so the trial and error process is reduced somewhat.

At the end of the day, you get a great blog, and you can add to it yourself with confidence, or we can help provide content, research or links to enhance your blog presence.

technorati tags: blogging, time+management, art, art+work, artists

I’m really enjoying working with Robert Meyer on his Musical Reminiscences. A double bassist who worked with Britten, de Sabata, and many others, Meyer participated in much of the classical recording and performance that occurred in London after the war, until the 60s when he moved to Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. His newsy reminiscences are always interesting to me. How do I help him? I take the emails he sends me and help them become bloggable. Then I post them with links to relevant additional information. And I handle any pesky spam issues.

We included his extensive discography which is introduced by a great article that really reveals the life of a working studio musician in London in those days. Through the blog Robert has been in contact with others, and has brought out even more stories than those he includes in his self-published book.

Check it out here.

A blog can really help when you are writing of a memoir, as it is episodic, and can be completed in stages, as it grows naturally. It seems easy, then the compiled blog postings can be edited together in book form. The people at Lulu have named this “the blook” - a book created from blog postings.

(This entry was included in the first LinkedIn Blog Carnival)