If you want to start a blog, or if you are visiting for the first time, getting a good blog started requires a little time, effort, and willingness to be open. Spend a little time developing your blog’s overall theme. What do you plan to write about. It’s better to focus on a narrower topic than to just write about whatever thoughts you have. And in deciding your blog’s main topic, you will need to spend some time developing a writing style appropriate for that subject. Since online interaction is the preferred method of communication, you’ll need to invite readers by allowing them to comment on your blog. Watch for spammers, but overall developing a blog is a process.

This is coming from personal experience with this blog. We all know spammers and scammers are out there in the cyber world, just waiting to send a deluge of pointless emails for whatever reason they have. A favorite target is to submit spam as comments to a blog. I have a measure on this blog that allows me to screen each comment. Some of the spam attmepts are obvious. I have a pretty good idea that if I get a comment with 15-20 links and it’s in RUSSIAN, it’s a safe bet that it’s spam. There are some, though, that get tricky because they seem like a response to the post. I still play it safe, so if you’ve posted a comment, please bear with me while I work to verify it as a legitimate comment.

I know I missed the regular Friday fun post. Life got in the way a little bit. So, to all of my fan out there (that’s not a typo), I give you my Monday bit o’ fun. I am a huge fan of music and comedy, and when someone can combine the two, I laugh to the point of wheezing. This clip from YouTube is of the great Victor Borge, the Danish pianist/comedian. He describes an opera suposedly written by Mozart and plays and sings the opera. Obviously, this is an imaginary opera, but Borge does a great job of incorporating all the common elements from Mozart’s music. Enjoy!

Thanks to MK Akan for this idea. Everything in life can be boiled into one of two things, an event or a process. An event is a periodic occurrence lasting a short time. A process is a long term endeavor that encompasses many days, weeks, even years. When you blog, if you want to be successful, you need to treat it like a process. If you’ve never blogged before, you need to educate yourself, but the education doesn’t just happen at the beginning. The education takes place every time you post. You learn something, even a little something, every time you post. The best bloggers are the most educated, and while some people can teach themselves and retain quicker, the process is still the same. Treat your blog like a crock pot, adding the ingredients of daily content with your experience as well as advice and experience from others. Given time, you will have the results you desire.

Jill Smokler presented a pretty concise list of the things to avoid adding to your blog if you want to attract a following of readers. Tops on her list was automatic music. I have never gone to a blog that played music automatically once I was on the site. I’ve been to regualr websites that did that, but not a blog. I agree that this is a sure way to turn people away. Even if it’s a music blog, forcing people to listen to music they may not enjoy just to see if you have something written will not keep people there for long.

I got to thinking about video blogs and what the proper protocol for getting something like that going. I went to YouTube and did a search for blogs just to see what would pop up.  this is one of the videos I got.  This is a very clever presentation of the benefits of both blogs and wikis.  For those unsure of what a wiki is, it’s a platform for sharing information where the content can be edited by the readers.  This “debate” uses the Kennedy/Nixon presidential debates of 1960 as its vehicle.  Now, I think that while this is a good presentation, I also believe it automatically sets a bias in the viewer’s mind because we all know what Nixon eventually did when he was President. Which is why I wince to say I sided with the Nixon side of the debate in general. At one point, Nixon talks about how you can see who said what when.  With a wiki, you can edit anonymously and there is no repercussion if your statement is incorrect.  But, watch the whole video and decide for yourself which platform is better.

Your blog is your voice to the outside world. And if you want people to interact with you blog, you have to display some personality in your posts.  Now, the extremes of this scenarios are when you have all personality and no meaningful content.  You are the equivalent of Paris Hilton, fun to look at and converse with for a minute or two, but you then realize that there is nothing of substance to what she is saying.  The other end is great content; smart, insightful but with no personality. Congratulations, you are Ben Stein calling out “Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?” So you have to find the right balance between your mind and your personality.  The problem? You have to find the balance that works for you.  No one can really tell you how much personality you need or how much more content you need to inject.  It’s a certain amount of trial and error.

I decided to do something different for this weeks bit of Friday fun.  Remember the old word game Mad-Libs? I decided to take a story and edit it, protecting the names of anyone involved, and replaced words with blanks to create a fun, silly story.

Martin Stone, an 83-year-old World War II veteran, and his wife Rosetta, 82, say that police have come looking for __________(noun) at their house about 50 times in the past _______(number) years.

It’s not clear why.

Police arrive from all over and ________(verb) on the door of the Martins’ two-story home searching for a _________(adjective) _________(noun) nearly every time. “I’m really worried,” Rosetta said. “How could so many people get my __________(noun) and how could cops be ________(verb ending in -ing) from so many different precincts?” The couple said one of the most __________(adjective) mix-ups came when police and ___________(celebrity) rolled up, hunting for _____________(famous villain).

“That is one I can’t get over,” Martin said, unable to understand how the NYPD could not know how to _________(adverb) find one. Even police don’t understand why the couple’s ____________(noun) continues to be a target. “Our identity theft squad is investigating the matter,” Inspector Red Mulen said.

Martin says they’re ___________(adjective) — but it still makes his ____________(noun) ______________(verb).

This blogger named ‘Evan‘ decided to blog about his grocery spending habits.  He posted each day talking about the challenges of spending only $1 per day on food for a month.  It got me to thinking that blogging through a book or blogging something like this, not necessarily for a publicity stunt, can be a wealth of blogging posts as well as stimulate conversation among your readers.  It’s got me thinking about something I can do for this blog.

Do these two things go together?

This is Fox’s headline for a healthcare story. I mean, no matter which side of the healthcare debate you fall on, as a news organization, if you promote yourself as being fair and balanced, you can’t use headlines like these. This implies that the other side is wrong. If you set yourself up as being balanced and fair, you can’t take a side, by definition, you have to remain neutral. When it comes to your blog, don’t say you believe one thing then go back on that.