Take services like Twitter or Friendfeed, for example. Scoble and Calacanis et al. have these huge following/follower counts, and while I know there are a certain number of positives to this, these top users don’t ever get to use these services for what they are intended to do. These guys don’t actually use Twitter for sending out status updates to friends, and I doubt they ever make any lasting friendships out of them.

While Brightkite is floundering a little of late, it is another perfect example of this A-List effect. Could you imagine Scoble and his 30,000-odd followers actually using Brightkite for seeing where friends are and meeting up locally? No, instead their phone/web interface would be flooded with updates that they more than likely don’t care about.

Having these crazy number of relationships on these services basically turn them into great big science experiments. While this has its use, I’m happy sticking to using them for their original puporse.

But I guess that is the true beauty of these things – you can use them however it makes you happy.

Anyway, Richard makes some really interesting points (not just in this post, but all the time). The things that stand out to me are:

Don’t go searching for things to blog about, let them come to you

This is something I completely agree with. Forced blogging is not something I ever want to read. If you have to search out something to write about, then it isn’t worth writing. I would much prefer to read about someone’s comments on something they come across in day-to-day life, than about something a person is posting because they feel they need to update a blog. I don’t unsubscribe from people for lack of posting if they make me think when I read what they have to say.

Keep a private life

Indeed, a very important point. Richard says

If I need to relate my personal state of affairs about something on this blog then I would likely pass it through my standard question: “would I be ok with everyone I currently know reading this post?”

It is always important to think about how your words affect others, and this goes triple for such a public and easily accessible medium. While I do post about my personal life, I indeed run everything through the same kind of filter that Richard does.

Richard does not write about his work

This is something I don’t entirely agree with. Since my work is online for everyone to see anyway, blogging about my work life is something I don’t really hesitate in doing. The ‘About‘ page on MobileBurn links to this blog, and obviously I need to take the same precautions as anyone would have to take when speaking of their employment, but overall I’m pretty happy to speak about what is going on in that side of my life. I think of this blog as an extension to my paid work anyway, where I can write more personal opinions about the pieces I write for MobileBurn, though it is not necessarily an integral part of my work – and I am certainly not paid for the thoughts expressed here. What I do not do, however, is blog about people I meet or talk to in my work life – I have no permission to talk about those people, and respect their privacy. The same goes for blogging about my personal life.

In short, I feel happy expressing my thoughts about my day-to-day work life, but not about individual situations that may arise in an effort to respect other’s privacy.

Richard really does sum it up perfectly:

I’m not going to jeopardize other areas in my life for the sake of my blog. I want to be proud (or at least not ashamed) of what I write here.

Well said.

Which brings me to looking back over the traffic and subscription numbers of the site over time, relative to the regularity of posts. It seems as though just as the blog is starting to get a little popular, I stop posting regularly, and obviously the numbers go back down again. This has revealed that there is a core base of subscribers that remain subscribed through the slow times though, which is nice, and I thank you.

In any event, I do not write this blog for the traffic. I write it as an outlet, and somewhere for me to express ideas and thoughts. I can say that I feel the block is lifting though, and there should be posts coming soon. A lot has been changing in my life – I’ve moved into a new apartment (a nice three bedroom place, very modern) among other things, so I guess I will be testing the theory that a change is as good as a holiday.

I don’t believe that this is a problem with posts disappearing, just that they are getting a post date of far into the past – in my case, it was December 1969. For everyone having trouble posting from Word 2007 to a Wordpress blog, fire up your admin console and head to Manage > Posts and change the browse month dropdown to whatever is the abstract date.

I hate it when people post to a schedule when they have nothing to say. I have been reading Atariboy’s blog for a little while now, and it is generally pretty interesting stuff. The trouble is, since he committed to posting three times a day (even though he hasn’t been), the quality of posts has gone down. I would prefer to post more infrequently if said posts have a higher quality.

There are many people on my reading list that don’t post daily. I don’t unsubscribe from them because when they do post, I enjoy reading it. They aren’t bad bloggers because of this.

Which brings me to my second point. Is there such thing as a bad blogger? There is so much emphasis out there on posting regularly, and if posts aren’t regular, a lot of people unsubscribe. I am of the belief that you can’t be a bad blogger, so long as you are satisfying your own aims for your blog. I don’t commit to daily blogging, purely because with the travel I do and other work commitments, there are times where that isn’t feasible. What I do commit to is blogging when I feel I have something that I want to get off my chest, or if I see something really cool.

That is my $0.02.

Something interesting to note though – I was looking through my feed statistics just then, and by a rather large margin, Google Desktop is the most popular reader for subscribing to my site. This surprises me a little – I have tried (and since uninstalled) Google Desktop, and it is something I would not consider to be a full-time feed reader.

It might just be me and the way I read feeds, but I would personally limit the use of a reader like GD (which sits as a sidebar or floating in a widget-like fashion) to reading things like news headlines. It is not something that I would use for reading personal blogs.

For my feed reading endeavors, I use the excellent Sage plug-in for the equally excellent Firefox. It works with the live bookmarks feature of the browser, and displays the list of feed names in a sidebar. Clicking on the feed (which displays bold if there are unread entries) takes you to an attractive two-column page with the text of the feed. Simple, brilliant.

One little thing bugs me on the Feed Icons (a group trying to promote the standard icon) website – it states down the bottom that they will soon be adding a gallery for people to upload custom feed icons for others to see and use. Is it just me, or does this destroy the point of having a standardized icon in the first place? It is bad enough that the site offers the icon in different colors, let alone whatever other form of customization that may surface.

Really, what is the point of a standard that is not being followed, even by the very place that is trying to promote it?

Also, while there is a feed for the icon releases, why does the site not utilize feed auto-discovery?

I think my biggest rule breaker is the fact that I don’t have an about me page. I have never really though about this, but now that I am I have no idea why I don’t. I will get on up by next week, for sure.

Other than that, I think I did pretty good with those rules. The only other thing I could improve on is my posting frequency, though new content should be up daily from now on.

I think that a blog has just as much right to place ads on pages as any other site. When it comes down to it, I don’t really care if they are to simply cover the bills of running the site, or to give the owner a little spending money. D’Arcy, if you could buy an iPod with revenue from running ads on your site, then I say go for it.

What I dislike though, is when said ads are invasive, distracting, or rude. I don’t have a problem with AdSense ads, but please spare me Flash ads!

I enjoy your content D’Arcy, so if you want to be remunerate for doing it, go right ahead. I don’t think your selling out, just making a living.