March 2007

As I am writing this, I am sitting in an empty house. After five weekends of painting and cleaning, tomorrow will be the day that movers descend upon this empty house and fill it full of furniture, boxes, and all the other outward and visible signs of my life.

I’ve just come from my old place that is now full of the boxes that will be delivered here tomorrow. When you’re not the one doing the packing, you get to sit around and do a lot of thinking. Thinking about the memories of the place you are leaving, wondering if what you are doing is the right thing, and hoping that the new place will work out the way you thought it would when you signed on the dotted line.

It’s called starting over. And it is a huge change, often fraught with risk.

How many times have you started over in your life? New place to live, new spouse, new child, new job, new state to live in, or new direction in your life?

I’ve done it quite a bit, thinking back on it. Starting over doesn’t get any easier with time, but planning helps out more now when I make such a transition.

Because starting over is such a big change, many people are not willing to go the distance to risk starting over. Instead, the stay with what makes them sad, or frustrated, or even in danger.

Yet, starting over is a critical skill. While it is hard, one needs to get to when it is right to start over and figure out how to gauge and reduce the risk. Starting over blows the past away. Not like the past never happened, of course. But starting over — and acknowledging it — means that the past is really the past.

That is a powerful change.

Scot

I’m in the process of moving, spending the last several weekends cleaning and painting the new (old) place. It has been a lot of work, even affecting the posting a bit on the blog.

Interestingly, one of the hardest jobs in the move this time around was getting the right technology for Internet access.

My current setup is DirecTV for Cable and Qwest for both local telephone service and DSL.

Moving three miles away yielded no DSL access from Qwest at the new home location. So now, we have the conundrum: What fast Internet service to get?

The logical option for most people would be the local (national) cable company which, in my case, would be Comcast. A lot of people select this option. I didn’t for several reasons:

• DirecTV has the NFL package and I am a die-hard Green Bay Packer fan and get to see them every week even though I am nowhere near Wisconsin to see them on television. My point: not all technology decisions have something to do with the logic of the blog; but, instead, the logic of the person needing the service.
• Comcast, in my opinion, has some disadvantages when it comes to recovering from a storm out here last December, where there were widespread power outages. Including my house for five days. They had to come back through behind the power crews and reinstall their cable lines. In the meantime, my DirecTV was just fine working with the home generator for power to the units and a dish. As a side note, many people also have phone service via the Internet and Comcast pushes this option heavily…but failed in the service with the power lines being down and not getting cable back up and working even later.
• I also had some serious reservations about changing my cable company — which I am very happy with — just to get high speed Internet access for the new place. It’s like saying I need a new RV just so I can get a sports car to run on the same road. One doesn’t really have anything to do with the other.

Now, I was perfectly happy with DSL from Qwest. I’ve had good experiences with them and good service when needed. I’m just stunned that in suburban Seattle-land with expensive homes in a densely populated area — well established neighborhoods and not new construction — that DSL would not be available. But, it’s not, so there’s my reality.

So, what did I end up doing? I used a new broadband wireless service called Clearwire. DSL speeds over the air using encrypted technology in licensed bandwidth.

I have to tell you, it has been the simplest, most pleasurable customer experience I have had in a long time.

I’ve used Internet for the ordering. They set up the account, the payments, and automatically shipped the equipment all through one ordering process that took about a half hour.

The equipment arrived FedEx the next morning. After unpacking the one box, the total time to install the service was a whopping five minutes. Plug in modem. Plug in Ethernet cable from laptop to the modem. Turn on PC. Have DSL speed on the Internet. I mean, that was it.

Oh. You can also take the wireless unit with you and as long as you are in their coverage area, you can have Internet access from wherever you are. Camping in an RV in their coverage area? You have DSL speed access there. Traveling to your home town and there is coverage (I was stunned at coverage in Eau Claire, WI, my home town…)? You have access there.

DSL speed is becoming technology that is a necessity for writers to do their work. Selecting the vendor for your home is an important decision to help make your writing, research, and accessing your other technology an easier job for you.

Scot

Today I added a new “widget” to my blog. It’s that thing labeled “Categories” over on the left side just under the calendar.

It’s called a “category cloud” in that the number of posts that I have designated as part of a category are shown in relative size to the number of posts. So, for example, right now the category of “Technology for Writers” is the largest typeface and has the largest number of posts that have that category listed by me when a new article is uploaded to the blog.

This post, as you can see at the bottom where information is provided, is placed into the “Technology for Writers” and “Ten Keyboards Business” categories. The plugin then takes and recalculates how many posts are in the various categories I listed and updates the size of the type in the “category cloud.”

The least number of posts are the smallest typeface — and there are a lot of them!

That’s why I like the so-called clouds: It’s a visual way of seeing where I have been concentrating on my writing and where I need to fill in with more posts on a particular category.

The other interesting thing about “clouds” is that they conserve space. As I write this, the regular Categories listed are equal sized and vertical — taking up a lot of space. That might be OK depending upon your blog template and how you want your site to look. But this plugin gives you a good option to change if you need to.

I’m going to try it out for a while and see how it goes. Does it make the blog look better compared to the regular Category presentation?

Scot

What kind of blog should a writer — you — create?

At a fundamental level, writers try and create relationships with readers. If you are writing a novel, you want the reader engaged in your characters and plot. You want your readers to develop a relationship with your characters.

In non-fiction, you want to create a relationship with the subject you are writing about.

So it should be with your blog as one of the technology components that support your writing. You should write to develop relationships with your readers.

Over at the blog on SOBCon07, there is a good listing of how to take your blog to the next level when it comes to building relationships. Here they are:

• Respect that in business and blogging all things are based in connecting relationships
• Treat our blogs like a business, or a business-like hobby
• Define a vision for our blogs that inspires others to be part of it
• Identify like-minded bloggers whose blogging goals match our own
• Evaluate our blogs through the eyes of a first-time reader
• Use links, trackbacks, and comments to lead to increased participation, and extended reach that could develop into business ventures
• Ensure presentation, navigation and all reader experiences are intuitive, simple and elegant
• Know our brand values as readers define them and be able to articulate the unique and remarkable values we offer
• Understand basic tools that are useful in adding video, podcasting, social media, and voice commenting
• Reach out beyond the blogosphere to non-blogging readers to become a resource they rely on
• Recognize the traits and characteristics of a successful and outstanding blog

Of course, doing those things requires a bunch of skill, knowledge, and persistence which is why this great group of bloggers is having a conference about it.

But whether you can go or not, writers should build relationships with their readers through their blogs. SOBCon07 can help show that way.

Scot