adoption curve dot net

This is an interesting article from B L Ochmann about things to bear in mind when writing content for blogs.

The basic guidelines: keep your copy lively, factual, tight, clear and short and search engine optimized.

After reading a number of these kind of articles, the first piece of advice I’d give someone about writing on a blog is “stop reading articles about writing on blogs and get on and write something” – I don’t know what it is about blogging per se, but it does tend to provoke navel-gazing amongst the marketing gurus and academic wonks around the blogosphere (which is a word I heartily detest, actually). Better to post something not-quite-perfect than not to post at all, as far as I’m concerned.

But despite my cynicism, the article does have some good ideas – which if applied equally to business writing generally would make the world a whole lot more interesting to read about.

Received by email this morning:

We know our members have cool & unusual interests and talents. So to make the most of that, we’ve created a new jobs category called OutRaGeouS jobs. This is the place to list non-mature stuff that you need to hire for (or have to offer) that might be considered a little wacky, bizarre, or just plain unusual.

And a quick sample:

Need Psychic to perform dog seance, $50.

OFFERED: I will clean your chimney dressed as a gargoyle $110

Who says online job boards have to be boring?

Via the consistently interesting Frank Patrick, I came across this article by Jason Womack on the site of David Allen, he of Getting Things Done fame.

Creation and Execution, both are important, and both very different. I’ve found and use different tools and strategies to enhance the quality and quantity of ideas I have, and the project outcomes I manage.

There are some interesting ideas from Jason here – in particular what he terms journalling:

For a long time now, I’ve journaled daily – my experiences, learnings, ideas, etc. I use this daily debrief to shake anything loose or to ground learning that I want to process.

This is a fairly formal approach – the idea of writing up a “dear diary” entry on a daily basis – but it’s also something that can be done on a much more casual basis, particularly in a project environment, using a blog. I’m constantly amazed by going back through the archives of the blogs I contribute to, and seeing how much valuable information has been hoovered up into them by the simple process of posting up snippets as and when they appear.

It’s part of the tacit information capture process – particularly if a number of members of the project team are contributing to a team blog. Shortcuts, workarounds – the small nuggets of unstructured information such as these are the kinds of information that can make project progress a great deal smoother. How many times have you spent time working something out from first principles, or searching for the right configuration settings – only to find that the person at the other side of the room had got there first, if only they’d told you about?

One of the approaches we recommend to our clients is that they encourage the habit of posting these kinds of snippets onto a blog as a matter of routine. That way they become archived and searchable, and the project blog starts to evolve into a shared repository – a collective project nervous system, if you like. While it may not seem like a particularly revolutionary step at first, try this for a short period of time and I guarantee that you’ll be amazed at how quickly the repository builds – and the time it starts to save by making vital information available.

This morning’s Dilbert will be familiar to many a project manager…