How to write killer blogs

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.

Outrageous jobs

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?

Blogs as a collective project nervous system

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.

Dilbert on team management

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

Secure passwords with nursery rhymes

I’ve lost count of the number of user accounts that I have to remember passwords for - so like most of the rest of the human race, I have a tendency to use the same password for everything. Simple to remember, which is great - but the need for a strong password is even more critical if you’re going to take risks like this.

Unfortunately strong passwords are difficult to remember, because the best ones are effectively random strings of characters - and we humans crave patterns. So here’s a quick technique to help create seemingly-random passwords that are easier to remember.

Take a phrase or saying, or perhaps a line from a song that you can remember readily, then type the first letter of each word as you say it to yourself. So if you find that you can easily remember “The Grand Old Duke Of York, He Had Ten Thousand Men”, you’d end up typing “tgodoyhhttm”. To the casual onlooker, that’s pretty random!

You can make it even more secure by throwing in a few number / character substitutions - zeros for the letter ‘o’, for example. So now our password becomes ‘tg0d0yhhttm’ - and if we used some other arbitrary switches - say ‘$’ for ‘h’ - we’ve got ‘thg0d0y$$ttm’, which looks even worse, but is still easy to remember once you’ve typed it a couple of times.

Try this next time your password expires instead of dog names and children’s birthdays, and you’ll be surprised how quickly it becomes second nature…

Curing distraction on the web

If you’re suffering from the distraction of the web when you’re meant to be doing something else, here’s a neat trick courtesy of Mark Wieczorek at MarkTAW.com:

The Internet is a vast repository of Time Wasters, and if you’re like me, the activity that signals that I’m about to lose focus is opening the web browser. So I created a simple web page with the words “Get Back to Work” in big, bold letters on top and set it as my homepage.

Simple, but highly effective!

Ta-da! It’s what you get when lists and RSS collide…

Getting around to saying something coherent about Basecamp (we’re impressed by it) is on the list of things to do, but the people behind Basecamp are not making things any easier by coming up with still more net-based goodness - this time, it’s a service I could use for that list of to-dos…

Ta-da Lists is one of those ideas that I wish I’d had - blindingly simple, incredibly effective, and done by someone else before I had a chance to think of it. Basically, it’s online to-do lists - but with the twist that they can be shared with others, and subscribed to via RSS.

To-do lists themselves are hardly revolutionary, and shared lists aren’t exactly new either - but what Ta-da Lists does is to make the sharing process simple and flexible. You can open your list to the world, giving everyone read access, or allow selected colleagues the ability to see and change the items on the list. And every list has an automatic RSS feed that you can use to keep up-to-date in your newsreader of choice. This is a great way of sharing simple task lists with other members of a project team that don’t need (or are frightened by) access to a full-blown PM system such as Basecamp, or simply sharing lists around - between friends, family members and so on. We’ve been using wikis for this for a while now, but Ta-da Lists makes the whole process very much more straight forward.

The use of RSS for distributing this sort of semi-structured information is perhaps the most intriguing aspect, and it’s something that we’ve been looking at in several contexts for a while now. Over the next couple of days I’ll post some more details about what we’ve been doing, and some ideas for how RSS can help get the right information to the right people at the right time.

A blogging hiatus

Things will be quiet around here next week as we take a post-Christmas break - but we’ll be back soon.

In the meantime, take a look at our sidebar, where you’ll find links to all manner of high-quality bloggage. Read and enjoy.

Helicopter views

Spotted on Frank Patrick’s Focussed Performance Business Blog:

“Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.”

    — Ludwig Wittgenstein

A nice sentiment to remember when the temptation to get lost in the detail takes hold.

Nailing down agreement

If you haven’t already come across ecademy, it’s worth a look. There’s an active project management community there, and there are often some real gems posted into the community’s forum.

This idea was posted by David Walker in response to a post of mine, talking about the problems of getting agreement on requirements:

A pretty neat thing to get your steering group to agree is a set of principles - if a requirement doesn’t meet all the principles everyone should agree that it gets kicked into touch (or put into Phase II which amounts to the same thing!). Example principles might be;

- ‘keep it vanilla’ (eg; for packaged implementations - Peoplesoft etc) - keep the software as it comes out of the box, with no unnecessary development

- no paper - nothing gets printed

- no additional hardware

- no change costing more than £x

- no hand-offs in the process

- automation, no pre-existing processes ‘computerised’

This strikes me as a simple, but very effective approach - very often it can be difficult to argue against requirements becoming more complicated mid-stream, or ensure that there’s agreement in the first place. Taking this approach means that you get agreement early on about the parameters of what’s acceptable and what isn’t - and gives you a ‘lever to pull’ if the goalposts start to drift later on.

And if you’re working in a Prince environment, this can be formalised in the Project Definition section of the Project Initiation Document, which gives a degree of ‘legal force’ to the agreement.