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This post grew from a proposal I put together for a client of ours, who were interested in the distinction between forums or bulletin boards, and weblogs.

Their site incorporated a forum section, intended for their customers to discuss their products and services. Although there were a few posts from a hard-core of regulars, the forums didn’t get a lot of use – despite the traffic to the site being relatively high. When we initially suggested adding weblogs to the site, there was a degree of confusion about the differences between the two – they were under the impression that the two were largely the same.

What follows is a quick explanation of the differences – and relative strengths and weaknesses – between weblogs and forums.
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Interested in the blogging scene? Confused how to go about setting up your very own blog? Follow these fifty-one easy steps and you’ll be a l33t blogger in no time!

I came across some quick tips for email this morning, which was well-timed given the number of messages in my inbox at the time. Here’s a selection:

Speeding things up

Use shortcuts on the subject line to remove the need to open and read the body of the message, e.g.

• NRN – no reply needed
• TY – thank you
• NRB 10/02 @ 1030 – need a response by 1030 on February 10th

Use the subject line for the whole message – e.g.

• Meet @ 10:00 on 10/02- OK?

Keep it short. If you can’t get your point across in less than 10 sentences, consider what you’re trying to say.

Using it right

Don’t deliver bad news in an email – pick up the phone and use the tone of your voice to indicate concern.

If you find yourself sending an email because it’s something you don’t want to say face-to-face, STOP. Delete the email, and go and say it face-to-face or pick up the phone

If you can’t resolve a problem within two back-and-forth exchanges, pick up the phone.

Never, ever, use the BCC field – think of it as the online way of going behind someone’s back.

Keep high emotions out of it – if you’re about to hit the reply button to something that’s annoyed you, CLOSE THE MESSAGE AND WALK AWAY FROM IT. Never send a hasty, irritated response to an annoying email – jobs have been lost that way.

There’s a phrase doing the rounds at the moment – “life hacks” – the idea that there are various tools and techniques that you can use to work smarter, not harder. Whether it’s as simple as leaving the item that you absolutely, positively, have to take with you in the morning underneath your car keys – or a full-blown life and work management process like Getting Things Done – when it comes to collecting these kind of techniques, I’m something of a squirrel.

Whether I use them or not is another matter – but I’m going to start posting some of the more interesting (and hopefully useful) ideas into a ‘Working Smarter’ category. Some will be techniques, some will be software – hopefully some will be useful.

Steve Rubel:

If some mischevious crafty person wanted to, he/she could launch a “fake” fake blog and fool everyone into thinking that a clueless major company was behind it. That’s a pretty substantial liability for corporations, don’t you think? Maybe we need a wiki like fakeblogs.info (it’s available) where we all can go to discuss fake blogs and who we think is behind them or whether a fake blog is really a phony itself.

OK, done…