Wigley and Associates

Blogger doesn’t have its own trackback feature and their comments feature doesn’t work well with a blogsite.

But these two features are both available via a service called Haloscan.

I enabled Haloscan for Gary G. Smith’s weblog a few months ago and now I’ve added it for Stephen Betheil’s Water Secret’s Blog on his OrderWaterFilters.com blogsite.

Here’s my post to his blog about it.

Sekimori Design is a company in Florida, doing some of what I do: setting up web sites that include weblogs. And they’re using the term blogsite to distinguish it from a traditional website or a pure weblog site. I like it.

Competition is a confirmation of what I’m doing. Plus, I can probably learn something by looking at the sites they’ve done. And maybe some of their clients need weblog coaching.

I got this email from Michael Fraase today about yesterday’s post on the importance of categories. Mike has been blogging for years and is the managing editor and webmaster for Utne.com.

Categories are important for sites with lots of entries, and, as you mention, discrete “sections” or “departments.” But there’s a downside. If readers start honing in on one or two categories, they potentially miss out on the serendipity of discovering something interesting in a category they thought they weren’t interested in. And then you get into the feature creep of each entry being assigned to one or multiple categories. Ease of use trumps everything else. Everything.

Most recent entries? Isn’t that the definition of weblog?

I can’t imagine trying to get a tech-adverse businessperson or civil servant to use any of the server-based content management systems.

I’ve been having an interesting email conversation with a marketing strategist who’s working with a client.

They contend that my client’s site needs more advanced weblog features that Blogger doesn’t provide but that Movable Type, Word Press, Drupal, and other server-based weblog platforms do.

I told them that Blogger has the best editing features and ease-of-use of all that I’ve seen, and I tend to lean that way when trying to get non-technical business owners and civic leaders blogging. That’s the biggest hurdle, as well as keeping the costs low, since Blogger is free and requires no web server installation.

Blogger doesn’t have blog categories, nor a “most recent entries listing” which are “absolutely critical” for this person.

I do think categories are important and Blogger had promised them up until Google bought the company. Now I’m not sure if/when they’ll be offered. Does not having them outweigh its other advantages?

Like a “most recent entries” listing, I’ve come to think that categories are most important for sites where there’s a wide range of distinct topics (subjects? issues?) being covered in the weblog… and that then allow site visitors to gravitate towards one set of weblog posts more than the others.

It seems as though most small business sites are 75% traditional web sites and 25% blog, and the range of topics that they’re covering on their blogs seems appropriately narrow for the customers who visit. A restaurant/bar could conceivably have weblog categories for food, drink, and events but visitors are likely going to be interested all posts in all those categories so it seems a low priority to have the feature.

But I’ve not really thought this issue through before so it’s been helpful to have my assumptions challenged about it.

Got insights on this? I’d like to hear ‘em.

From the Jan. 10, 2005 Issue of Fortune: 10 TECH TRENDS: #1 - Why There’s No Escaping the Blog Freewheeling bloggers can boost your product�or destroy it. Either way, they’ve become a force business can’t afford to ignore.

Unlike earlier promises of self-publishing revolutions, the blog movement seems to be the real thing. A big reason for that is a tiny innovation called the permalink: a unique web address for each posting on every blog. Instead of linking to web pages, which can change, bloggers link to one another’s posts, which typically remain accessible indefinitely. This style of linking also gives blogs a viral quality, so a pertinent post can gain broad attention amazingly fast�and reputations can get taken down just as quickly.

Kent Nerburn, author and blogger, has a profile in the December issue of Minnesota Monthly: Kent Nerburn writes to bridge the spirits of two peoples, by Pat Samples. Alas, the article isn’t available online.

In the Dec. 20 issue of eWeek: Movable Type Fixing Bug as Spam Clogs Blogs

Movable Type 3.14, which includes a patch, was expected to be available by the end of Monday as a free download for users of Movable Type 3.0 or later

In Phil Windley’s blog last Friday:

I just got off the phone with Blake Harris who’s writing a story on blogging in the public sector for Public CIO. We had a great chat about the uses of blogs in state and local government. I pointed him at the blogs of the Chief of Police and City Manager for Eden Prairie, MN. These guys are still at it and their blogs appear as great as they did when I first saw them. Makes you want to visit.

Windley also mentioned “these guys” in his blog back in July. (I’m sure they’d be pleased to have you visit, Phil.)

Windley is a prof at Brigham Young University, formerly Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the State of Utah. Blake Harris of Public CIO interviewed one or both of the Eden Prairie bloggers yesterday.

I’ve contacted them to let them know about the U.K. project, the Northfield.org’s civic blogosphere project, and some of the citizen journalism projects being followed by Professor Len Witt and his Public Journalism Network.

Four of my blogging clients are among those participating in a U.K.-led civic leader weblog project called Read My Day. (Project details in this previous post.)

L to R: City of Northfield Police Chief Gary Smith, City of Northfield Planning Commission Chair Betsey Buckheit, and Minnesota State Representative Ray Cox at an audio recording session at my house on Friday night. The Minnesota-based bloggers who are participating:

• City of Northfield Planning Commission Chair Betsey Buckheit
• City of Eden Prairie Police Chief Dan Carlson
• Northfield School District Board of Education Member (elect) Diane Cirksena
• Minnesota State Representative Ray Cox
• League of Women Voters VP Kathleen Doran-Norton
• Scott Neal, City Manager, City of Eden Prairie
• Rice County Board Commissioner (elect) Jessica Peterson
• City of Northfield Police Chief Gary Smith

See this post on the project weblog that contains 11 audio clips (MP3’s) from the several of the bloggers.

I posted on this issue of interaction to my Leadership Blogging weblog today.

It starts out:

There’s an inhibiting factor in getting many leaders to participate in online interaction (message boards, mailing lists, weblog comment discussion).

They easily get overwhelmed (or rightly fear they will) by the volume of communications and the subsequent expectation that they will have to continue to be responsive to any citizen/customer who wants to engage them electronically.

And then when they don’t/can’t keep up, they look/feel bad.

So I typically advise them to NOT enable comments when they first launch their blogs, but rather to use a Contact Me form…

continued…

In the December, 2004 issue of Governing magazine, The Artful Blogger:

Blogs don’t have to be anonymous or racy. Scott Neal, the city manager of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, keeps a blog that offers readers an insider’s view of what it’s like to manage a local government. He doesn’t dish gossip the way the 4th Floor blogger did. But Neal’s blog is intensely personal, timely and insightful. On Election Day, for example, he wrote about some of the unexpected problems he had to deal with at polling places. “I try to present citizens with the kind of things we face every day,” Neal says. “This is an opportunity to put a face on the faceless bureaucrat.”

…

Griff Wigley, a consultant who coaches Scott Neal on his blogging technique, says that policy wonks often have a hard time breaking out of “memo speak” in their blogs. “The key piece is the voice must sound authentic,” Wigley says. Bloggers don’t need to be technologically savvy, according to Wigley, but they do need to devote a little time to blogging almost every day. That keeps material on the Web site fresh and keeps readers–if there are any–coming back for more. “It’s this near real-time window into your world that makes blogs compelling,” Wigley says.

12/1 update: The preview text of the article is online in their “glimpses” format but not yet the in formatted version.