Finding connections in blog comments
Borrowing an idea from Tom Webster‘s social media monitoring, let’s take a look at your blog’s comments today.
Start with WordPress (any blogging software will do, however). Open up your comments section and look at only approved comments, as I assume you de-spam your comments regularly before approving them.
Open up your text editor of choice and begin copying and pasting the last 10 pages of comments into it. If you’re feeling more sophisticated than copy/paste, open up MySQL and do an export of the post text column only to simplify the next steps.
Dedupe it if your software allows you to dedupe by line. Remove any obvious formatting or data-only lines and you should be left with a large text file of your recent blog comments.
Now fire up Wordle and feed this large chunk of text into it:
Two questions for you:
1. Do the largest words in the cloud express an intended focus of your blogging? That is, if you blog about marketing or social media, are the comments you’ve received indicative of that? If not, your content may be somewhat off target.
2. Are there words or word associations in the cloud that you didn’t expect to find in there? For example, in my cloud above, I found that people was unusually prominent and it turns out that the word people is used very heavily when referencing how to build social networks like Google+.
Got a blogger you respect? Run their comments through the same mechanism and see if you have anything in common with their audience. Here, for example, is Chris Brogan:
So, what are people saying about your blog posts?
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Disaster Rice Tabbouleh
One of the best disaster prep foods I’ve always found to be reliable is good ol’ brown rice. It’s dense, full of nutrition, keeps reasonably well (not as good as white rice, but you sacrifice nutrition for longevity), and is relatively easy to make, especially with a rice cooker.
In advance of Hurricane Irene, in addition to all the other sensible disaster prep stuff, I put on an extra large pot of rice as well. Now that the hurricane has blown through, I have a lot of cooked rice on my hands. Luckily, there’s a great rice salad that you can use the leftovers with, using ingredients familiar to anyone who knows the middle Eastern dish tabbouleh.
Ingredients
- 1 large pot of cooked brown rice
- 1 large cucumber
- 2 medium onions (medium = tennis ball size)
- 1 medium carrot
- Basil
- 1 teaspoon Salt
- 1/2 teaspoon Pepper
- 1/4-1/2 cup lemon juice
- Jalapeno sauce or other spicy sauce
Directions
- Chop up all the vegetables into small cubes.
- Mix in a large bowl with the rice.
- Add in the rest of the ingredients except the jalapeno sauce.
- Stir.
- Add in jalapeno sauce to preferred spicyness.
- Let sit overnight.
- Eat.
This makes as little or as much rice salad as you want. It’s very tasty and super easy to serve. It’s best cold, which also means that it’s great for taking to work. It works on the same principles as bulgur wheat, so any recipe for tabbouleh can also use brown rice instead of the wheat.
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How to market your WordPress blog
I’m delighted and excited to share some of my ideas, strategies, tips, tools, and methods for marketing your WordPress blog at Boston’s WordCamp event. As I anticipate a fair number of people and A/V conditions that are always less optimal than we’d like, I’m providing the mindmap for the session in advance here, so that if you’re attending (or even if you’re just curious), you can follow along on your own device and not have to rely on squinting at the screen.
Click the image for larger versions.
Would you like a high resolution version you can download and print out? Click here for the high-res PDF.
One cautionary note: without hearing the presentation that goes with the map, there’s a good chance some stuff won’t make sense. If you’d like to hear the full presentation, make sure you request the next marketing conference you attend to book me to speak and ask for this presentation to be a session at the event.
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How to distill content curation for real impact
How do you cope with the flood of information that swamps your inbox, blog reader, and mobile device every day?
How do you find and isolate all the good stuff, separate the wheat from the chaff, and use the information you’re receiving to actually move the needle?
The same way that you get the good stuff out of crude oil, weak brews, and perfume herbs: distillation. If you slept through high school chemistry class (or were interested in an entirely different kind of chemistry, as many of my peers were), distillation is the process of heating a raw material to extract a chemical based on its boiling point, then condensing the distilled product separately. Cognac, for example, is distilled wine from high-quality ugni blanc grapes. It’s distilled twice in copper pots, then aged for two years before being sold for consumption.
The same process that works for cognac works for content curation. It’s not enough just to subscribe to a bunch of blogs and read a bunch of tweets, not if you want to take all of the information you receive daily and make it useful. Here’s the process I use on a daily and weekly basis; feel free to modify or adapt it for your own needs.
I start every day with my blog reader on the iPad. I’ve subscribed to about 2500 different blogs across a spectrum of topics, and each day I hit the main topic areas, such as economics, marketing, social media, development, etc. I skim through rapidly, looking for bits of information and data that catch my eye, read into articles that do, and then share them via Google Reader. I do this specifically on the iPad because it lets me focus better on just reading the news with no other distractions.
If that were all I did, I’d still be swamped with information, since I share 20-30 different articles a day, if not more. The first distillation pass is what I cull out for #the5 on Twitter every day. Of those 20-30 articles, which 5 of them are the most worth sharing? Some days, that’s easy. Some days, that’s a very tough call. But forcing myself to distill out only 5 different pieces of information makes me focus on the stuff that’s truly important to me, stuff that I’d want to really remember. One of my general rules of thumb for stuff in #the5 is that if I didn’t learn something, I don’t share it.
The second pass of distillation occurs weekly, as I prep each Tuesday night for a recording of Marketing Over Coffee. I actually subscribe to my own #the5 tweets as a separate RSS feed so that I can see just the most important articles of the week that I thought were good enough to share. I’ll star key items in that feed so that I have a very compact list of stuff that should be headline discussion topics and then bring those with me every Wednesday morning when John Wall and I record the show.
The final stage of distillation, the stage where I know something has got to be kept or else, is when I take distilled items out of this process and put them into reference tools like Evernote or Instapaper, ensuring that I have them on hand for when I need to reference them later.
This three-phase process wasn’t automatic or something immediately contrived. It just evolved that way as the amount of information thrown at me increased, and this was a handy way of filtering it down until only the gems were left. It’s probably not right for you and your information processing style, but I hope it gives you some ideas and inspires you to try multiple levels of content curation to distill out the things that you really need or want to remember and learn.
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Weekend Foodblogging: Spicy Bacon Onigiri
If you’re not familiar with the traditional Japanese dish onigiri, you’re missing out on one of the handiest portable foods there is. Onigiri date back at least to the 11th century, if not older, and were a food used by many Japanese, especially in the military, since they stored and traveled well. Onigiri are traditionally rice balls filled with some salty food to act as a preservative, such as pickled plum or bonito, but since modern technology has given us refrigerators and such, the need to restrict fillings to preserved items is somewhat less mandatory.
This recipe is, as far as I know, original. That’s not to say that putting bacon in things is an original idea, but this application isn’t something I found at a restaurant and tried to imitate. It’s fairly straightforward to make and is wicked tasty.
Filling:
- 2 strips of finely chopped, crispy thick-cut bacon & the rendered fat
- 1 tablespoon of finely chopped fresh parsley
- 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise
- 1 tablespoon of panko Japanese bread crumbs
- 1/4 teaspoon or to taste Sriracha chili sauce (adjust depending on how spicy you like spicy)
Onigiri:
- 1 full pot of cooked, cooled short grain white rice, ideally sushi rice
- 1 package of nori seaweed sheets
Instructions:
- Cut the nori in half diagonally with a pair of scissors.
- Take all the filling stuff, put it in a bowl, and stir very well.
- Form rice “patties” with your hands that are about a half inch thick and about 2 1/2 inches across.
- Take a small spoonful of the filling, put it on one patty, put a second on top, and mould into a ball or triangle shape, depending on how traditional you like your onigiri
- Fold the triangular piece of nori around the rice ball when you’re ready to eat. (don’t put it on in advance or it gets soggy and nasty)
- Enjoy!
The filling is something that should be a little sparse but spread across the tongue as you chew; that’s why I make this with two rice patties instead of the traditional method of putting an indentation in the rice ball and filling it. Using two flat patties lets the filling spread out a little more and be more present in every bite.
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Who are you reading?
I’m always on the lookout for new sources, new points of interest, new things to research, new ideas. I would imagine you are, too. I’d like you to leave suggestions for who you’re reading in the comments below. Here’s the criteria for who I’m looking for you to share:
- The original content test. As much as I love Techcrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, etc., I’d much rather subscribe to the sources they read. Who is writing original stuff? Share them below!
- The first test. When you open your blog reader, whose blog do you go to first? Share them below!
- The blind retweet test. Who are some people who are so worth reading that you automatically retweet their stuff first, then read it, because you know they are always providing ridiculously good value? Share them below!
- The dark horse test. There are some folks who are pretty well known, like Chris Brogan, Mitch Joel, Avinash Kaushik, Jason Falls, etc. that most people know. Who don’t we know but is writing at the same level of value and quality? Share them below!
If you include a link (please do), there’s a good chance the comment will be moderated by Disqus, so I’ll approve it manually – thus, don’t hit submit comment a whole bunch of times if nothing appears. I’m out of the office today, so come back at the end of the day to see all the comments, or if you folks leave a phenomenal list, I may take the time to publish it as an OPML file for everyone.
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