PureBlogging

For several days, I’ve been trying to spend a little time getting more organized to increase the efficiency of my work. What I have mostly been doing is reorganizing my Google Reader account.

As a writer/blogger, I have plenty of sources to draw from, and I subscribe to a ton of RSS feeds. I also write for a variety of different blogs/sites, and they’re not all in the exact same niche (plus I have other interests and subscriptions that don’t have much to do with my writing at all). I have been working for a while with pretty much a jumbled mess of all of these things. Don’t get me wrong. I had it organized to a certain extent. I had my work stuff separate from my non-work stuff, although as I take on new writing projects, the line on some of that begins to blur a bit.

But I have been breaking down my organizational structure as far as I can take it. For example, I have a folder dedicated to only blogging-related sources, that I will draw from for this blog in the future. This way, when I know it’s time to write something for PureBlogging.com, I can easily peruse this folder and find a topic that I wish to discuss (if I’m having writers block) or a reference that I can cite. I follow a similar pattern for my other writing projects.

I have also been going around seeking out new sources of information. The more sources the better as far as I’m concerned. The more information coming in, the more informed I am likely to be, which can only enhance my writing.

This is all probably common sense to a lot of you, and it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but it can be a bit time consuming. That’s just the thing. I think sometimes we get caught up in our work (and non-work lives for that matter) and don’t take the time to get organized, which in the long run will likely save you a lot of time and increase your productivity.

I’ve been doing it a little at a time, from day to day as to not take too big a chunk out of my day. When it’s all said and done, my Reader is going to be a well-oiled machine and my writing quantity and quality should increase as a product of that.

Flock is a web browser, which is built on Mozilla Firefox, and it has just left beta. The draw to Flock as opposed to other browsers is its social integration, which includes that for MySpace, Facebook, Digg, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket and Twitter. Mike Sachoff talks a bit about it here.

what’s probably most intersting to bloggers though, is that Flock also includes a built-in blog editor, which is compatible with TypePad, Blogger, WordPress, Blogsome, LiveJournal, and Xanga (Flock recommends WordPress, TypePad or Blogger).

According to Flock:

Once configured, Flock remembers your username and password for one or more blog accounts. To confirm that your account information has been saved, open the accounts and services menu by clicking on the Display Accounts and Services button in the top bar. The button is represented by a picture of a key. If the account was added successfully, the account will appear in the My Accounts section of the Accounts and Services sidebar.

Your browser can also automatically publish blog posts to a notification service, such as Technorati. A notification service alerts people when you post a new blog.

I haven’t used Flock yet, but I have to admit it sounds kind of cool. They have more details about the blogging capabilities here.

What are your thoughts on Flock? Anybody used it for blogging?

Big news from StumbleUpon today!

Not only has the social bookmarking site (or “personalized recommendation engine” as they call it) announced a new partnership program that will see sites implement internal stumblability, but they are rolling out a new design that will no longer require users to install the toolbar into their browsers.

What does this mean besides added convenience for users?

It means that many more people are likely to start using it, and that means a whole lot more content. It also means a whole lot more potential fuel for bloggers (as I mentioned, it’s one of my favorite tools for overcoming writer’s block).

I think both of these announcements are going to turn into something really big for StumbleUpon, and they are announcements that are long overdue (particularly the non-toolbar one).

For more about it, I wrote a piece on it for WebProNews this morning.

Google has yet another tool in the works that could potentially benefit bloggers greatly. Currently in Google Labs (aka: the experimental stage), Google In Quotes is a feature that lets you search for quotes taken from stories that are linked to in Google News.

Currently, there is only a limited number of people whose quotes you can peruse, and they’re all politicians. In fact, the site at this point defaults to an Obama vs. McCain format, allowing you to compare quotes from both guys on the same issues. You choose the topic, and Google In Quotes finds quotes from both.

What the tool does is separates actual quotes from articles, removing opinions and bias from the articles. While it is in such an early development stage, there are plenty of flaws so far, such as misquotes and paraphrased quotes, but maybe these problems will get worked out at least to some extent as the project moves further along.

What I’m thinking though, as this tool eventually (hopefully) turns into a regular Google News feature, is that you will be able to search for both the quote and the person, which will be great for those blogging (particularly on newsy items) and want to quotes from people they are writing about.

Combine a feature like this with Google’s proposed indexing of newspaper archives, and Google News will be an even more important tool for bloggers than it already is.

Here I go again rehashing something I’ve already written about, but so be it…it’s relevant

As I talked about recently, many blog platforms seem to be making a bigger jump into social media, and today Google (who already owns Blogger by the way) has acquired another blogging platform - TNC. TNC claims that they’ve been doing the social media thing longer than most of the other blogging services.

TNC is out of Korea, and many are speculating that this will be the beginning of Google trying to capture more market share in Asia where it is not nearly as dominant as it is here in the U.S.  This might be the case, but I have to wonder if TNC has some back-end things going on that Google is interested in as well. Perhaps things that it will incorporate with Blogger.

Admittedly, I am not really familiar with TNC’s product(s).  I know they have a social tool called TextCube. Usually when Google makes an acquisition, it is something interesting, so we’ll have to see what becomes of this one.

For more on TNC from the horse’s mouth…

It is not my intention to just link to my own articles on WebProNews everyday on this blog. It just so happens that I’ve been covering stuff that seems relevant here, so if the shoe fits…

Those of you out there who blog about current news topics might be interested to know that Yahoo! News has a redesign in the works that will feature a section where blogs covering news items can get some links.

To see the new design, you can go to any Yahoo! News article page and alter the URL slightly, replacing the “S” with “Story” in the following manner:

news.yahoo.com/s/…

news.yahoo.com/story/…

I have not heard anything about when Yahoo! intends to roll this new design out, but once they do, it should be a good way for bloggers to pick up some good promotion. Yahoo! News is pretty popular, so it should drive a good amount of traffic to the blogs it features.

For more on the topic, read my WebProNews piece.

I promise this blog won’t consist entirely of retreads of my own work as time goes on, but I don’t know how many of you are WebProNews readers anyway, and there’s some crossover in topics of interest.