In a recent podcast episode of Conversations with Mzinga, Liz Strauss offers two recommendations for bloggers who want to generate rich(er) comment-thread discussions:

Leave your blog posts “unfinished.” Don’t complete every thought, idea, or subject that you write about in a post, lest you leave your readers with nothing of their own to add.
Ask the right [...]

Inspired by the efforts of Neville Hobson, I’ve put together a montage of family photos from 2008 as a way of recapping the last 12 months (with a helping hand from Animoto).
Here’s hoping 2009 will be as memorable as 2008 has been. Happy new year!
Part 1

Programming note: In spite of following Animoto’s estimates when choosing [...]

Joe Jaffe has reached out to several leading business communicators to join him for a discussion tomorrow afternoon about the evolution of podcasting. And if you’re looking for a way to spend a thought-provoking hour on the last day of 2008, consider tuning in, via Talkshoe, beginning at 12:30pm Eastern.

Why Jaffe’s talking about podcasting
Simple: Podcasting [...]

I’m really not a fan of blog-tagging memes.
So count me out …
They remind me of chain letters, which have always creeped me out (I still have this horrible memory of receiving one from a girl named Kerry Jean Jenkins when I was about 8. Kerry had moved to the neighboring town and we would [...]

Who are the best, brightest, and most innovative social media users in Texas? The Austin American-Statesman, my hometown newspaper, wants to know — and will share the community’s recommendations as part of its first-ever Texas Social Media Awards.

To find out more about the awards, as well as the Statesman’s own efforts in social media, I [...]

Looking for a productive way to spend your Friday afternoon (or late morning, if you live on US West Coast)? Then you won’t want to miss today’s FIR Live on BlogTalkRadio, beginning at 2:00pm Eastern, as co-hosts Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson engage an erstwhile panel in a discussion of the recent Forrester Research report, [...]

Still haven’t drunk the Twitter kool-aid yet, and wondering just what the heck you should tweet about (It’s a question I hear often )?
Here are some tips that I shared by e-mail with a colleague today. The bulleted items beneath each subhead are theoretical tweets (some exceptions noted), and not necessarily posts I’ve read or [...]

Sometimes, complaining on Twitter has delightfully unintended consquences.
Such was the case for me, after I raised a stink about lazy PR pitches a few weeks ago. Here are three of the relevant tweets, in reverse chronological order:

From a PR person to me: “We don’t have the time to read everyone’s blog [before pitching].” Her full [...]

This tweet from Chip Griffin caught my eye over the weekend:
trying new approach to blog reading. I can subscribe to more blogs, but I only read posts over 3k in size for more meat/thought, less noise

Through subsequent Twitter exchanges, Chip, who is the co-founder/chairman of CustomScoop (disclosure I: CS is a former sponsor of my [...]

Do you spend much time looking at sidebars of blogs?
I know that Jason Falls has a whole heap of tools in the right-hand columns of his Social Media Explorer site, that Mack Collier grades sidebar content in his blog checkups, and that bloggers galore incorporate widgets and badges into their sidebar designs.
I’m just wondering wondering [...]