Five Surefire Content Ideas (When Your Blog Is Drawing Blanks)

Business blogging is exploding this year, but content ideas are always in short supply.  Small businesses can benefit from blogging, but ideas may be even more difficult to come by, especially in small towns.  There was a good article this week from Marketing Profs with “Five Surefire Content Ideas (When Your Blog Is Drawing Blanks)” (http://www.marketingprofs.com/6/kranz9.asp).  Here’s the intro:



If you’re like me (and many others building a business), you may have created a Web log to communicate more intimately and more frequently with your audience. It’s supposed to be easy. After all, the technology is simple, the style casual and the content brief.


But after the initial wave of enthusiasm, you may find it increasingly difficult to generate ideas for the blog that began with so many thoughts—and so many posts—just a few months ago. Worse, you might be guiding a boss or colleague who may not be a fluent writer, but is the appropriate representative whose voice must be present in the blogosphere.


This is free content, so definately check it out when you get a minute, and keep working on the content for your blog!  For more insight into business blogging, I do recommend reading Naked Conversations.  I was fortunate enough to be a galley reviewer, and you can read my review at http://www.rjdudley.com/blog/Review+Of+Naked+Conversations.aspx.


If you’re interested in adding a blog to your website, drop me a line through the contacts page and I’ll be glad to help you get started.

Scoble Coming to Pittsburgh

TiE PittsburghEvent:

Sales & Marketing Network: The Blog
Blogging and podcasting are revolutionizing the way companies interact and communicate with customers, suppliers, partners and employees. Learn how these new tools are impacting marketing and branding efforts as you hear from a panel of regional and national experts, including Microsoft’s Robert Scoble, Pepper Hamilton’s Jim Singer, Schwartz Communications’ John Moran, Pittsburgh Bloggers co-founder Mike Woycheck and moderator John Soat, Producer of InformationWeek’s The News Show. Note: Pre-registration is required. Please bring valid photo identification for security purposes.
Date: Thursday, January 19
Time: 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Venue: One Mellon Center, Third Floor Conference Room
Cost: $25 for Council and TiE Pittsburgh members, $35 for non-members
RSVP: Online, Council Events or 412.918.4229

Scoble first announced this a while ago, but the Tech Council’s newsletter just came out today.  Blogfest 5 will happen the night before, and Scoble’s an scheduled guest.  Nothing’s guaranteed with weather at this time of year, but I look forward to the event!

Now playing: Electric Light OrchestraDo Ya

“Dewey Defeats Truman” redux at Sago Mine

One great advantage electronic media have over printed media is quick and easy corrections.  Someone may capture screenshots or save printouts, but you don’t have to send your delivery guys all over a city to retract a headline.  The PG was able to correct on their website in short order, but the printed copies had already flooded the streets.

This is a serious mea culpa:

 

Software for Starving Students (SSS) version 2006.01 is now released

via Digg



The Software for Starving Students CD enhances the Windows and Mac desktop computing experiences by providing an easy way to install free, high-quality software titles via a user-friendly interface. It includes popular open source programs like Firefox and OpenOffice, intended to help students learn about and benefit from open source and free software programs. The SSS team put all the most commonly used free programs onto one CD to make it easier for students to install useful software (including fully-featured office suites, 3D graphic editors and much more) for free. To preview the new SSS interface, check out some screenshots of the latest release.


Full info at http://mirror.softwarefor.org/index.html.

via Digg: Free Asterisk Ebook

via Digg

O'Reilly Media's latest book, Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, written by Jim Van Meggelen, Jared Smith, and Leif Madsen is the most complete book on the Asterisk PBX system to date. The new book, announced at Astricon 2005 covers many of the new features of Asterisk 1.2. In the spirit of open source, O'Reilly has licensed the book under the creative commons license making it free to download and distribute. If you are looking for the ultimate Asterisk book, you can now download the entire book as a PDF file!

Find it at http://voipspeak.net/index.php?/content/view/33/2/.