Informational Geometry

I finally saw Julie & Julia last night. Loved it! The movie is a true story about a 'lowly cubicle worker' ( Julie Powell ) who decides to transform her reality by becoming a food blogger. Julie assigns herself a monumental project, a theme for her debut blog, cooking Julia Childs' Mastering The Art of French Cooking . There were some funny parallels for me in this story. Like Julie, I love cooking. Like Julie, I was struggling with some career angst when I turned to blogging as affordable mental health therapy. But unlike Julie I was in Silicon Valley and my perspective on blogging was quite different. My workplace (AOL) encouraged blogging, and I remember my coworker Holly getting all the love in the office just for going to geeky after hours meet-ups (like Mobile Mondays) and writing about it. At the same time one of my friends was rocketing to the all-time blogging hall of fame, winning webby awards year after year, just for sourcing and posting the cutest pho...

So you started blogging, or you want to start, but you need motivation. After plugging away at this blog for the past 2 years here are my motivating tips. 1. Find a Muse and just write a lot Do you have a business? Do you have a lot of clients and contacts? Do you have an interesting hobby or project? A baby? Do you travel a lot? Are you into the news or politics? Do you shop a lot? Pick a topic and don't be shy. The more you post, the more you'll think about blogging, and the more you'll get into the flow. 2. See who reads your blog, add Google Analytics It's really easy, you cut and paste a small snippet of code from Analytics into your blog template and voila! See who visits your blog, where they are from, and which posts are their favorites. See how search engines connect you to your readers. Get Analytics here . 3. Talk about your blog, old school style promotion I've found that I can use my blog as a conversation topic at parties, with friends, at work etc. No...

I started blogging in January as a bit of an experiment. I'm pretty happy with it so far. The more I post, the more I like it, and I guess this blog has accomplished what I wanted it to do. I'm shocked that anybody actually reads my blog. What I like most about blogging is the unexpected social aspect. All the off-line conversations with friends and people about user experience. What I don't like about my blog is I find it difficult to have anything truly interesting to say about "interaction design". Some projects are more interesting than others but overall ID is pretty esoteric and geeky. I want to keep up writing in 2008, but I think I have to change my tagline. I wont be writing about web ux stuff so much anymore. I'm formulating a strategy now, I think it needs to be something completely different.