I’ve been discovering some excellent talks over at Ignite’s website as I see how others grapple with the constraints (and uniqueness) of the talk’s format!

I didn’t go last year so it’s really time I go to the dentist again.  In July last year, I received a beautifully handwritten note in the mail from my dentist’s secretary (he’s had the same one since I first when there when I was 10) which said:

“It’s been a year since your last appointment.  Be a good girl and make an appointment.”

The phrase stuck in my head ever since: “Be a good girl and…”  

I got a new note in the mail this last week since another six months had gone by.  It was also beautifully handwritten and simply said:

“It’s been two years since your last appointment.  You know what to do.”

And, just like the last one it’s been in my head!  Perhaps it’s a guilty conscience, but it’s also such a memorable way of actually saying something and probably the best reminders I get in the mail (even though I detest going to the dentist).

Goes to show there’s always creative ways of getting someone’s attention!

“Oh, you didn’t know that?  Wow!”

“Oh, yeah that’s old news.”

It’s like we’re being discouraged from learning or discovering something new and then frowned upon for admitting we don’t know everything in the world.  The world is expecting everyone to be an expert in everything already.

So, I learnt a new word the other day as a result of a few tweets:

TV reporters refer to those they are interviewing (even if they’re a witness to a crime) as the “talent“.  It sounded rather weird to me, but I guess so do many words the first time you hear them to have a new meaning.

(I have of course heard of talent being used to refer to TV show hosts, reality show contestants and actors.)

Like Facebook or loathe it (I can’t decide), the social networking giant has had a huge impact on blog comments, primarily:

A decrease in the number of blog comments

I regularly hear from bloggers who are concerned about the low number of comments they get on their blog, compared to a while ago. They note that more conversation is happening on Facebook but would prefer it to happen “out in the open” on their blog and on their site.

I think there’s a few reasons for the shift:

Facebook is so much easier to comment on than most blogs

How much simpler can a comment box be than this?

By making that the most common commenting experience people are now having online, anything else looks rather a lot of work and requires learning a new way of adding a comment. Compare the Facebook experience to WordPress (top image) or Blogger (bottom image):

Granted, creating an account and logging in reduces the comment form complexity in WordPress, but if you’re like many of us, you’re already logged into Facebook for purposes other than to comment.

Facebook has mastered the art of easy commenting.

Facebook is more personal

In Facebook, you’re commenting on a friend or page’s status update or photo etc. You know the types of people who are reading it and will also be commenting. You recognize their photos – which pretty much everyone has, unlike Gravatars used on many blogs. You can see their real* names. In many cases, you closely know the person you’re commenting with as well.

On blogs, unless you’re a regular commenter, or reader of the blog’s comments, you’re not so likely to know the other people commenting and you can get into debates with people who you’ll have no idea as to who their identity is.  This can be a good or a bad thing – but by and large, requiring commenters to use their real* name and photo attached to their thoughts reduces the likelihood of the nasty and unwanted comment varieties.

(Probably not as important, but different to most blogs, if you make a mistake you can edit or delete your comment on Facebook.)

A preference for clicking “like”

Facebook’s “like” button has replaced a certain type of comment and reduced other kinds of comment. Instead of spending a few moments to write a thank you note, or insight into why one appreciated a post, clicking “like” is much faster and much easier. For some sites, “likes” reduce the clutter of endless repetitive comments, but for others, the richness of a full thank you note is lost.

An overexposure to soliciting for comments

Now that every site (not just blogs) are wanting your comments, your feedback, your interaction, it can get a bit overwhelming and tiresome to comment on everything you read. When blogs began, their commenting functionality really opened up communication channels and was revolutionary. Not anymore.

So what can bloggers do to get more people commenting?  Here’s some ideas.  

Reassess your commenters’ experience 

Think hard about the commenting system you’re using (WordPress’ default, Disqus, Intense Debate, Facebook comments etc) and whether it provides an easy user experience in the way you have it set up.  Keep an eye on new features but check that you’re not complicating things for commenters.

No one wants to be first

Being the first commenter on a blog post seems to take more courage, more effort.  Perhaps try getting a few friends to comment on your blogs with an insightful comment to help get things going.  Also, the first few comments can really set the tone of the discussion – it can start off on the wrong foot very easily.  You set the tone for your blog content, consider the type of conversations you want to encourage and discourage in your comments.  Do you want constructive discussions, allow petty ones, fierce debate etc?

No one likes their comments ignored

I love it when I see responses from the author to comments on their blog, and it makes me want to comment there again.  This is even more so the case when I have spent a lot of time writing a comment.  It’s disheartening to feel ignored.   What’s more, the bigger the blog, the more meaningful the blog owner’s direct responses to you can be.  When was the last time you responded to the majority of comments on your blog for a day or a week?

Late last year, I read about a team of researchers who created a bunch of “socialbots”:

“designed to be stealthy, that is, it is able to pass itself off as a human being.”

This enables those behind the scenes to infiltrate a group of people, reach an influential position and then exploit it by spreading misinformation and propoganda, or to gain access to more private information which can in turn be sold. Their findings were that it’s easy to infiltrate Facebook at a large scale, most people are not careful enough when accepting connection requests sent by strangers, especially when they have mutual connections, and Facebook’s “immune system” did not detect their socialbots.

“102 socialbots made a combined 3,000 friends in eight weeks. The bots began by sending friend requests to random users, 20 percent of whom accepted, and then to their mutual friends, which resulted in the acceptance rate jumping to almost 60 percent.”

Knowing if someone on Facebook (or other social media sites) is “real” or not is going to become more of a problem (if not for you and me, for Facebook).

In two books I recently read, “fake” people were powerfully used: The World According to Monsanto, documents chilling examples of fake scientists traced back to PR companies who influenced the scientific community and Ghost in the Wires showed how easy it was for someone to create a new identity.

So yes, there’s spambots, transparent useful bots and socialbots, stolen identities and fake identities out there. Would I know the difference between those and “real” people, always? Really?

I remarked to Regan the other day that I find that some blogs I used to regularly read have become so insanely formulaic, so robotic-like in their content and publishing schedule (Top 10 Lists! Guest posts! I have the secret!) that I wonder where the personality and edge has gone in lots of blogs. (Not all!)

And yet, Anil Dash blogged:

“The entire modern social web was born from the blogging movement, and social activism has been part of the blogging medium since its birth.”

Has blogging and status updates been toned down over time to have less “realness”? Less “humanness”?

A friend recently lamented on Facebook that once blogs meant daily stories with adverbs and adjectives and now status updates are so dry, boring, too much detail and not enough feeling. She also linked to the book 420 Characters which tells stories within the 420 character limit Facebook puts on status updates.

I know my status updates on Facebook have changed. I’m more aware of what I’m writing, more aware I’m being watched and it changes my behavior. (The Hawthorne effect.) I’m trying hard to avoid doing that with my blog – I want to write about the things which interest me, rather than the things which will get me traffic.

Meanwhile, I’m waiting for my copy of Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything to arrive in the mail.

Bloggers are also in a great position to launch an ebook: they have loyal readers – people who enjoy reading what they have to say, they’re people who enjoy reading and are likely to have an ebook reader.

There’s more and more DIY tools for bloggers looking to write an ebook or a printed book:

• Today Apple announced its iBooks Author software, a new tool to help people build multi-touch books for the ipad.
• Blurb offers a blog-to-book tool and an ipad book tool, more suited to photo books rather than full interactive ones.
• Amazon has its Kindle self-publishing tool and so does Nook.
• Tools such as Scrivener and Storyist help you put together a book and then export it into the various ebook formats.

I’ve worked on four different ebooks in the last few weeks and I expect we’ll see more spin-off ebook projects during the year as bloggers expand their offerings.  When doing research for ebook cover design for Dianna Huff’s ebook (now available for purchase), I was astounded at the general low quality of ebook covers which made me feel like there was a general low quality of content inside – bad I know, but it’s hard not to judge a book by its cover.  There’s plenty of room for improvement with ebooks there.

Here’s three sites I’ve found for ebook and book cover inspiration:

• Book Cover Archive
• Brain Pickings
• Barbara de Wilde

The Book Designer is also running a monthly ebook cover design competition.

Letters in the Mail – receive real letters from authors each week.

Whimsey Box – get a box of craft samples each month, the website providing ideas and tutorials for using those samples.

Kiwi Crate – get a crate with a fun themed activity for kids each month.

The Thing Quarterly – each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers will create you a useful object.

Quarterly - receive a blend of original, exclusive, and consumer items that are timeless, practical, exciting, and fly under the radar.

“What we’re selling is an experience, something akin to the feeling of getting a letter in the mail from a friend. But instead of a friend, it’s someone you admire or find interesting, and instead of a letter, it’s an awesome gift.”

Loose Button – get beauty product samples in the mail each month.

(Thanks for the suggestions over at Swiss Miss!)

I particularly love the concept originating out of a website or blog (such as Letters in the Mail below), and like the intertwining of the physical and online realms that Whimsey Box offers: a community with a shared passion of crafting sharing something physically and then digitally.

I began thinking of some of my favorite blogs that I read and tried to imagine what I’d get from them in the mail regularly (which wasn’t purely a magazine/newspaper/book based on their blog posts).

For example, imagine Oh So Beautiful Paper sending you four cards a month – one themed for a particular upcoming holiday or season, one for a birthday, one for a thank you note and any occasion card so you could plan to use the cards during the year.  I’d love that!

Imagine your favorite food blog sending you a little box with all the ingredients in it to cook one of their recipes, along with a recipe card?  (My sister gave me a brilliant Christmas present: a calendar with ethnic foods for each month of the year, and gave us the ingredients for January.  She’s coming over on Friday night to cook it with us!)

Forgetting logistics and cost for a moment, what would be something you’d love to regularly get in the mail from your favorite blogs?