http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2007/04/09/twenty-usability-tips-for-your-blog-%E2%80%94-condensed-from-dozens-of-bloggers-experiences/

Tom Johnson’s 20 usability tips for blog writers:

• 1. Pick a topic for your blog. Having a specific focus actually gives you more to write about. Like a novel, your blog takes on direction and purpose.
• 2. Encourage comments. Allow comments, and respond to comments.
• 3. Make it easy to subscribe. Make it easy to subscribe to your feed by placing an orange RSS button in a highly visible location. Route your feed through Feedburner so you can keep track of your subscribers.
• 4. Include an About page.
• 5. Present your ideas visually. Long blocks of text aren’t read.
• 6. Keep posts short and to the point.
• 7. Use subheadings for long posts.
• 8. Link abundantly. Links increase readership and let others know you’re writing about them.
• 9. Make headlines descriptive.
• 10. Archive by topic. Rather than date.
• 11. Include a list of related posts beneath each post.
• 12. Allow users to contact you offline.
• 13. Present your real viewpoint. Be yourself and speak your mind.
• 14. Write for your future employer. You should know that your future employer, and possibly your current employer, will read it.
• 15. Include a Top Posts section.
• 16. Provide an index. Providing an index readers can quickly scan is an excellent way to let users skim your entire post collection.
• 17. Get your own URL and match it to your blog’s title.
• 18. Include a Recent Posts section in your sidebar.
• 19. Reward commenters for commenting. Add the Show Top Commenters plugin.
• 20. Post often.

I noticed some problems on WeoGeo blogs due to MS Word formatting tags. I’ve been looking for a work-around and just learned about Windows Live Writer. It does rich content such as pictures:

hmm… my wp install doesn’t like pix.

Maps:
hmm… not working.

Tags:

del.icio.us tags: blogs blogging RSS

And, lastly, it (a Microsoft product) integrates with Firefox with a Blog This plugin!

O’Reilly Network — Web 2.0 Podcast: A Conversation with Jeff Bezos:

What business is Amazon.com in? Founder Jeff Bezos tells Web 2.0 Summit program chair Tim O’Reilly that there are three components. He says that everyone knows about the consumer-facing and seller-facing businesses. Bezos spent most of his time talking about their developer-facing business, with elements such as S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). Amazon’s goal is to take the pieces of the heavy-lifting infrastructure that don’t differentiate your business from any other and provide them “by the drink” so that they change from a fixed cost to a variable cost.You can download the audio as an mp3 or download the video as an mp4. Here are all of the Web 2.0 Summit Podcasts released so far. You can also subscribe to the audio podcast or to the video podcast.

Mikel Maron from Brain off gives us some props:

Brain Off » Web 2.0 Expo, Location Intelligence:

The guys from weogeo were also hopping between Web2.0 and LI and rightly so .. their stuff looks awesome.

The previous post is really a complement to the theses put forward by Levine, Locke, Searls, & Weinberger in:

the cluetrain manifesto - 95 theses:

95 theses the following are the 95 theses from The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual Copyright © 1999, 2001 Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger. All rights reserved.

This article talks about the place of blogs in the new open and “transparent” era of corporate communication:

Wired 15.04: The See-Through CEO:

The See-Through CEO Fire the publicist. Go off message. Let all your employees blab and blog. In the new world of radical transparency, the path to business success is clear. By Clive Thompson

We’ve (OK it was actually Dave) created a new Del.icio.us account for the recent blogosphere coverage of WeoGeo. It is publicly available here:
weobuzz’s bookmarks on del.icio.us

Andrew Turner of High Earth Orbit and author of the excellent O’Reilly pub on Neo-geography has given some kudos to us:

High Earth Orbit » Blog Archive » Web2.0 Expo & Location Intelligence Wrap-up:

Weogeo is making the eBay for maps. More on that after they release, but it’s very cool, just check out their current front-page to get a flavor for what will be coming.

Adena Schutzberg, Executive, Director of Directions Magazine, has a nice article on the Location Intelligence Conference that mentions WeoGeo and Paul:

Location Intelligence 2007 Takeaways - Articles:

WeoGeo has a different twist on making money from datasets. Paul Bissett, the CEO, is implementing a soon-to-be-launched marketplace for data that will ensure the owner payment for them and for products built upon them. Or as he describes it on his blog: “a B2B portal and server solution to rapidly deliver mapping products to end user customers.” What platform underlies that effort? Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services. In fact, if I follow it correctly, WeoGeo, the company, built the platform WeoCEO which enables the WeoGeo Server. It’s that technology which powers the soon-to-be available B2B portal. I’ll go out on a limb here and note that Bissett reminds me of John Frank of MetaCarta and further, this solution has the potential, similar to MetaCarta, of turning a bit of the world of geo on its head.

I’ve been developing this new version of our blog for some time and it finally went live today. Note the login at the top. This actually logs into the forums and wiki components of the WeoGeo community as well!

The next step is upgrading those two sites. I noticed that there are some dead links in the header and that will be my first task tomorrow morning.

-d