Daily Brad, the blog

In case you hadn’t read previously, this isn’t my first creation of a blog online, and probably won’t be my last (unless of course, noone ever reads my long posts and I start to get bored of writing to noone.) My first attempt at a blog, Tweet Sweet, is online at www.tweetsweet.com. Tweet Sweet is more of a hobby site that allows me to log and share my ideas on the creation of a dessert/sweet shop, as well as little tidbits I run across that are in-line with the “sweet” subject.

So, since I hadn’t blogged before last month (did you know that according to a recent InformationWeek magazine that I picked up that the word “blog” was coined by Peter Merholz on Peterme.com in 1999?) I thought I’d share my experience of creating and making a successful blog as I experience it. (I cross my fingers on the “successful” part)

Yesterday marked the first month anniversary of my first blog post on Tweet Sweet, here’s what’s happened thus far:

What is a Blog?
As I mentioned in my first post here on Brad’s blog, my ideas have changed on what blogging is all about in the past couple months. Wikipedia.org defines a Blog as a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order. The word “Blog” comes from the contraction of “web-log”.

So first, I learned that a blog was something that interested me, and would be a good outlet for my ideas, as well as build traffic to future projects through it’s readership.

What do I need to start a Blog?
To start a blog, all you need is an opinion or interest, or even a “life” perhaps, and access to an internet connection. Though it helps to understand basic concepts of how websites are built, no programming knowledge is really necessary.

I have opinions, ideas, interests - sounds like a good one for me.

Getting my blog started
I took the advice of Janet who’ve I’ve mentioned before, and decided to use WordPress as opposed to Google’s blogger that I had heard mentioned a couple times and had looked through their demos. And when I investigated the possibility of hosting it through my current host - BlueHost - I found that they offered a one click installation for Wordpress. I decided to host it myself so I could make more customizing changes down the road, rather than host it for free at a sub-domain with WordPress.

So from the process of not having a blog, to making my first post was taken care of in a matter of 5 minutes. Really, BlueHost is amazing (I’m not just saying that because I designed their website either.), but I’ll talk about hosting later.

Writing content that you’ll enjoy and so will others
If there’s one thing about the web, is it’s so large that eventually you’ll find a lot of people who have the same interests as you. I’ve been trying to write what interests me, as well as add reviews for places I’ve gone. Tweet Sweet has over 30 posts now, and I’ve even gotten a couple comments from readers. I’ve found that my biggest struggle is trying to keep posts short and to the point - I tend to think i have to over-explain everything. So how did my readers find out about it?

Telling others about my blog
Janet told me about Technorati - a search engine where you can let others know about your blog. There’s also digg, and del.icio.us that I still have yet to explore and figure out. I’ve also been watching and working with Google to see how it indexes my site. As I learn more about this, I’ll blog. It’s fun to be learning something new, and contributing to the content on the web… hopefully someone, somewhere out there will enjoy it and comment.

Okay, so I’ve heard the term “Web 2.0″ several times… and I’ve heard about blogs, about MySpace.com, about how Google works, and all that - but never quite connected what they had to do with each other until last week.

I was at Interop in New York, when I stumbled in on a presentation being given by the Editor-in-Chief of the Web 2.0 Journal, Dion Hinchcliffe on Web 2.0 entitled Applying Web 2.0: Early Notes from the Field.

The speaker quoted Tim O’Reilly in his presentation giving the short definition of Web 2.0: “Networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects.” A network effect creates value by having a better product the more people that use it. He gave examples such as MySpace, YouTube, Digg, and eBay where content is created by users, as well as a search engine like Google or it’s gmail that gets smarter as people use it.

I hope to blog more about this in the future, but until then, here’s a side-bar I ran across in the most recent edition of Information Week entitled “The Skinny on Web 2.0″.

Your given name as a URL
One of my good friends decided to put up his first personal website (a portfolio site) a couple months ago (Yes, he is VERY late to the game as far as that goes). Since the most obvious choice for a URL is your own name, (as a freelance graphic designer or illustrator, it IS what you’re selling isn’t it?) we went online to see if the URL for his name was available to register. We typed his first name only into a browser, adding a .com to the end and an all-black page with a few links came up, so I told him to email the owner and see if he would sell it. This worked for me with brad.com 5 years back (though I just sold the domain last year and made a good profit from it). The response was that the owner had bought it for his son, and was waiting for him to grow into it. (No isn’t that interesting?) So we tried his first and last name, it was taken by a book author with the same name. We tried shortened versions of his first name, using his middle initial, nick-names and combinations of all three. Nearly every good combination had been taken. I suggested that he use his first and last name divided by a dash. Dash domains - even if they are .com domains - seem to be slightly frowned upon in the commercial space, but search engines don’t know the difference. We’ll see what he finally decides on.

Have you Google’d your name?
Have you ever Google’d your name? Go ahead, do it right now if you haven’t. Don’t forget to put quotes around your name so it will only look for that exact name combination. Just for fun, I’ve Google’d several of my friends names and found it pretty comical when very interesting people show up who share their same John Hancock.

Why is it important to do this?
You can find what others can see about you. Where have you been mentioned before? What does a simple web search say about you? When I enter my name, I find posts that say I went for a Macromedia Flash training conference in Mountain View, CA 7 years ago. (I happened to email the teacher to tell him thanks and he quoted me and my name and employer still appears on his website.) My name also shows up in genealogy forum posts for a granny I was looking for nearly 5 years ago. But mostly my name appears in relationship to my website bradmccall.com and my freelance business as a graphic designer – I’ve been able to keep control over my brand online.

Your name online and your personal brand
Your name is an integral part of your personal brand (more posts to come about your personal brand later). Every post you leave, everything you write about online, leaves an electronic trail that can be traced back to you. Do these things reflect positively on your personal brand? Would an employer or potential client find these things positive? Especially as a freelancer, your brand is important to your livelihood – it should be carefully managed.

Several years ago I developed a method for inventing company names when I worked on the SkyDisc brand. Over the years I’ve refined it slightly, but in essence it works pretty well for creating names to be used for a technology company or product. I used this technique most recently while developing the Omniture name when it rebranded itself as an enterprise analytics provider from its previous life as MyComputer.com, a small/med business webmaster tool shop. Here’s my technique:

1. Create a Brainstorming Matrix
Create a matrix that includes the following headers: (The following examples are portions of the exercise I did while at Omniture.)

1. Industry Words (Words related to your product, service or industry
2. Web Words (If you’re web-based, this is a necessary column)
3. Prefixes
4. Suffixes
5. “Feel Words” (Words that you want people to “feel” when they think of your product or company.)

On this particular brainstorm, there was probably about 300
more “Feel” words and another 100 more or so industry words on the list.

2. Brainstorm Name Combinations
Begin brainstorming with the matrix. Combine multiple words together and add new words – search through the dictionary and the thesaurus to gather more ideas and word combinations. Be sure to look at Latin roots for words and their meanings. Remember, no name is a stupid name at this stage in the game.

3. Run a Personality Test
Once you’ve brainstormed a giant list, run what I call a “personality test” on each name. Write them down and see how they flow. Are they hard to pronounce? Hard to spell? Do they sound like your company or some kind of pharmaceutical drug?

4. Organize Favorites.
Once I’ve sorted through them and have gathered a list of potentials through the personality test, I then organize them by first, second, third, and fourth choices before I make the final presentation.

5. Run a URL Test
Begin rounding the large list down by going to the Web. Visit a “who is” directory and check all the URL’s associated with each name to see if a company already exists with this name. This is a quick pre-trademarking search. If the site is small, or looks home-grown, chances are if you love the name, you can buy the URL for the right price. Begin marking any off your list that don’t pass the URL test.

6. Run an Initial Trademark Search
Visit the Website of the United States Patent and Trademark Office to do an initial trademark search. They’ve got many different ways to search for your potential company name.

7. Consult Legal Council on Full Trademark Search
If you made it through all the previous steps, and things are still looking good, consult your legal council. Now’s the time to do the full search and then register the trademark.

So it’s rather rare that I launch something before it’s “fully baked” (Meaning fully designed and covered in all the right content), but I make an exception in this case. Sometimes I just want everything perfect before I let it out into world. Blogging is different.

Search engines love blogs, and apparently so do advertisers these days. So why am I starting a blog? Well Janet put me up to it. (Not really) Janet’s excitement about blogs and blogging has made me really excited about the concept - when until that point I pretty much imagined a blog as an online journal of sorts. Now I see blogging as a concept that I was looking for many years ago as a freelancer.

I created my official portfolio site at bradmccall.com when I became a freelancer back in the spring of 1999. I have yet to update the site, even though the scope of work I have done since then has been more significant than to that point. As a freelancer I found many ways to promote myself and worked for several different companies in the hay-day of the dot com. I learned a lot about businesses that work, and businesses that didn’t. But is it my expertise that gives me the right to have a blog? Not really - an opinion, yes.

My first blog attempt isTweet Sweet located at http://www.tweetsweet.com/blog. I’ve been adding content there for a couple weeks and have enjoyed putting my ideas in writing for my dream of having a dessert shop someday. (Plus it’s always fun having an excuse when I’m outta town to go and get dessert so I can review another dessert joint.) I’ve found that many of the postings there have swayed toward branding, naming, etc. and created this blog so I can keep that content there more tuned toward the chocolate side of things.

So here it is world, be patient - new design will come soon.

Thanks!
Brad McCall, designer