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Community, communication, consideration. The three founding principals of marketing your blog to an audience, whether general, or specific. People want to get be a part of the next thing, so give them a chance. 1. Community Whether you start up your own community, or join others, via means of MyBlogLog, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing and others, this is a guaranteed and proven way to get visitors, to get hits, impressions, and often quality traffic, because you know that these people haven’t just clicked on a random link or search engine listing, but have seen you or your website’s profile, and followed it through to your homepage/landing page. The best ways to get the profiles themselves noticed? See below… 2. Communication I don’t mean ’spam’ by this either. Get involved in genuine discussions, with other people of similar interests, start up a civilized, profitable, knowledgeable discussion, then when you’re finished, ask if they’d take a look at your blog or website. You’d be surprised how many loyal readers have come to my own blog in this way. Simply leave comments in communities, on social networks, on other blogs, etc. Still not quite your way of dealing with people? 3. Considering All the time, you have to consider the reader. Who are you writing for? The reader. Who will be navigating your blog? The reader. Who should you devote your time, energy and attention to? The reader. Consideration is important, and you can show this in many ways. Either by having a clutter-free, easy-to-follow design, or you could alternatively try getting the readers involved, by asking questions in blog posts, or website statements, and opening up comments. If people comment, strike up a conversation with them, and keep them coming back. Answer their queries and requests with solid, reliable, dependable answers, and take note of the feedback they leave by using it, and putting it into action. If someone states that your text is hard to read, change the colour to stop it clashing so much with the background, or simply make it slightly larger. There are lots of ways you can show consideration to your audience, and it shows just how loyal you are to your readers through this. If someone spots an inaccuracy in a blog post and tells you, don’t be lazy. Go change it! They’ll keep coming back, they’ll tell their friends, and in turn this C will do word-of-mouth marketing wonders. The Element of Surprise You’ve looked at both SEO, content and the ‘C’s now, but my last tip is probably what has brought me the large majority of my visitors, both loyal and one-off traffic hoppers. Differentiate yourself, do something different. Be daring, be random! Try something wild, or something completely unheard of, whether it’s outrageous, or greatly beneficial to the reader. Sometimes, even beneficial to the writer! (http://www.techzi.net/donations/) Mad things work out great sometimes, other times, they really can lower your reputation, so it’s time to take calculated risks here. My advice? Follow your instincts. Be an entrepreneur. Take that risk. Make it happen. Throw a competition (http://www.techzi.net/competition/), for all the good it will do. Stand out and be different. Darren will sure know what I mean by that…

It’s important, I think, for the Open Source community to recognise that there needs to be a collation of tools to make that one killer app - straying away from the “do one thing and do it well” mentality, sure, but that’s where things seem to be headed. Mediawiki + Unobtrusive Sidenotes + a good WYSIWYG editor + some way to integrate with OpenOffice/KOffice + an email interface for email-to/from-wiki + good RSS Feeds + LDAP/AD Authentication + iCalendar (or some wikiable calendar) + exporting to PDF + whatever else as one package will provide some really stiff competition to Sharepoint, which is only improving in integration with Office with the upcoming 2007 release. You could probably use a bit of AJAX to do a number of the extras. Something like Confluence. Without of course taking Mediawiki too far down the same path as Sharepoint - it’s important that at its core, Mediawiki remains a wiki and not a bastardised spawn-of-wiki-CMS.

Will That Be Coordination, Cooperation, or Collaboration?

For many of us, a piece of chalk represents a time in our lives when anything was possible. A time when we were learning, building, communicating and most importantly - having fun. So when we decided to create a great collaborative web application, it seemed like the perfect name. However, like back in school, our imaginations started to run rampant with ideas. It didn't take long for us to realize what we really wanted. Something that takes us back - not to the classroom or playground, but to a world where we can create and collaborate freely, with friends, colleagues or even strangers. Designers, programmers, writers, family, friends - anyone. We all want tools that make us more productive, especially when we're working in groups. Chalk gives any team an immediate, real time collaborative environment thats accessible from any computer in the world. Do you want to share your ideas, code or graphics instantaneously with others? Chalk is already changing the way we work, and we're sure it will for you. Oh, and did we mention Web 2.0 yet? Chalk communication is in real time, powered by the excellent Ruby on Rails and AJAX, and it's fully compatible with Internet Explorer 5+, Firefox, OmniWeb and Safari. Not to mention the excellent social features we're still adding such as buddy lists, instant messaging and even entire community hub - all without a single page refresh and just a mouse click away. The end product is almost ready. We've come a long way in a short time, but we're about to graduate (hopefully with honors!). We hope you'll be there at the ceremony so you can take Chalk for a test drive. Until then, sit tight and tell your friends - after all, thats what Chalk is all about, sharing.