coclarity

I was a bit of a late adopter when it came to the iPhone. I bought an iPod Touch in the early days as a development device. I was happy with my bulletproof old Nokia 6233 which could take passable video and only needed charging every five days. Then the iPhone 3GS came out. It had video and a battery that lasted more than a day.

It only took one more train journey to Dublin, squinting at the Gmail java app on my Nokia to set off the nagging in the back of my head. Eventually I gave in and bought an iPhone 3GS.

I’m pleasantly surprised when it comes to the battery life on the iPhone. Here are some stats from my phone at the moment.

• Time since last charge: 4 days 2 hours
• Usage since last charge: 4 hours
• Charge remaining: 13%

I’m not a very heavy user of the phone, but the iPhone has been used more than the Nokia especially for browsing/twitter.

I turn off the radios at night. It seems to lose only 3% charge overnight. I have 3G off, Wifi on and push notifications off.

I drove to Cork yesterday to go to Sabrina Dent’s Blogging Masterclass. This post is about things I learned and some other blogging links I found useful. Now you might be a seasoned blogger already, and thinking, “Oh God NO!, not another newbie post about blogging”, but read on because maybe there’s something here that might refresh your view of this blogging lark. Then again maybe there isn’t.

So in the cold light of day, I sat down at the computer to catch up on email and do some work. Then I remembered the old advice about training, “If you don’t do something within 72 hours you’ve wasted your time going to the training”. That’s when I decided to write a blog post about blogging because I couldn’t resist doing something that meta.

Anyway, here’s some of the more interesting stuff I learned yesterday:

• Write like a person, not a company.
• Be a resource, no hard sell.
• Don’t write a blog post about all the things you’re going to write about. Just write about them.
• Avoid buzz phrases.
• There’s some serious etiquette around blogging. If you do anything dodgy you’ll be lambasted from a high. So no astroturfing or copyright infringement.
• Use tools (feedburner, google analytics, etc.)

After some slides, Sabrina reviewed everyone’s blog posts and gave them “feedback”. Of course my draft was woeful. I got some serious flashbacks to Timmy Frawley’s Irish classes in fifth year. That’s one blog post that will never see the light of the interpipes.

In fairness though, this reality check was worth the price of the masterclass (free), my joyful time in Cork’s rush-hour traffic (logjammed), and the drive up & down the N20 (bumpy and rainy).

So then when I got home I fired up OmniFocus and found all the old links I’d saved in my “start the blog” project. I found Damien’s Dipping Your Toes in the Business Blogging Water. I read Chris Brogan’s Best Advice About Blogging.

So here I am, blogging again after a long hiatus and one or two earlier attempts. Many thanks to Sabrina for her advice, and apologies in advance as I proceed to forget & ignore half of it. Best of luck to my classmates Joe Scanlon, Mike and Matt Kane, Julian Alubaidy, Aedan Ryan, Gordon Murray, Keith Shirley, and Linda FitzPatrick.

That’s all for now, I’ll be back in a few days with some tips on dealing with “Information Overload” (especially for Sabrina ;-)!!!…

Are there any other good summaries out there on how to blog while avoiding the pitfalls?