Rodent Regatta

A couple of things have caused a fairly decent jump in readership here in the past ten or so days. Many of the new readers are nonbloggers or new to the concept of weblogs altogether.

There is a conference coming up on October 4 & 5 at the Harvard Law School. It’s called BloggerCon. Experienced and rookie bloggers are going to be doing presentations and break-out sessions on a variety of topics of interest to the weblogging community.

Dave Winer, who is directing this very first BloggerCon, has asked Michael Feldman to do a session titled Weblog for Beginners. Here’s an outline for that session.

Take a look at that outline and you’ll begin to see what kinds of things you should think about as you prepare to join the blogosphere. Once you’ve selected a tool for weblogging, you’ll discover the real power of the medium is in the syndication of your weblog and the ability to subscribe to other syndicated sites via a news or RSS feed aggregator.

Don’t be misled. Currently, all of my weblog work is done using two applications that I touch each day. One is Movable Type and the other is FeedDemon. You can abbreviate your learning curve in Movable Type by using its sister tool known as TypePad. Other add-ins or useful tools are listed at the bottom of the sidebar of this weblog.

The learning curve for doing basic entries in a weblog and using a basic aggregator to read other weblogs is not steep. It’s a far easier trek than trying to learn Excel or Word.