Blogging While Brown Review – Cheryl Contee and Naoko McCracken

Cheryl Contee a.k.a. Jill Tubman of Jack & Jill Politics and Naoko McCracken a WordPress rep gave a joint panel on “Using the Latest Tech Tools To Grow Your Blog”. I’ll start with Cheryl’s piece first.

Cheryl emphasized the point that when you have made the decision to convert from one blog platform to another (ex: Blogger to WordPress) your conversion activities are critical. Research and archiving are important. You have to research the particular conversion procedures on your current blogging platform. Archiving your existing posts and comments are important. Once they had done their homework and were ready to make the platform switch Cheryl and her blogging partner Baratunde Thurston dedicated a long weekend to the entire conversion process.

Jack and Jill also participated in the Democratic National Convention in 2008. The tools they used were laptop, iPhone, flip cam and mobile internet. They used a Nokia 965 to do live web streaming via Qik and they got lots of good video and man on the street coverage via bus riding and walking the streets.

At Inauguration 2009 they did a lot of WordPress blogging on the iPhone. While in Washington D.C. they walked around the city and rode the Metro to take in the scene.

They also had the opportunity to cover the G20 Summit in London this year. They carried lap top, iPhone, and flip cams as their key hardware systems. The team covered events at Heathrow Airport and they got around by walking, and riding in the Tube.

Can you say Twitter? So that’s what microblogging is. The Jack and Jill team used their phones for mobil microblogging. In fact if you want to keep up with Cheryl and Baratunde you can tweet them at @ch3ryl, @baratunde and follow their adventures around the globe. Cheryl and others at the conference were my reason for finally “getting it” about Twitter and I finally created an account.

Finally Cheryl introduced us to Disqus a cool WordPress plugin that lets you organize comments. Commenters can get to know each other as a community. You can also add features such as Likes, Replies, ties to email, Twitter, Facebook etc.

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Naoko’s presentation included some of the differences in the two versions of WordPress. The .org platform is open source. The .com platform is the one you want to use for hosted blog service.

Naoko also shared some interesting links with us. This one shows some of the heavy hitters who use WordPress for their sites. This link shows how to apply WordPress for iPhone applications.

If you developers weren’t already aware, you can publish posts via email on WordPress. Other variations of WordPress include WordPress MU which allows multiuser blogging and BuddyPress which helps you build social networks. An example given was flokka.

I really learned a lot from this presentation and got a lot from Cheryl and Naoko’s experience. You may never use all of these tools but you’re bound to find something that you can apply to your site immediately so be sure to save these links to your blog site favorites folder and review them from time. Whenever the inspiration hits you to try something new and take your blogging to the next level, you’ll have this great trove at your disposal.

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