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February 16, 2007

I’m loathe to start a speed link section like so many other bloggers, but I’m ensnared by the possibility that information that some readers might want to know about is passing them by while I wrestle whether to write a long or short post about some of these items. So here is my first attempt at speed-linking with brief explanations.

  • Brian Bailey has a new book called The Blogging Church: Sharing the Story of Your Church Through Blogs. I’m really looking forward to getting this and reading this as soon as time, money, and family allow. Thanks to Merlin Mann for pointing this out. Merlin is a contributor to the book.
Posted in: General & Blogging & Management & Music
January 21, 2007

It’s 2007. Few people in your neighborhood read blogs. Depending on where you work, you may have coworkers who don’t know what a blog is, much less a “blog reader”. Most people you know read more each year from magazines, trade journals, books, and newspapers than they ever read from a blog.

Not me.

I’m going to tell you why reading blogs is absolutely crucial if you want to be smart, well-informed, and street-smart. Moreover, I’m going to show you how reading blogs will make you more sociable, friendly, and confident.

Posted in: Blogging
January 11, 2007

There are lots of things you can do to speed up a website. But that is a whole article in and of itself. For now, to make my blog more comfortable for my many new visitors, I removed some of my badges and third-party content on my sidebar. For now, this includes my Traineo badge that details how much weight I’m losing, my Amazon Wishlist, and my music listening profile on Last FM. They aren’t gone forever - you can still see them on my “About Lawrence” page.

Posted in: Blogging & Website Design
December 31, 2006

I reviewed Google reader sometime ago, after its major update, and wasn’t impressed. I had been looking for an online feed reader so I could make use of my time away from my home computer by catching up on the blogs that I read. At the time, I had been using the built-in feed reader of Thunderbird, my email program.

However, after continual frustration with being stuck somewhere, waiting on someone or something, and wishing I could use the twenty minutes to catch up on my blog reading, I finally decided to give Google Reader a more comprehensive try. I’ve been using it for the past two months as my only feed reader.

Posted in: Blogging
December 26, 2006

One thing many folks don’t seem to fully grasp is that if you want to be available, that is to say, if you want people to contact you, then you must allow spam in your life. I hate these Russian-originated stock quote spam emails as much as you, but it is a necessary evil in order that people can conveniently have an email address.

Often, I’ll see blog postings and various tech magazines give a list of dozens of ways to control spam. It is quite often more time-consuming and frustrating to implement those ideas than it is to just let spam take its course.

Posted in: Blogging & Small Business
December 22, 2006

Joseph Rago, an editorial assistant for the Wall Street Journal has just debuted a smashing critique of blogs and bloggers on Opinion Journal, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial section. Entitled “The Blog Mob”, Mr. Rago, who was previously the editor-in-chief for the Dartmouth Review (an in-house publication for Dartmouth College, his alma mater), prefaces his article with Joseph Conrad’s quote about newspapers themselves “written by fools to be read by imbeciles”, but intones that this now applies to the very blogs which criticize newspapers - the kind for sale at my local convenience store - the type I don’t buy, or read because they “are predictable” and thus, “excruciatingly boring” - despite both of those terms used by Mr. Rago to refer to political blogs on the internet.

Posted in: Blogging
December 22, 2006

BooksieI’ve removed some of my creative writing from my blog here and put it on my profile at Booksie. I didn’t want to clog up my blog with creative writing, plus I have a few projects I’m working on which are a bit long for a blog format. I will make mention of any interesting posts at Booksie here, but you’ll have to go to Booksie to read it and comment on it there - along with all the other great creative writers that float around that domain. There will always be a link to my creative writing at Booksie profile under “Some Cool Links” on the side column in case you lose track of this post. If you want to read my latest short story, check out “Upstate”.

Posted in: Blogging
November 08, 2006

Just wanted to say a big thank you to all my consistent readers, as well as a warm welcome to newer visitors. Traffic to the Salberg.Org site has been way up as of late. In fact, as of COB (close of business) on Nov 7, traffic has increased beyond September and October’s total numbers. I look forward to meeting your expectations and keeping you informed, entertained, and hopefully at least a little off-balance - else I just wouldn’t be me, right?


Technorati : blogging, traffic

Posted in: Blogging
November 01, 2006

Lawrence Salberg logoI finally had to retire my favorite Darth Vader logo that I used whenever I signed up with some site that wanted a photo upload. I have a pet peeve about my personal photo being a masthead for anything. I think I have some fear that some longtime reader of my site will recognize me from my photo when I’m walking in Walmart and walk up to me and start jawing my ear off about everything I ever said or wrote (even though they never bothered to comment). It might sound kind of paranoid, but when you’ve been around the world as much as I have, you quickly realize that 5 billion people or no, it is still a small world after all.

Posted in: Blogging
October 08, 2006

As of this post, Salberg.Org now has 100 pages on it. Seems like a milestone worth mentioning. I hadn’t even noticed it creeping up until just checking a few things on the site after posting the previous article. I’d like to say I have 100 posts, but that isn’t entirely true. There are a lot of static pages on the site such as the archives page, my general information pages like my favorite talk radio shows, my long lost friends, and so forth. I believe this is actually the 77th post.

Posted in: Blogging
June 09, 2006

Darren Rowse, who runs the monster site, Problogger.com, recently put out this little challenge to have bloggers write about “developing goals for a blog”. Darren occasionally will put out “group writing” offers with the bait that he’ll include a link to your article if it is pretty good. The guy gets so much traffic that it is almost crazy so people tend to covet a link on his blog. I purposely missed the deadline for two main reasons (not counting my lack of direction lately).

Posted in: Blogging
April 05, 2006

For those who follow my site religiously, which includes about a half-dozen wacky friends, a few wayward internet surfers, and a guy named “Moses” (or is it a ‘bot’?), you may not have noticed, but I’ve started adding some more static content along the side. So far, these include such astounding lists as the talk show hosts that I like the most, my favorite freeware, and my controversial, yet oh-so-ever insightful list of the top 10 guitar gods of all time.

Posted in: Blogging
March 12, 2006

I happened to check the origin of visitors to my blog and found some very strange results. Besides the United States, visits to my blogs from other countries are ranked in order as follows: Saudi Arabia, The Czech Republic, Canada, and Norway.

While I did spend a great many years growing up in Saudi, I’ve not yet mentioned it on this blog. So someone there must be looking me up, but I don’t recall anyone from Saudi that still actually lives in Saudi. So whoever you are — identify yourself!

I have no idea what’s going on over at the Czech Republic and frankly, I always liked their original name Czechoslovakia. I’m all for democracy, but their old name was way more hip.

Posted in: Blogging
March 10, 2006

Dave Sifry, a columnist for Technorati, in his latest report on the blogosphere, claims that the number of blogs is doubling every five and a half months. Back in August 2005, it was every five months. While he acknowledges the rapid ascension of spam blogs (blogs that are essentially void of any real content and just filled with tons of links and google ads), I still find great doubt in these numbers. I read another statistic not too long ago that said that 19 million Americans have a blog. This too, I also greatly doubt.

Posted in: Blogging
February 27, 2006

I’ve had a few emails about why I started a new blog, what happened to the old blog, etc. Yes, in a moment of shining clarity I deleted the old blog - forever. I can’t seem to recall the exact clarity anymore that led me to do that, however. I think it had something to do with the overall focus that the blog had strayed toward. You can still see the excerpts of the postings by using Google’s Blog Search and typing “MelbourneLawrence” which was the name of the old blog. I think you’ll see what I mean.

Posted in: Blogging

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