My boss and I were talking recently about blogs, the Internet, Social Networking (Social Media), Twitter, and the like.  He brought up some statistic about blogs that I found interesting.  That only 5% of blogs have been updated in the past 120 days (according to a New York Times blog entry from June).  He considers himself one of the early bloggers and has had a blog since the dinosaurs. He regularly updates it (at least once per week but sometimes as frequently as dozen times per month) and has many opinions about the value of bloggers and blogs in general.  I’m not going to go into that, but he can on his blog if he so chooses.

It got me to thinking about my own blog and the fact that it’s not something I update regularly. I sort of go through spurts where I’ll write blog entries a few times per week and other times where I either can’t think of a topic or I have bloggers block  I just don’t want to blog on topics that may be on my mind.

My absence can also be related to all the stuff that has been going on in my life recently including moving, traveling more (now that I’m working remotely for my same job), attempting to sell a home, Stacie starting her internship at NC State, etc.

However, this morning I came up with a topic I wanted to blog about, but before I started writing it, I decided I’d at least post this upgrade my server (laptop), upgrade WordPress, and pen this first. Maybe it will get me over the hump, maybe not. I’ve heard some folks say that blogging can improve your writing skills (which I’m not so sure about) and that if you force yourself to create a blog entry per day for 100 days it will become much easier.  I can just see myself blogging 100 times in 100 days with topics like whether or not to mow the grass….

Regardless, this discussion with my boss also turned to other Social Networking/Social Media tools and users. Which, like my frequency in blogging, has been very intermittent.  I will tweet a few times per day, but then go a month or so without a tweet. Likewise, I go for weeks without a single Facebook status update, but then send several when I get the hankering (like recently at a Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and John Cougar show).

I guess where I’m going with this is that sometimes I feel like being social and other times I feel like curling up in a ball on the couch and watching movies two or three times in a row (like Citizen Kane) and that Social Networking/Social Media is like that but the time periods seem to last for weeks/months versus any given Sunday.  So like Judy Nichols (who probably got a huge boost from the NYT), I’m going to get back to it eventually….

Consider this scenario: Have you ever purchased something at the store that you were really looking forward to? (eating)? Like you recalled picking it off the shelf and thinking, wow, garlic black pepper pork loin, “that sounds damn good.” So it is in the fridge overnight (or three) and you decide to fire up the grill and have you some garlic black pepper pork loin.

Meanwhile, you’re on the phone with your wife (from Kentucky) and you pull the pork loin out of the fridge just thinking how good it will be for dinner. You casually read the package that says, “? portabelo mushroom ?” pork loin and you literally say (into the phone), “Oh, Snap!”

Why? Because you don’t much care for fungus. Thank you very much.

Call it strange. Call it whatever, but the only legitimate reason for eating one of many varieties of fungi (that you picked out of cow dung in a pasture in Normangee Texas where you lived on a ranch with some dude named Colby and a dog named River) was to see what it felt like (and you vaguely remember seriously thinking the house was on fire (because the paint on the ceiling was patchy)).

So, with that said (“oh snap”), you just figure you’ll wash it off real good and put something on it to mask that smell.

Personally, I would go with something like Wishbone Italian salad dressing and a shit ton of black pepper.

Gave it a name while the Big Green Egg was heating up, and for meat and giggles I tweeted about it or something or other…

Tossed it on the egg at 350°F (ohhhh use of a symbol) for about 20 minutes, flipped it, and after another 20 minutes figured it was done enough for government work. Not that you can catch swine flu from undercooked pork (who doesn’t like limp bacon).

My opinion is that it was a bit salty. That may have been the 15% flavorings in the Smithfield vacuum wrap of fungus smelling yumminess.

Got full. Got bored. Looked at twitter for a bit and decided to reply….

However, I’m seriously looking forward to some not quite mushroom flavored left overs.

By the way, did anyone notice that there isn’t a fungus flavored loin on the Smithfield Web Site (maybe they should update it)?

As it was looking like my blog consisted of nothing but tweets, I wanted to hide my weekly tweet posts (from Twitter Tools) from my main blog page. I still wanted them available for search engines, or if someone just wants to see my tweetroll (hey baby … want to see my tweetroll?) (did I just coin a new word? – A google search indicates I did not).

After poking around on google and the WordPress site, I figured out a pretty easy way to do what I wanted.

1. Download and install the Advanced Category Excluder plugin
2. Put all of your Twitter Tools weekly digests in a category if their own (tweets)
3. Set incoming Twitter Tools weekly digest posts to post to the new category
4. In the ACE settings select the Twitter Tools weekly digest category on the Home column

Once these steps are completed, your tweet digest posts are no longer visible on the main page.

The next step for me was to create a page for my tweet digest posts.

1. Create a page (I named mine My Tweets)
2. On the page, include only the URL of that category (mine is http://blog.sidboswell.com/category/tweets)
3. Assign it a template type of Redirect

That’s all that I needed to do.  You can tweak the settings of ACE pretty easily to hide or un-hide your tweet digest posts from widgets and plugins where appropriate.

She asked that I help her with some changes, but when I started making suggestions she was reluctant to include my changes in her article because the audience had never heard of “web2.0″ and were more concerned with the loss of prescriptions as a profit center to 1800petmeds.com.

I was taking the angle that the practices, universities, and other vet professions (like drug sales (e.g. 1800petmeds.com)) that aren’t taking advantage of new advertising media (e.g. social networking, viral marketing, etc.) would lose to those that do. I’m not an expert in the field, but even I see the changes that these technologies are causing in my business and my company is trying to find way to use them to our benefit.

Additionally, as clients get younger a yellow pages advertisement just doesn’t go as far as it used to. A friend of mine recently complained that his children couldn’t find something on the Internet when it was easy to find in the yellow pages and they just didn’t even think to look their first (or even second).

I think that most successful practices at this point do have Web sites, but do they allow e-mail appointments or respond to e-mails?

Should veterinarians start Facebook groups for their clients, blog on the latest epidemic in their regions, tweet suggested reading or even reminders for annual vaccines. Better yet, if they don’t will they lose out to those that do? After all, it’s a profession that is based upon a veterinarian-patient-client relationship and relationships are moving into cyberspace whether or not the practicing veterinarians want that or not.

I’d be happy to get some perspective from either veterinarians or cognoscenti in social media and new forms of advertising.

I added a SEO widget even though it’s probably useless for this blog. It was fun to add and I’ll see if it makes a difference.

I added WordPress Popular Posts which is why on the index (or main) page you see the posts that are visited most often.

I added WordPress Stats which tracks some specifics that my awstats package on my server wasn’t tracking.

And as you can see from the post below, I added Twitter Tools and enabled a weekly digest of my tweets to be posted to the blog.

I’m also using Akismet, Share This and WordPress Database Backup

Any cool widgets you would recommend for a personal blog?

Tweety

Twitter is all the rage.  Is it the next facebook?  The next version of social networking?  Social network without wiress?

I created a twitter feed.  You can follow me here, or you can simply text “follow sidboswell” to 40404.  You’ll be requested to respond with a username and you’re off.

Twitter is like a combination of SMS (texting) and facebook. The basic question is “what are you doing now.”  That can only get you so far. Do I really need to know that my friends are cooking bacon or driving to work. Is that valueable?

Rather, use clever updates to your twitter feed. Consider it a micro-blog. Follow some others that you find interesting and respond to them (using the @username command). I can think of 100 utilities for twitter, but for now, I’m going to stick with the social side of things. When I’ve mastered that, I may try some utilitiarian tasks in my professional life.

Until then…..