The Bill Social Network Redux

I have fired up the tools to get my blogs back into some sort of relevance. My readers should rejoice…all 1.457 of them.

Anyway, going to try and get The Bill Social Network back up and running with pithy posts, shared content and curmudgeonly  observations.

See you soon….

How can Design make you happy...

While this is a test of putting video into my blog, this clip is well worth watching. Taken from TED.com, is a talk by Don Norman. While I am not personally acquainted with Mr. Norman, he is apparently a guru of design. In this 12 minute clip, he talks of how Design can make you happy.

Switching Gears

My blog over on Wordpress, The Blog of Bill, has sort of been taken over by the theme of a software platform we recently installed. I guess I don't want to push too many posts on top of that one right now. People have been going there just for that topic.

So, why not revive my Blogger blog? I mentioned a long time ago that I was becoming more partial to the Blogger interface. My Live Writer still respects the the Blogger format, so I have my favorite tool available.

Anyway, this post will at least bump this blog up a little bit.

Widgets, Widgets everywhere

I could start liking the Blogger application more and more. While I was originally very impressed with the Wordpress.com interface, the Blogger interface and capabilities are starting to win me over.

Widgets are little scraps of code that allow other applications to run on your blog. More and more of the Web 2.0 applications are offering widgets to let the user take content from the widgets site and make them available on their sites.

Wordpress.com allows only a select few widgets to reside on their free blog account pages. Blogger, on the other hand, seems to allow whatever scrap of HTML or Javascript code you may have and happily incorporate into your site.

This Blog, then, has been designated the widget test bed. You can see on the right column the widgets I have installed so far.

One of the interesting thoughts I have had on this is the notion that a Blog (like this one) that does not get much specific new content created on it can actually get ranked organically fairly high because the site looks "fresh" even though there actually few postings made directly on it.

Well, time will tell.

Social Networking Experiment

I have been toying with the whole Social Networking phenomena. I have set up blogs on all the major sites. This particular blog is an attempt to stay within the entire Google universe. I have iGoogle for my home page, Gmail as one of my email addresses and now Blogger as a blog.

This blog is also linked to my Utterz account for autoposting from there.

We will see. I am leaning towards WordPress as my blog of choice, but there is more than a little romance to staying in one unified environment.

Blogger certainly does not seem as feature rich as WordPress, that's for sure.

Well check back.