Month: June 2006

First of all, if you don’t know what is “bogstipation” – that’s writer’s block for bloggers (source: The Giant Blogging Terms Glossary). These are the times when a blogger can’t think of anything to write about. Every blogger had at least one of those.

As you know, I’ve had one very recently. And here’s the little quiz for you. To make it easier, I’ll even make it a multiple choice.

Question: Is my blogstipation over?
Answers:
1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. Yes.
4. All of the above.

Which one is it?

Seriously now, I’ve been thinking about the reasons that cause me to fall into blogstipation mood and I think I found at least one. You see, I like to keep things chronological in here. All posts are dated and backdated in the order I thought about them. And that’s not actually the problem in itself.

The problem arises with pictures. Sometimes I take a lot of pictures in one day. Usually this happens during some events or on special occasions. All those pictures have to be looked through, sorted out, postprocessed, and uploaded. And it takes a lot of time to do all that. But I want pictures to be posted with the date they were taken on. And this suspends me.

I don’t want to write a few posts today, and then add another post backdated with yesterday. That’s non-sense. The post with the pictures will just get burried in the archives without anyone seeing it. So, what I do is pause all my bloggin activity until all the pictures are ready. Sometimes that takes a really long time – like a two or three days. And when I come back to blogging after those two or three days, with five or ten posts in my head, I just don’t feel like doing all that work. So, I avoid blogging. But that doesn’t solve any problems. Because the more I stay away, the more posts I have to write later.

Finally, one fo the two things happens. Either I throw away a dozen or two of posts, or I sit down and do all the work. Sometimes in more than one sitting.

Now, all I have to do is force myself to blog earlier than later. And I’ll try to blog more in times when I don’t shoot any pictures. Maybe this way, my mind will get unloaded more often, and will rest at those rare times that I have to process images.

Anyway, I identified the problem. Now I have to work out the solution. That’ll probably take some time, but that’s the easy part.

Do you have any ideas or suggestions on the matter?

If you’ve been holding your breath for WiFi connectivity on the airplane, then go out and get some air. After that, read this post, which links to this story, and also has a few interesting comments.

I myself am not yet too disappointed. Most of my travelling is still ahead of me, so airlines have some time on their hands to figure out the solution to this problem. But I do expect them to provide me some sort of wireless connectivity by the time I will fly around the world with my son. Because, how else are we going to duel in Quake VIII?

For some strange reason, articles about the future of the media capture my attention. This post in Fred Wilson’s blog is no exception.

In one week, on July 1st 2006, signing up for Blogathon 2006 will open up. The Blogathon itself will take place on July 29th, 2006.

Blogathon is a lot of fun. Too bad, I’ll probably be off the net on July 29th, otherwise I’d participated. Blogathon is a blogging marathon, which goes on for exactly 24 hours, where every participant must update his blog every 30 minutes.

And that’s not only for fun. The whole idea of the Blogathon is to raise some money for charity. You can choose from a number of charity organizations. If you want to raise money for more than one, you’ll have to update more than one blog every 30 minutes for 24 hours straight – a task practically impossible.

Are you guys up for a challange? You can group and work in shifts to keep up with a single blog or you can have each your own.

BloggerCon is on. This time there is a whole lot of ways to participate. And the best part is – you don’t even have to be there. There are mp3 podcasts, webcast, and even an IRC channel, where you can communicate with people while listening to the conference online in real time (for free).

Getting into conference mood, I got interested about technology conferences in Europe. I’m sure that there is a lot going on, and I won’t have to fly for three days to get there. While I was given a couple of links (this one and this one), the real deal came from someone who set up the European technology conferences group at Upcoming.org. There are only 7 members at present, inluding yours truly, but there’s already enough content to choose from.

After looking through the list of upcoming stuff, I got my attention set at BlogTalk conference. It will take place at Vienna, Austria on 2nd and 3rd of October, 2006. There are a few interesting speeches about social software and blogging already confirmed, and more are coming. Also, the conference’s website is very informative, with prices (85 EUR) and links to accomodation (a selection of hotels with prices and conference discounts).

BlogTalk looks like the perfect conference for me to attend – not too far away, reasonable prices, and only a couple of days long. I’ll consider it more seriously after I come back from Russia.