Project: I, Blogger UPDATE!
By Desty on Jul 10, 2007 in I Blogger
|
|
First and foremost, a big thank you to all participants! Thanks to the wonders of IFollow, those that commented should have their linkbacks. If you didn’t get a linkback from your comment on Project: I, Blogger, drop me an email and we’ll get that sorted out. To see who said what, check out the comments on all of the Project: I, Blogger posts.
I had several readers send their thoughts via email. As promised, here is what people are saying:
Dan from Blog Success Journal suggests that the individual follow their heart. Dan goes along with the common theme of following your offline moral compass.
Chris from Blog-Op, as he was packing for his vacation, gave several excellent points.
- Never, ever steal content, period.
- Don’t be afraid to give credit - Even if another blogger only gave you the basic idea for your 4000 word original post, it doesn’t hurt to link back.
- Link often, but only when relevant.Don’t feel you have to get hitched onto a link train if you don’t want to.
- Don’t write for Google, write for humans.
- Don’t hotlink images.
- Never write in a comment, what you wouldn’t say to someone’s face.
- Don’t accuse another blogger of anything without rock hard evidence.
- Don’t use the email address you gather for comments, for spam purposes - A personal message is fine, but when I get a ‘Dear friend - please Digg my blog’ generic type email it gets marked as spam and deleted.
- Treat others as you like to be treated.
Finally, Sue from Sueblimely, bless her heart didn’t want it appear that she was using this to promote her blog, submitted a post she wrote titled Betiquette. She writes about respecting your readers, other bloggers, and the people you live with.
I feel that we’ve barely scratched the surface what behavior of bloggers and what the community sees as acceptable behavior. We’ve all seen and read articles on how to scam free links by working Alexa, Technorati, Google, etc. How do these practices fit into you ethics?
Everyone keep up the great work! As I told one reader, Project: I, Blogger isn’t about me telling the community about what is acceptable ethics for bloggers. I wanted to start a community wide discussion where the community says “this is what we think, this is what we believe, and this is how we act.” Continue your emails and comments!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

[…] Check out the where Project: I, Blogger is with the update. […]
Great post and some definite great tips. I definitely agree 100% with don’t write a comment that you wouldn’t say to someones face. So true.
Good stuff.
I would like to make an observation on the Chris’s points quoted in your post. When he says “Don’t use the email address you gather for comments, for spam purposes” it comes across to me as if he is saying “it is fine to spam as long as you use ways to stop being penalized for doing so”. I reckon he did not mean it to come across this way; reading his some of the posts on his own blog made me more certain of this.
My own blog ethics say that spamming is wrong under any circumstances. I would never do it myself and have no respect for those that do.
That’s an excellent point. I’ve been working on an article about blogger’s actions and how Google molds and shapes those actions. When it comes to marketing, sometimes it seems everyone will do anything they can get away with to promote their blog unless Google woould punish them for it. More on this in my article when I finish it.
I surfed over here from Sue Brides’s post. She’s a fine lady, and she did a guest blog for me not too long ago, plus I find the most interesting bloggers through her. I installed a new Technorati fav button on my toolbar which makes it easy for me to fav others now, so I’m faving you because I like your style. On this subject I’d like to add that I allow certain people to spam me from time to time with their web addie in their comment…I cut them some slack, even though they should know better. One old guy in particular never leaves a comment without his blog addie attached….but I always let him get by with it. What would you do?
Promoting one’s blog is, as I see it, a given. In comments, it’s assumed that you are commenting because something written moved you to share your viewpoint. Comments are great in that not only can you add to the conversation, but if another reader likes your take on the article, they can go to your blog and see what you’re about. When I comment on blogs, I normally just keep it to the comment and leave my site address with my name. However, if I’ve written something I feel goes with or against the article, I’ll post the address to the article.
I generally agree with all of these comments and suggestions. In this last comment, I do exactly as you do Desty.
I see a lot of people are being cautious about promoting their blogs. Why? You blog is out there because you want people to read it, otherwise it should be called a diary. Don’t be afraid of promotion, because that is what you want (or at least what I want, lol). I believe everyone here knows when to say when, and as long as you follow the rules of etiquette, I say promote away!
With blogs, internet marketing is the name of the game. Unless you have a personal / family blog, a blog is meant to be read. How will you get readers without getting the word out?
Hi. I am here at the first time. Would you like to lay out an interesting article. Original lifehack.org.
If you want to look back on a life that fills you with joy, conventional rules for success are not the place to start
1. Don‘t chase money, power, or status.
If they come to you, that‘s fine. But most conventional ideas about success go wrong because they focus on outcomes instead of on the processes of living. Outcomes come around from time to time, but life itself—the process of living, acting, thinking, and being—happens all the time. No outcome is going to make a lousy, miserable process feel worthwhile.
If you hate what you do, no amount of power or money will make up for that. If your life is constantly stressful, boring, unhappy, or frustrating, how can achieving some high status once in a while make up for all the miserable days and weeks you spent getting there? It‘s tempting to feel that the end will more than make up for the means; that you‘ll forget the misery in the blaze of achievement. And you will—for a few moments. Then you‘ll be back on the treadmill, with only the distant hope of some fresh achievement or monetary gain to console you. That‘s like being a laboratory rat conditioned to unnatural behavior by occasional pellets of food.
2. Take whatever time you need to discover what matters to you most
Success isn‘t simply a matter of money, power, or prestige. You could gain all of those and still feel that you have fallen short of what you wanted; or you could gain none of them and be blissfully happy and fulfilled. What constitutes personal success is mostly in your mind. It has much less to do with finding the best career in other peoples‘ eyes, creating a killer business, or holding down a fancy job with a big salary than with achieving what really matters to you. Many people find this out too late. They struggle for years to get where other people said they should go, only to find it does little or nothing for them. Sad;y, it‘s often too late by then to do anything else.
3. Don‘t base your choices on others‘ approval. We all want to please those we care about, so it‘s natural to try to do what they approve. Natural, but rarely a good idea as the basis for life‘s choices. I don‘t say that you should deliberately ignore sound advice, or reject a career path simply because other people suggest it. But even the most loving parent or friend can‘t always see what is going to make your heart sing. Listen to others. Value their input and their support. But go your
own way. It‘s better to be committed to doing what you truly love than accept something lesser for the sake of being approved by someone else.
4. Stay authentic. That means always doing what truly matters to you and is part of who you are. The simplest definition of a hypocrite is someone who says one thing and does another: like a person who says that he or she wants to work at something that benefits society, then forgets that at the first sight of a fistful of dollar bills. Somewhere inside of you is a part that recalls what truly matters and will never quite let you forget it. Over the years, that inner voice is only going to get louder.
5. Go for meaning over money every time. It‘s perfectly possible to do something meaningless to you and earn a great deal of cash while doing so. Some people do, especially in parts of the media world. It just requires a stronger stomach and more cynicism that most people possess, plus a huge tolerance for boredom.
Is it worth it? If money is truly all that matters to you—and you can make lots of it quickly and get out—it might be. Few areas of work will allow you to do that, aside from criminal ones. Meaningless days corrode most peoples‘ minds and destroy their happiness. Doing something that means a great deal to you almost always makes you feel energized and alive. It‘s your choice.
6. Be endlessly greedy—for learning. You can never learn too much or overfill your mind with new ideas. Nothing is more useful in life than a well-developed, well-stocked mind, especially one that has been broadened and enlarged in the process. It‘s hard to name a single famously successful person who was narrow-minded, bigoted, or stupid. The list of notable successes who are recognized for the power of their minds is long. And you don’t have to have had an expensive education to be able to develop a great mind. There have been plenty of near geniuses whose education was almost entirely self-produced.
7. Make a friend of failure. You are certain to fail sometimes, and the higher your aspirations, the more frequent and significant that failure will be. People who don’t strive for anything glorious rarely fail; they take no risks and never aim beyond what is easily attainable. But if you treat failure as an enemy, it’s going to lead only to discouragement and even the abandoning of your hopes and dreams. Failure can be a friend, pointing out what isn’t right yet and showing you the way to do better. The more proficient you become at accepting the lessons of failure, the quicker you will succeed.
8. Make sure that every time you make a mistake, it’s a new one. Making the same mistake several times shows that you haven’t learned what it can teach you. Making new mistakes proves that you’re trying something different. The best definition of a loser is someone who makes the same mistakes over and over again, never managing to learn anything in the process. Such a person is doomed.
9. Choose to spend your time with the right people. I don’t mean that in the sense of the rich and the powerful, the movers and shakers of society. Whether they’re powerful or not, the best people to spend time with are those from whom you can learn most: the ones whose own lives have brought them joy and endless fulfillment. That means people who do what they love and love what they do. People who have become experts in life, thinking people, people with wide-open minds and wide-open hearts.
Seek them out wherever you can. Listen to them. Never mind if they are no longer living. Read their books and emulate their largeness of spirit. Learn from them all, but don’t simply copy what they did in this world. What they did was right for them, but may not be right for you. What you need to use as models are their ways of thinking and responding to the challenges of the world; the process of their lives, not what it happened to contain.
10. Drop whatever is inconsistent with these principles. That means all activities that don’t move you forward towards what you value most; things that get in the way of learning; pursuits that waste time and dull your senses; and people who hold you back. You may sometimes have to be ruthless. Each of us has only one life. If you waste it, you don’t get another chance. Besides, if you have chosen your dreams and aspirations wisely, what you must leave behind by dropping what’s inconsistent with those dreams will not be worth worrying about anyway. Those who make bad choices find, too late, that they have abandoned things and people that meant more to them than whatever they gained in exchange. If that happens, you have truly reached one of life’s lowest points.
Lets discuss?
Sounds exactly like some conversations I had with a young lady back in college. I didn’t have a family back then, but I still feel the same. Growing up, we all were brought up living a certain lifestyle, be it living hand-to-mouth or having a new car every year because you get tired of the old one. I don’t claim to speak for all men, but I feel that it’s my duty as the husband and father to do as well for my family as my father did, better if possible. I have a loving wife and two wonderful little boys; I love them all to death! There’s almost nothing I wouldn’t do to take care of them. I sacrifice, gladly, to make sure that their needs are taken care of. At this poing we go from needs to wants and desires. I believe that my family should have the finer things in life; does that mean a new car every year? No, but a year under 3-5 years old would be nice
. I have dreams for my family and myself. Is it wrong to work towards those dreams and hope to turn them into reality? I don’t think so. That brings us to the ways and means; does the way justify the means? Do work your life away to provide for your family? Do you miss out on precious moments with your children as they’re growing up to make life alittle more enjoyable for them? I would love to be able to stay at home and not miss a thing when it comes to my 1 year old’s firsts (first walking type of stuff), but I work my job and businesses so my family can do better. Is that wrong, I think so, but like the poet goes, “But I’ve got promises to keep, and Miles to go Before I Sleep, and Miles to go Before I Sleep.”
[…] like to share a comment left by getboboweds on my article Project: I, Blogger UPDATE! It’s a very long comment and makes some excellent points about a life and a life worth […]
hay!!

good project
senks