Making a Place for Yourself in the Blogosphere, Part 1

Starting your own blog does not have to be an arduous endeavor.

"You just do it! There is way too much anxiety over blogging," said Lorrie Thomas, chief executive officer of Web Marketing Therapy.

There are plenty of tools on the market -- like Blogger.com, WordPress or TypePad -- that can be used to launch a blog, Thomas told TechNewsWorld.

"Bloggers need blog technology and authenticity," she said. "It's not so much about the tools but how you use them. Be yourself and give great content." 

Getting Started

Bloggers need to have a reason for blogging, however, before starting construction.

"People do not plan to fail at blogging," Thomas said, "but failing to plan the who, what, when, where, why and how -- and who cares -- of blogging will result in a blog that will not have a lot of business being in cyberspace."

It is important to figure out the blog's purpose and message, as well as who will manage the writing and development of the theme, she added.

Write your strategy down on a napkin before starting the process of installing software and publishing content, advised Derick Schaefer, managing director of Orangecast Social Media and creator of How-To-Blog.tv.

"Figure out what you want to write about and create a rough content strategy," he said.

It is also important to pick a good domain and title for the blog before getting started. "Trying to undo the wrong decision can be costly," Schaefer told TechNewsWorld.

Worrying about how the blog looks, however, is not important. "Concentrate on the content and getting readership," he said. "The theme can always be changed." 

Step by Step

Butterflydiary.com, started more than a year ago by Charu Suri, now has more than 12,000 monthly visitors. Suri decided to start her blog on WordPress, citing its search-engine friendly platform. There are also plenty of plugins and templates, she said.

The name of your blog will make an impact on the topic you plan to write about, Suri told TechNewsWorld, so you should think about possible domain names before registering. You also need to make sure the domain name is available.

There are plenty of companies that register domain names online, she noted, such as BlueHost or Go Daddy.

The next step is finding a server host for the blog. Make sure the server host provides good support, Suri advised.

You may need to hire a Web designer to help. Instead of doing it all herself, Suri paid someone US$100 to help her design the look and feel of her blog.

"In a matter of two weeks, you have your own blog and business," she said.

For the Proofpoint Email Security Blog, Director of Market Development Keith Crosley decided to go with TypePad. A company acquired by Proofpoint was already using the service.

"After having a look at TypePad, I really liked it because it was very customizable, easy to use, had good analytics, and had all the advantages of a hosted solution," Crosley told TechNewsWorld. He enlisted professional help from the same Web design firm that helps with the company's site.

"It only took them a few hours to do the customizations," he said.

Target Audience

Finding a target audience where there is a demand is key to a successful blog, said Scott Fox, author of e-Riches 2.0: Next Generation Online Marketing Strategies.

If you do not consider yourself a technical person, Fox recommends using TypePad. If you are a little more technically inclined, WordPress is good.

"TypePad or WordPress are just fine for most people," Fox told TechNewsWorld. "You can then customize the designs as much as you like."

I t is probably best to steer clear of custom-made systems, Fox said. "It is easy to get tangled up in a system if you go with your cousin's homemade blogging system."

Building relationships and creating a buzz are important when blogging, said Susan Gunelius, president and CEO of KeySplash Creative and author of Spread the Word: Social Media Marketing in 30 Minutes a Day.

"When you are blogging, you are building your brand," Gunelius told TechNewsWorld.

While the content of your blog depends on the audience you are trying to reach and a plan is eventually important, getting started with blogging is critical.

"Go out and start a blog for fun and just play with the tools," Gunelius said.

Find a free blogging service and play around with the applications, she suggested. "Find your best audience, join the conversation and speak up."

Security Flaws Leave Egg On Face(book)

Two privacy flaws in Facebook were quickly patched Wednesday, but for security experts the breaches are just signs of what may be chronic problems with the social network's ability to preserve the sensitive data of its more than 400 million members.

The flaws were linked to a feature that's part of Facebook's new -- and controversial -- privacy settings. The preview feature allows users to toggle off and on changes they make in their privacy options for the system. It contributed to the flaws which enabled a user's private chats to viewed by all his or her friends and for a user's friends to see all his or her pending friend requests.

"For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users' chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the 'preview my profile' feature of Facebook privacy settings," reads a company statement.

"When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function," the statement continued. "We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests which is now complete. Chat is now back up and running."

"We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented," it added. 

Congress Weighs In

The recent changes in Facebook's privacy policy have been criticized from a number of quarters, including the U.S. Congress. Just last week, four Democratic senators -- Charles E. Schumer of New York, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Mark Begich of Arkansas and Al Franken of Minnesota -- fired off a letter expressing their concern about the changes to the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

"While Facebook provides a valuable service to users by keeping them connected with friends and family and reconnecting them with long-lost friends and colleagues, the expansion of Facebook -- both in the number of users and applications -- raises new concerns for users who want to maintain control over their information," the senators wrote.

Concerns cited by the solons were the expansion of publicly available information about Facebook members, removal of time limits on third-party storage of member information and broadening of access to member's data by third parties through the new "instant personalization" feature.

"We look forward to the FTC examining this issue, but in the meantime we believe Facebook can take swift and productive steps to alleviate the concerns of its users," the senators added. "Providing opt-in mechanisms for information sharing instead of expecting users to go through long and complicated opt-out processes is a critical step towards maintaining clarity and transparency."

Even Geniuses Fallible

Facebook's privacy scheme poses problems even for sophisticated users because the socnet constantly changes the playing field, according to Marian Merritt, an Internet safety advocate at security software maker Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC). "If you're somebody who's trying to take privacy seriously, they do keep moving that target in a way that makes it very hard to keep up," she told TechNewsWorld.

Many of the recent changes made by Facebook require members to opt out of features, when they should be opt-in, maintained Paul Reynolds, electronics editor at Consumers Reports. On the eve of the security snafu at Facebook, the magazine released a report that found, among other things, that 52 percent of consumers post risky information on social networks.

In addition, changing privacy settings can be difficult, Reynolds asserted. "You have to go pretty deep into a number of pages to get to the right controls," he told TechNewsWorld. "They're not as easy to access as maybe they should be."

The flaws revealed yesterday suggest that members aren't the only ones confused by changes at Facebook, contended Chester Wisniewski, a security analyst with security software maker Sophos. "I think they've made their own privacy ecosystem so complicated that even their own developers don't understand the implications of the changes they're making," he told TechNewsWorld.

Facebook members looking for a respite from privacy breaches in the future will be disappointed, maintained Zeljka Zorz, the news editor at Net-Security.org. "I think this kind of thing will definitely continue to happen in the future, and not only to Facebook," she told TechNewsWorld.

"When flaws in the code and its execution are concerned -- and from the looks of it, it seems that this is what happened in this instance -- it's simply inevitable," she noted. "People can be geniuses, but they are still people, i.e. fallible."