The blog is yours for one day!

Don’t be shy, don’t feel uncomfortable, guest bloggers generally are very well welcomed. There’s no reason to doubt yourself, to feel a stranger for a day, if your regular content weren’t great already, you would never have been asked to guest blog.

This is your chance to create killer content!

Many times the blog you’re invited to write for, has a bigger readership than your own blog. This is your chance to show real authority and create genuine killer content. This is the moment to write that stumble/digg article.
Guest entries are a great business card opportunity. One killer entry will bring you lots of new visitors, many links to your blog and sometimes even new orders! You really have to put up your best content right now.

Be yourself!

Don’t try to imitate the voice of the resident blogger, to write in their style, to voice their opinions. Voice your own strong opinion, showing guts while guest blogging can have a great ROI and boost the number of visits to your own blog.
If the blog hoster didn’t respect your voice, you would never have been offered the opportunity to post an entry on THEIR blog.

Continue the visual style of the blog.

Check how the regular entries are visually written and try to continue this style. If the resident blogger uses headings and subheadings, use them too. Most readers are conditioned and expect easily skimmable entries when they are used to find them at that blog. No one wants to read 400 word paragraphs at Copyblogger or anywhere else actually.

Create a compelling intro or entry footer signature.

With every guest entry you’ll get a small intro or the occasion to use an article footer with a link to your own blog. Make this one of the most compelling parts of your guest post. Many serial feed subscribers will only skim the headers/subheaders and read the conclusion. If they find an interesting entry footer, instead of the conclusion to the entry, they might be compelled to visit your site or actually read the whole entry. Same applies to your intro.
Don’t feel afraid to set expectations in your intro. This is your chance, everyone reads you! Grab the attention. Don’t forget your most erotic picture to spice up the entry!

Start your guest entry today!

When you are asked to guest blog, you almost always have several days to prepare your entry. Unless you’re a serial deadline addict, you might want to prepare your entry today already! Set yourself the deadline one day early. You don’t want to be caught by the ‘must get it ready now fever’. Only deadline freaks write better under that pressure. Don’t hesitate to ask the blog host’s opinion!

Know the blog you write on

Guest blogging is the hardest way to show authority, but a great chance to feature yourself! The chance is yours, grab it!
Dig through the archives, read the comments and ask the blog hoster what the regulars/subscribers like, what their level is. Demographics are irrelevant, but try to understand the audience of the blog. Write on their level.

Of course those tips also apply when you’re asked to write on a multi-author blog, more even because together with your regular great content the whole team will grow!

Are the new features in MT4 exciting enough to catch attention?

Redesigned Dashboard

The new dashboard is very modernly styled and almost completely customizable, thanks to the MT template tags. It seems as if this feature will rather be used by the real coding, designing geek than Joe Average, but expect many dashboard mods to be released by the MT community.

The nicest features for the user who doesn’t like to customize the dashboard structure, are IMO the standard activity log and graphics for entries and comments, but I can’t really say those are groundbreaking reasons to switch to MT.

Simplified Installation

The installation process of Movable Type has become a lot easier, but still isn’t easy enough, compared to other platforms such as WordPress or even Expression Engine.
And honestly, a 40 minutes long upload process (almost 2000 files) might put off users. To have a chance long term, the MT community definitely has to create a Fantastico installation process, because I can’t imagine updating several blogs if I didn’t have shell access to uncompress archives directly on the server.

Better Publishing

Except for the world’s smartest template language I really can’t figure out what is innovative among the new features in MT4. Unless it were for the in house support for both Markdown and Textile, which are standard plugins MT4 is shipped with.
A notable mention deserves the easy multiblog setup, but the biggest annoyance about MT has not been solved yet: the slow republishing system when the user opts for statically published template pages. Rebuilding archives still takes ages depending on their size. The standard implementation of the CatCalendar plugin would have improved MT4 majorly.

Update: Byrne Reese, Product Manager of MT, points out in the comments that the CatCalendar functionality has been intgerated in the core of MT4.

Community Building Services

Community building improvements, such as built-in registration, the integration of OpenID (and other services), rating services and customizable feeds or even reply to comments from the dashboard, don’t really do it to me. I fail to see any innovative factor in those new features — innovative to the blogosphere that is — as most of those features are nothing more than the core implementation of some of the most popular plugins for other systems.

Conclusion

This might be a groundbreaking release for the MT community, but from the view of a WordPress user there is nothing to get really excited about MT4. The success of MT4 will majorly depend on the speed and accuracy of the MT community to release new plugins, already existing popular plugins for other platforms.

MT might have a more stable, better scaling platform for the industrial blogger but right at the moment MT4 (and MTOS) isn’t ready to start eating of WordPress’s cake. MT4 needs to be simplified, simplified for the user, not every blogger is a code freak, wanting to fiddle with templates.
An active and thriving community certainly can make MT more popular and a widespread alternative to WordPress.

The Six Apart Team deserves all merits for having released MT under an open source GPL license!

Disclosure: I recently switched several of my own sites from WP to MT4 RC and the geek in me loves that almost every plugin I was looking for (sitemap, contact form, feed redirect to Feedburner), can be realized with MT templates, but all this could have been solved much easier. Right now I can’t advise anyone without coder’s, designer’s soul to switch from WP to MT.

I understand and respect the risk that many see that comes with trusting all of their data online. But the risk of losing data is going to be faced anyway, whether it’s in your home office or in a server camp in California. In both cases there’s risk, but that doesn’t mean the same pros/cons come with each. For example, with a hosted storage solution you don’t have to worry about

1. managing your own space, including environment control and troubleshooting,
2. paying the bills to keep it running all the time, or
3. worrying that your house will burn down and take your data with it.

Although before storing online you should be concerned with

1. securing your information (much like Grandma’s cash in her mattress),
2. copyright regulations and user agreement forms, and
3. playing nice with Customer Service Reps. Who enjoys that?

So there are some ups and downs to each side. But imagine what the geek world will look like let alone the rest of the world. For one thing you may (sooner than later) be considered a dinosaur for purchasing extra hard drives. I’ve already given a few photographers a weird look when they don’t know about Flickr (before evangelizing them, of course).

Flickr’s a good case study, actually. This is a service that will host your photos, make them manageable and shareable, and do it a hell of a lot better than your computer can. But if RAW is your thing, well, you aren’t storing them on Flickr. So the purist would say “There, you need personal storage for that.” Well, besides the fact that I think the purist would miss the point of the case study, I do agree that internet based storage services have a way to go. But Flickr is nipping at the possibilities; this combined with Google Apps, numerous writing applications, and now presentation services available online, one can’t help but wonder what the use will be for desktop storage (let alone desktop applications) in the time to come.

Imagine all of your data being accessible from anywhere. And it’s easier than navigating your computer’s hard drive. And it can be shared and collaborated on by anyone you choose. And backups are limitless. And it’s free.

The direction the internet is headed, as far as I can tell, is to make the desktop a portal. One of the first things to go has been applications (I can’t remember the last time I used Word if I didn’t need to) and storage is not too far down the list. In some ways, this is an exciting shift that’s happening. In other ways, it may only be the changing of hands (from the big shots now to the little shots who are going to be big shots later). Only time will tell.

Uglification

The introduction of F8 (Facebook applications platform) was the big breakthrough for non-students and myspace freaks to join FB. The huge plethora of useless time wasters such as Super Poke, FoodFight, Happy Hour and many more applications, turned FB within weeks from a much hyped platform in to the next MySpace. A MySpace with white background and thousands of multi-colored bitmaps on most profiles. Exactly what Joe and Jane love.

Fatigue

Any human with the slightest sense of ratio will rather quickly be bored of (super)poking, foodfight and many similar applications. Sure, poking can be fun, but only for a rather short period of time. After having poked all your friends hundreds of times, there only are two options. Whether you have become the typical FB drone or you realize that what you are doing makes no sense at all.
Third possibility is that you have already been fired from your job because of all the working time you spent at FB.

Marketing

The implementation of sponsored platforms, multinational corporations using FB for marketing is nothing new. Many brands use Myspace or even LiveVideo.com for their marketing campaigns already. Facebook is nothing more than a new platform to those conglomerates.
For FB this opens the doors to the world wide internet user, the internet user who loves brands, labels and celebrities, but dislikes text-only sites. Commercial brainwashing.

Aggressive and Ugly Advertising

If FB/Microsoft manage it to keep the advertising, banner policy as is, the platform won’t suffer too much. The banners shown on FB are of acceptable visual quality. But who guarantees that application builders won’t soon build in fastmedia/clickmedia smiley and casino banners? Even application developers need to make money sooner or later.

Mix those four elements up and you have exactly what a websites needs to become really popular: a butt ugly looking flashing and blinking banner farm. Is it a surprise that 4 out of the 6 most popular websites according to Alexa are just as ugly time wasters: Yahoo, MSN, YouTube and Myspace (#1, #2,#4 and #6 accordig to Alexa.com).

The geeks and A-Listers, who prefer slick looking sites, will leave Facebook for exactly the same reason as they left Myspace for Facebook. Is the myspacecification of FB what Virb needs to finally go viral?

The Straw that Broke…

Not long ago I read a piece describing the way Facebook has built up walls around itself. Nick Gonzalez called it a walled garden, meaning that the spread of your information is limited. He pointed out that Plaxo’s service is approaching the scope of Facebook’s, and that it is doing so in a much more open environment.

“While not as exciting as Facebook, Plaxo is edging in their direction. Plaxo Pulse ties together disparate services from across the web unlike the news feed, which ties together only Facebook’s content. While Plaxo hasn’t launched a platform to a crowded hall of over-eager developers, they have quietly focused on linking to existing applications on the web.”

Honestly, the new Plaxo developments excite me. The fact that it now supports OpenID excites me. (Which reminds me: go see 37signals’ explanation of OpenID and its usefulness. It’s wonderful.) I may actually check the service out now. Until now I only knew it’s name by the subject line of dead emails long delivered to Recycle Bin hell while cries for me to update my contact information were left hanging in the thin dry air.

Okay, maybe that was a little dramatic. You get the point.

My favorite applications are always those that aren’t closed applications. They reach their true potential when combined with other applications.

Some Clarification

Inclusive design embraces other technologies and services with the goal being seamless integration for the end user. A huge feature of an application designed inclusively is the ability to export all of one’s information at any time. Examples that come to mind: Plaxo(duh), Highrise, WordPress, and (maybe a stretch) the iPhone. These inclusive services/apps/products take advantage of standards like iCal, RSS, and valid semantic markup.

Exclusive services have a tendency to lock you into the service it provides. And I mean lock in the cruelest sense of the term. With Facebook, your information isn’t going anywhere (yet). In a sense, it isn’t really yours. Control of your information is the price you pay with applications like these.

Or, for example, I’ve faced the headache of helping friends migrate from LiveJournal EasyJournal to WordPress. Fumbling around in a system that is largely proprietary and non-standard is a nightmare.

Some web applications get it, if not completely. Small steps are taken, every year or two, toward what users really want. Take hosted video websites: you would be hard pressed to find one that won’t offer a slew of options for embedding your video in a number of different places. At some point they realized that offering the data in one place wasn’t good enough: it had to be where it was wanted, when it was wanted.

But that isn’t good enough anymore either.

New Developments

Independent developers are now stepping in where the big guys aren’t. Facebook won’t allow us to get our information back, so we (in the we-the-people sense) found a way to take it back (sorry, for Mac only). In a related story, other developers fed up with constraints decided to start downloading YouTube videos on their own.

We (again, the people) are an impatient bunch aren’t we?

Now, neither of the stories above are recent nor are they the worst that’s been done. But knowing that that has happened, and that it’s become so commonplace (especially in the case of YouTube downloading) one can’t help but wonder what’s next.

So what’s the answer? Best as I can tell, new companies (web, specifically) have to start being open. And not open as in “we have a company blog, we’re relevant.” I mean open as in “you can have your information back, your files however you want them, and full control of how everything looks.” That time is coming, either by evolution or revolution, and it will be a huge step in the advancement of technology design when it does.

This post was written by Ryan Imel, who also blogs about WordPress Plugins and themes at Theme Playground.

Design Is More Than Beauty Only

Beauty is good looking, but good design is more. Good design is developed with the user in mind. Great design is highly functional.
Whether the the highly praised Mobile Clinical Assistant or the LOMAK – Light Operated Mouse And Keyboard, brilliant design serves a purpose, serves its user.

Design Is Also Presentation

But that’s not all. Great design also needs a good presentation. Presentation can ruin a lot. Even terrific design. One of the 2007 IDEA winners is a simple, but IMO brilliant concept: Roll N’ Roll. Chopsticks, but not your ordinary chopsticks. Portable fun chopsticks with an environmental twist.

Roll n’ Roll are portable, personal chopsticks that give people an environmentally responsible, sanitary tableware alternative when in public. They are made of a thin metal slice that can be rolled vertically to form a straw or chopstick, or horizontally into a small cylinder that coils around the wrist like a bracelet ensuring Roll n’ Roll are always there when you need them. Since Roll n Roll are more portable and fun than traditional chopsticks, the designer hopes to reduce the use of disposable chopsticks, which in turn will lessen the consumption of precious natural resources.

I love the concept. Really simple but brilliant at the same time. Brilliant until I saw the picture Business Week used for its slideshow.

Suddenly I was reminded of all the shortcomings of the portable fun chopsticks. Minor details, details such as hygiene. I was reminded of all the germs I’ld carry around after having enjoyed a lovely Indonesian meal. Sweat taste flavoring my next Bourbon Sour.

And all that because of… one anorexic arm. An arm reminding me of a movie. A movie and a sin, a deathly sin: Se7en and Sloth.