Now I find myself blogging at a different pace: it’s looking like once or twice a week for this season of life. In the past, The pace I liked to have for my blogging is 2 to 3 posts per week.

(What is a good rhythm of blogging? As a point of reference, I typically advise people to not start blogging if s/he cannot make a blog post at least once a week. I know there are people out there more in the professional blogging realm that blog every weekday in a very disciplined manner. For business- and goal-oriented people, that’s a good thing to do.)

With 12 years of blogging, I’ve certainly not exhausted topics to be blogging about. I’m not considering pulling the plug. This blog started as a personal endeavor and will remain so. Just a place where I can share (a part of) my life and to connect with people far beyond my geographical limitation. Yes, I have a wide eclectic range of topics of interest.

All this to say, not all that much is changing here. Just a change of pace. Add a comment with a topic you’d love to see me blog about. And I’ll queue it up for next week.

Links mentioned in the extended video, aka show notes: Yogurtland, Tim Keller, Peter Drucker, Christian celebrities, Asian American, Multiethnic church, my YouTube channel…

In other words, conversations build relationships and understanding. Blogging in many ways is a better way to express ideas + thoughts + feelings in more details than a quick tweet via Twitter. Ultimately, the best conversations can happen face-to-face, but just because we’re not in the same geographical physical location doesn’t mean the conversation has to stop. Here’s a list of active bloggers that are multiethnic church leaders, actively engaged in blog conversations about church diversity, in random order:

• Eugene Cho eugenecho.wordpress.com + @eugenecho
• Mark DeYmaz markdeymaz.com + @markdeymaz + authored Building a Healthy Multi-ethnic Church & Ethnic Blends
• Shaun King shauninthecity.com + @shaunking
• Eric Bryant ericbryant.org + @ericbryant + authored Not Like Me
• Scott Williams bigisthenewsmall.com + @scottwilliams + new book releasing in April: Church Diversity – Sunday The Most Segregated Day Of The Week
• Soong-Chan Rah profrah.wordpress.com + @profrah + authored The Next Evangelicalism & Many Colors
• Artie Davis ArtieDavis.com + @artiedavis
• Byron Davis dreamofdestiny.org + @coachbyron
• David Swanson davidswanson.wordpress.com
• Derwin Gray derwinlgray.com + @derwinlgray
• Peter Park redemptionboulevard.com
• Miles McPherson blog.milesmcpherson.com + @milesmcpherson
• Matt Schoolfield mattschoolfield.wordpress.com
• Derek Chinn cornerstonesoup.wordpress.com
• Proskuneo Ministries www.proskuneo.info/blog

Why aren’t there more team blogs as more normative for good blogging? The idea seems easy enough: get a team of bloggers to share the load of content generation, e.g. get 5 people to blog once a week, instead of 1 person blogging every weekday.

Launching a multi-author blog doesn’t magically beget popularity and large readership (if you’re into that; by the way, a large audience makes it easier to monetize and turn a blog into a profit-making venture, a la an advertising revenue model)

Here’s 3 things I’ve noticed about effective / successful team blogs:

• hot topic: team blogs with lots of readers (and comments) are on popular topics that lots of people are interested in. Call it market-driven if you will. Hot topics = tech, celebrities, politics.
• quality: gotta have great writing, great content, which comes from skill and passion and staying on topic
• coordination: this isn’t a laissez-faire hands-off deal, someone has to actively coordinate and contributors ought to develop some system of communication with one another; content scheduling is one part of doing this; conductor-less orchestra is a rare exception

What would you add? Some other thoughts + insights about team-blogging ::

• Team Blogging: Tips From Southwest Airlines (@ podtech.net cf. Nuts about Southwest blog)
• Zen and art of team blogging via creativity-portal.com
• Top Ten Tips for Successful Team Blogs @ Library Garden
• Communication Is Essential For A Successful Blogging Team @ techmiso.com
• Team blogging @ bloggingtips.com [w 13 authors]
• Team Blogging and Multi-Author Blog Etiquette @ Fort Hard Knox
• A Team Blogging Environment for Multi-Author Blogs @ raproject.com

[mood: writing this blog on a Sunday afternoon in one of the larger Starbucks around, here in West Village of Uptown Dallas; lots of buzz and people all around.. with a lil reggae music in the background]

And, while it is possible to type on this smartphone, blogging thoughtfully does go so much better, and faster, on a full size keyboard.

To glance back at my week, look at my instablog http://daily.djchuang.com and my 24/7 twitter feed http://twitter.com/djchuang247

My upcoming multi-site road trip next weekend triggered my exploration on what to do with my online content. You might call this “content segmentation.” Here’s where my content is now being posted:

djchuang.com – my personal blog here will remain the place where I write out my more lengthy color commentaries on my eclectic thoughts and personal feelings

twitter.com/djchuang – @djchuang is my main twitter feed with updates primarily covering the topics of faith and culture, and joining in on related conversations

twitter.com/djchuang247 – @djchuang247 is my new twitter feed with updates that will be reveal glimpses of my personal everyday life and more extensive commentaries and sound bites during conferences I attend

daily.djchuang.com – this is my tumblr-powered daily blog that’ll mix mostly a photo blog and an audio blog, with occasional deep-dive event live-blogging

facebook.com/djchuang – this connects me to a smaller circle of people. If I instinctively recognize the face or name, I’ll accept a friend request. If not, sorry.

friendfeed.com/djchuang – this will get you everything in my lifestream, including blogs, tweets, yelps, delicious, flickr, youtube, etc.

I also contribute to these blogs as a part of my professional career life:

• L2 Foundation blog – relevant items to develop leadership and legacy for Asian Americans
• Books @ Leadership Network – Practical innovations from books that leaders are reading
• Digital @ Leadership Network – church tech blog for non-techies
• Learnings @ Leadership Network – what innovative churches are doing
• Multi-site Church blog – informing & equipping churches to reach people at multiple locations

I’ve heard not everyone wants to read everything I have to write or comment on everything, particularly some of the inane personal things I’m doing at the moment, to which I even say to myself, “so what?” I’ve even had one person _block_ me on Twitter just to make sure he doesn’t get my too-frequent updates — when all he had to do is unfollow me.

All of us have to be selective on what content we’ll subscribe to, filter through, follow, or manage. No offense taken if you choose only a portion of my lifestream.

[photo credit]

A book published in 2006 opened it up — Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. The authors, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, posted their book’s content on a blog, and invited feedback on the draft version. Leaning into the power of the wisdom of the crowds, the book was polished in the open, and got published into a hardcover book. And the book still sold well. (How well I can’t say; I don’t have access to those numbers.)

The authors blogged milestones in their publishing process, Publisher’s Proposal 1.0 + Not Quite Fully Transparent + Publisher’s Update + We have our publisher! . And as they wrote, the book‘s (draft) content’s was posted online:

• Table of Contents (revised)
• Foreword by Tom Peters
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Ch 2—Why Blogging Matters
• Ch 3– Word of Mouth on Steroids
• Ch 4– Direct Access
• Ch 5– Little Companies
• Ch 6– Consultants who get it
• Ch 7—Survival of the Publicists
• Ch 8—Non-English blogs
• Ch 9—Thorns in the Roses
• Ch. 10—Doing It Wrong
• Ch 11– Doing It Right (corporate blogging tips)
• Ch 12– How to not get Dooced
• Ch 13– Blogging in a Crisis
• Ch 14– Emerging Technologies
• Ch 15– The Conversational Era

Defies conventional thinking that they could post a book’s (draft) content free online and then get that book’s content published in a book format that still sells. (Also, portions of the published Naked Conversations can be viewed and searched via Google Books Search.)

In a world where so much content is free and readily available on the Web (cf. the notion of free economy that Chris Anderson is articulating, in articles like “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business“), what is the value in the printed book, then? In attending a conference? The value is shifting from obtaining the content towards something about the experience and format. Just my preliminary speculation.

Now, as we speak (blog), Shel Israel is working on a new book, tentatively titled Twitterville. Overview at Twitterville Notebook: My Book-Writing Process and you can follow along the book’s content being developed in the open at
Twitterville Notebook.

Your feedback would be welcomed, both there and here!

The above list was made off the top of my head (I didn’t want to try breaking into the registration database.) So if I forgot you, or if you know someone else who is going, please add a comment and say hey. * Asterisk indicates people I’m meeting f2f in person for the 1st time.

Tired is the new Fine. I’m noticing that answers to “How are you?” is switching from “Fine.” to “Tired.” Haven’t you? In DETAILS magazine — Being Tired Is Not a Status Symbol — “Some people think telling everyone how exhausted they are makes them seem important. But flaunting your fatigue only makes you insufferable… Stop complaining–No one cares how tired you are.” [ cf. So Tired: Where Web surfers go when they haven't slept a wink; EDGE's Jeanne Harnois notes, "Caffeine, the new status symbol"; tired.com contrasts with wired.com ]

Pastors in rural area churches, or “in the sticks”, there’s a conference for you in Loudonville, Ohio — aptly called “the sticks” conference, November 11-12, 2008. [ht: LeadingSmart] cf. conference blog has latest updates and a Free Gas giveaway.

Kinko‘s is fading away. Several months ago in car with wifey, behind a FedExKinko’s truck, I commented to her that the Kinko’s font is so thin compared to the FedEx font, I think Kinko’s is going to fade away and disappear. Lo and behold, it’s now official. I saw it coming, er, going.

Jason Calacanis retires from blogging and holds a mock press conference to answer questions. He’s only been at it for 5 years; I’ve been blogging since 1999. But then again, I didn’t have to deal with the pressures of being an A-List blogger.

Starbucks is closing 600 of its stores all over the United States, and here’s a list of 7 in Orange County that I have been to and/or have co-worked at:

• valley view & firestone 16610 valley view ave la mirada ca
• pch & boat canyon 636 n pacific coast hwy laguna beach ca
• lake forest & muirlands 22621 lake forest dr lake forest ca
• marguerite & college dr 28171 marguerite pkwy mission viejo ca
• trabuco hills 27775 santa margarita pkwy mission viejo ca
• newport & el camino real 14001 newport ave tustin ca
• newport & main 13681 newport ave tustin ca

See the complete list of Starbucks stores closing before June 2009. [ht: savvywallet] 3 other OC Starbucks are closing too.

That doesn’t mean you should stop blogging if you don’t reach a certain audience size. Brian Bailey, author of The Blogging Church, exhorts that blogging has to be done well and intentionally: “Blogging isn’t worth doing poorly or for the wrong reasons. It’s too demanding and too distracting. In God’s economy, we don’t have the luxury of pouring ourselves into good things when he has so many great things for us. There is simply too much at stake.”

Well, audience size mostly means that there’s a lot of people who want to keep on reading what you’re blogging. But what the public deems popular and interesting changes quickly: 80% of the top 100 Technorati blogs changed from last year’s rankings. You don’t have to blog for them. You can blog for yourself or for an audience of One.

Guy Kawasaki is one of those consummate marketing genius, adding blogging to his repertoire in December 2005 and skyrocketed to the Technorati top 100 in less than 4 months, noted Observations after 100 days of blogging + A Review of My First Year of Blogging, and shares great tips like How to Evangelize a Blog and How I write my blog entries.

The co-founder of Netscape has finally started blogging — see what he’s learned already — Marc Andersson’s blogging lessons learned in 5 weeks [ht: plaid blog]:

1. First, it’s hard to believe it’s only been five weeks. “Internet time” lives, I can tell you that.
2. Second, I’d like to truly thank everyone who has read this blog, linked to this blog, sent this blog to your friends, or come up to me at various parties and events to say that you’ve been reading it …
3. Third, I should have started doing this years and years ago.
4. Fourth, one of the best things about blogs is how they enable a conversation among people with shared interests.
5. Fifth, writing a blog is way easier than writing a magazine article, a published paper, or a book — but provides many of the same benefits.
6. Sixth, blogging tolerates and even encourages stylistic idiosyncracies that traditional publishing would not accommodate.
7. Seventh, it is totally clear that original content is what generates readership, at least for most bloggers.
8. Eighth, I am convinced there is a whole world of optimization to be done based on detailed stats and studying what works and what doesn’t on one’s blog.
9. Ninth, we are definitely entering a world in which bloggers are taken super-seriously by political candidates, company PR departments, government officials, and book editors, among many others.
10. Tenth, it’s been fun to see the traffic to my blog generated by services such as Digg, Reddit, Techmeme, and the like, but the big surprise to me has been the amount of traffic that I get from StumbleUpon.
11. Eleventh and last, the most common reaction that I got from starting my blog that I didn’t expect was, “finally he’s blogging”.

I grabbed the bullet points for a quicker read. Click over to read the full context with Marc’s commentary about his lessons learned.

Then again, there’s other good reasons for blogging. Tara Hunt went to BlogHer for the first time this year, and noted these difference in the rules for blogging, perhaps suggesting a gender difference — excerpted bullet points from Getting back to what matters:

… here is a snapshot of the rules I was getting well versed in [referring to the male world]:

1. Numbers matter.
2. It’s about the rockstars.
3. Link link link link link link link
4. Coalitions, coopetition, collaboration… we gather to win.
5. Meritocracy is the way to go.

… But to put it all into context… to weigh in with the overall paradigm of this group, I would say the new rules I was getting versed in were [referring to BlogHer, a female world]:

1. Stories matter.
2. It’s about kindness.
3. Share share share share share share share …
4. Community, cooperation, collaboration… we gather to make things happen.
5. Mentorship is the way to go.

Again, click thru to read the full context with Tara’s commentary on BlogHer.

Had a great lunch conversation with the poetic Natala Constantine the other day, lamenting over the misunderstandings of the blogging lifestyle. I sorta broke the news to her that we bloggers are in the minority and marginalized. Even though there are more than 12 million bloggers in America and Technorati tracks over 66.6 million blogs, only 7% of adults read blogs at least once a week.

We also wondered about how to find someone else’s passion, as a means of connecting her ecumenical church community to its surrounding community through serving. Yes, you can use Rick Warren’s SHAPE acrostic for this: Spiritual gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, and Experience. SHAPE is a very helpful framework for ministry, finding a place to serve voluntarily in a church kind of context. SHAPE could be adapted for choosing careers too, I think, though there are more than 1,000 tests for career assessment. But as we discussed this further, I thought of 2 ways to discover passion more quickly:

1. Listen to their story. Passion is often born out of pain or joy.
2. What does that person naturally do on their own?

Underneath it all, it’s about what motivates someone to do something and to take action, and that doing good things passionately can make a difference in the world. We also veered into a discussion about the difficulty of rallying people around something in an interfaith or ecumenical perspective, and while altruism is noble, it doesn’t really get lots of people galvanized together for a cause. It’s so much easier when things are black and white, over-simplified and goal-oriented, to align people in a community or organization to do something big and focused. Assuming that the long tail effect could work in mobilizing volunteer efforts (as much as it does in the marketplace), maybe doing little good-work efforts will do as much good as one big visionary cause.

Recently thought of a great metaphor to explain these new web technologies to traditional organizations (and non-techies) by comparing them to traditional media channels. (Let me know how well this works, ok?)

• Blogging is like the AP wire. It’s instant publishing that enables organizations to instantly communicate with their audience. In the old days, the “AP wire” was a (kind of) teletype machine, and had a long scroll of paper fed into it, ready to type out the latest & greatest news as it happened. I saw the wire in action during my short-lived deejay stint at my college radio station.
• Podcasting is like your own radio station. You (and/or your organization) can produce a podcast show in a talk show, interview, or monologue lecture format. (I know podcasting can be either audio or video, but for simpler distinction here, I’m using podcasting for audio and vlogging for video.)
• Vodcasting is like your own TV station. You can record something simple like reality TV, or an informative infomercial, or something more compelling. The video format is great to weave into online education, web-based workshops, and/or video welcome or introduction.

Organizations previously had to hire creative agencies to produce a show (or write content) and buy air time to get radio or TV in hopes of finding and growing an audience. Now the internet has inverted that. Organizations can now be in the driver’s seat of their communications and actively manage their own media channels. Blogging implies daily (or more frequent) communications, podcasting implies weekly or daily communications, vodcasting (videoblogging) implies weekly communications. Good communications using any and all of these channels can only increase engagement with an organization’s existing audience and grow new relationships.

Anyhow, Crouch added that every writer needs a website. And, I would agree–not just because I have one, but also because the marketing director at my new publisher tells me it was this site, along with a good proposal, that sold him on my first book.

“A blog is a waste of time,” Crouch also suggested. This quiet comment drew loud cries from the Riess-Winner side of the panel–which said to me that they both have blogs.

Crouch pushed back, though. “You don’t develop an audience with a blog. Your writing is at its worst. And writing for a blog doesn’t improve your skill.”

But, it doesn’t have to be that way! There’s a growing number of bloggers who are getting book deals, because their blogs are what built the audience in the first place, like Robert Scoble‘s Naked Conversations, Glenn Reynold‘s Army of Davids, Anna Broadway‘s forthcoming Sexless in the City, and more. (cf. The New Yorker: “Suddenly, books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon.” + InfoToday.com’s Blogs to Book Deals + The Book Standard’s Blogs and Bestsellers: One and the Same? )