A few days ago, you might have seen my claim that I would begin blogging daily.

I’ve been thinking that while this site is a great resource, many might miss it due to infrequent or unexpected updates.

Regardless of our past update frequency, blogging daily sounds like a tall order.  Here are some steps I plan to employ in order to keep daily weekday blogging (and quality) up to par:

1 – More regular writers. Having guest posters is fun and gives people some fresh ideas, though having regular contributors takes on a whole other voice to your blog.  Select these people wisely, as they should balance your normal tone.

2 – Nightblogging. I’ve just found it most effective to blog in the middle of the night.

3 – Assembly line method. One thing that has been particularly effective for me is what I’ll refer to here as assembly line blogging.  Literally, if you look at your blog post as pieces on an assembly line, they become easier, especially when you’re looking to keep up a frequent pace.

So let’s say I come up with a great idea to blog, but don’t have the time.  I quickly jot down the idea in notepad, or put in a draft in WordPress, usually with a catchy title.  When time will allow, I will continue to develop the idea.  Unless it’s a pure research post, the last steps I will do will be adding links, images and video.  Give it a final edit, and the post is on its way.

4 – Delayed Publishing. Thanks to the beauty of WordPress, we’re able to schedule posts to publish in the future.  While I might have some great ideas at 3am, it might not get the best exposure should I choose to publish at that time.  So I could publish at 6am and have the blog do the publishing work by itself – just in time for my morning coffee.  Does it really take that much time and work to publish a blog post? Of course not – it’s just nice to know that your post is on its way in a scheduled fashion.

5 -  Keeping Fresh. Nothing keeps you on your game like blogging on a daily basis.  Once you fall off your schedule, you may find yourself in a pattern of “paralysis through analysis.” I’ve fallen into this trap too before.  You haven’t blogged for what you think is far too long, so you over think and over analyze the “perfect post.” You sit on it for days, maybe even weeks.  Last I checked, nobody has won the Nobel Peace Prize for writing a blog post, so break your behavior here and publish already.  It’s a self-defeating behavior that doesn’t help you, and your audience would appreciate the updates.

6 – There are some things Twitter wasn’t made for. Yes, you heard me.  Twitter can’t make your coffee (though you can order coffee from it), and it can’t blog.  Not beyond 140 characters.  So this can lead to a lot of noise.  Also, you don’t “own” your Twitter blog and links are nofollow, so the more you Tweet, the more you’re actually working for Twitter.  Reclaim some of your blog power – your readers will thank you for the focus.

7 – Keep one step ahead of yourself. Try to keep at least one full post ahead of your writing.  If you can’t do that, at least have a few half written ones, ya slacker

I’m not asking you to blog daily…though I’m curious: what do you do to keep up your pace?

There’s now no doubt now that Google is gradually building a social network to rival all other social networks but it all seems to be in dribs and drabs and it’s a bit confusing how they are going to eventually connect it all up. I mean, let’s look at the various strands :

1) iGoogle : Google’s personalised search pages. As yet, still rather underrated (Google is not really pushing people towards it) but it is nevertheless slowly gaining a cult following among Googlers. Developers are becoming a lot like Facebook developers and are pushing out a lot of applications to users. There may come the day however when Google DOES start pushing people by default towards their personalised iGoogle pages and we may not have a plain no-frills Google.com page anymore……but let’s wait and see on that one.

2) Picks For You : Google’s version of Stumbleupon (but without the profiles, thumbs up, commenting and close-knit community that makes Stumbleupon unique). “Picks For You” is a Google Toolbar button that needs (obviously) the Google Toolbar installed and your Google search history enabled. So you need to trust Google a great deal to use this feature. “Picks For You” works by studying your Google search history stored inside the toolbar and then bringing you alternative webpages that it thinks you might like based on those past searches. But unlike Stumbleupon, you cannot specify particular subjects to include or exclude. It just goes by what you have searched for in the past. So bad luck if you previously searched for how to treat your STD problem.

3) Gmail : Many people have commented that with a bit of work, the Gmail contacts section could be leveraged into a social networking area of its very own, especially since Gmail 2.0 came equipped with the ability to add instant messaging usernames. Then Zoopit (not connected to Google) launched its private beta which gives users the chance to show photos from their email in their Gmail inbox (which I eventually uninstalled because Zoopit demanded my Gmail password).

4) Google Reader : and so we come to Google Reader which seems to me to be the jewel in the Google social networking crown right now. They hit a major snag at first when they announced that Reader shared links would be visible to all other contacts and I have to admit this soured me on Reader for a while (it also caused a bit of an uproar in the Google Help Forums) . But I soon decided to forget about it and work around it instead. Instead of worrying about what links people can see, just let them see what you want them to see.

The first hint of a social network in Google Reader is the basic profile and you can invite your Reader contacts to share in your RSS feeds.

This is all old hat though. It’s the new feature that has made me realise that Google Reader is on the verge of kicking some serious social ass.

A lot of the time, while I am stumbling around, I find great webpages that I want to share with my Google Reader contacts but at the same time I do NOT want to subscribe to the whole damn feed just to show off one page. In these circumstances, I tend to think “oh forget about it!” and move on.

There are also (believe it or not) websites without RSS feeds (gasp!). It’s 2008 but these sites are still stuck in the mindset of 1998. One of my favourite websites doesn’t have a RSS feed which irritates me immensely – The Straight Dope. I have always wanted to share pages from that site with my Reader contacts but how can I when I can’t get it to show up in Reader? But now, thanks to Google Reader, I can!

First, just go “Your Stuff” in your Reader sidebar and then “Notes”. You’ll then find a draggable javascript link that you can pull up to your browser bar with your mouse.

Now I went to the Straight Dope to try out this link. I found this page on tornadoes in North America and decided to send it to my Reader contacts. So I clicked on the Notes link to see what happened.

It opens up a small Reader box in the top right hand corner of the screen, asking you if you want to proceed and it also gives you the opportunity to attach a note with the link. After doing all that and pressing the confirm button, the link then appears in Google Reader right away :

Absolutely neat! No hitches whatsoever!

There is one other new feature as well – the ability to send notes to your Reader contacts. Again, just go to your Notes page and start typing in the notes box at the top of the page. Then click “post note” :

With features like this, you have to wonder what other RSS services have to do to compete to stay relevant. If they bring out similar services, they’ll be accused of copying. If they do nothing, they’ll be accused of giving up. But if you compare what Google is bringing out these days and then look at My Yahoo, Bloglines, or a similar service, is there any real competition in the RSS business anymore?

Someone asked me just now if there is any need for Google to connect all these various services up and what is wrong with them all being disconnected. Well maybe it’s my orderly neat mind but Google has always seemed to me to be a neat organised company and having scattered pieces of a “social network” doesn’t fit their psychological profile. Do you agree? I really am interested to see how it all comes together in the future and how they intend to take on Facebook at their own game.

Written by Mark O’Neill