I’m really excited to have started a new job, blogging and podcasting for the Virtual Worlds Forum website. The Virtual Worlds Forum is a wildly successful conference in London which debuted last year, and is coming back this year in October. I started on Tuesday this week, which couldn’t have been a bigger news day; Google finally got into the space with Lively, and I really welcome the opportunity to get really involved with a space that is clearly going to be of increasing importance in the future as advertisers go to new lengths to engage their audience.

I haven’t been doing proper, regular blogging for about a year now, and its a really nice feeling to be ‘back in the saddle’. I’m doing a handover period with my extremely helpful predeccessor at Virtual Worlds Forum blog, Stuart Dredge, for the next couple of weeks or so, and then I’ll be striking out on my own.

I’m in a bit of a blogging limbo at the moment. I don’t want to stop writing, but after the collapse of Blognation, I’ve not been sure where to write. I thought about restarting GizBuzz, but then doubted my ability and willingness to give sufficient time to it to make a renewed effort worthwhile. I’ve thought about trying to do some casual writing for bigger sites, but haven’t got round to getting in touch with people to arrange it. But frankly, that isn’t the problem.

Pompous as it sounds, I’ve got ‘bloggers block’, because lets face it, I could have been writing here. The very fact that the first post I have written in a while is on my bloggers block shows the desperation of my situation.

Joel is onto something at YouMakeMedia when he states “I don’t believe in writer’s block”, instead attributing it to a mere “deficit of motivation and a surplus of good old fashioned laziness”. Realistically, although I am ridiculously busy at the moment with school work, I do actually have some spare time that I should/could be using to write. I have a reason to write, to improve my skills for a career in journalism that I’m getting keener to pursue every day. Further, I continue to have the ability to write: I’m producing several thousand words a week in essays. And that’s the problem.

It’s a mindshare issue. I am doing so much ‘stuff’ that I lose the impetus to do things that I should really be doing, but which have less critical time scales or less direct benefits.

So I’m setting myself a challenge. Next week I am going to post every day on here. I haven’t racked up a load of posts; I’m just going to find something to write about and sit down and actually do it.

Fingers crossed!

I find my optimism on joining blognation about six months ago deeply irritating now. I don’t think it has been an entirely wasted period for me personally however; beyond the obvious “don’t lie to people you do business with”, which I would hope I could have worked out for myself anyway, I do think I have learnt some good lessons, and have come into contact with great people.

So where from here? I haven’t decided yet. In the short term I’ll probably do a bit more blogging here. In the long term, I will certainly continue to blog, although I am not sure what form that will take.

In the meantime, I find this 401 authorisation on Vecosys (Sam Sethi’s domain) deeply disturbing. It says ‘restricted access pre-launch’. The idea of Sam launching something else already seems an incredibly bad one to me.

To celebrate the relaunch, below is a random Latin music track from Ioda Promonet.

Download “Un beso” (mp3)
from “God’s Project”
by Aventura
Premium Latin Music

Buy at iTunes Music Store

I’d encourage everyone else to do the same. Whilst it doesn’t actually do anything to get him released directly, I think it is important that as many people as possible point out that it is not acceptable to kidnap a person doing his best to report the story of a region as accurately as possible. We need to show that this matters, and that we are not going to let the matter drop.

I quite enjoy having absolutely no access to the internet – on some levels I don’t give a monkeys about any of the top stories on TechMeme. That’s a good thing. I’m singing evensong in Truro Cathedral, which should be quite nice.

Out.

I’ve lined up about 4 drafts in the Gizbuzz system, which have the first paragraph written. So, over the course of next week, all I need to do is finish them. I have a feeling I will.

So – to get over future blocks, I will half write posts.

(by the way, I’m procrastinating again – I have a coursework essay to write, and it is midnight).

In my opinion, tech companies (and much of this would apply to other companies as well) need look no further than Zoho for their tips on building interest and brand value for their product in the age of new media. Zoho first got in contact with me when I wrote on Gizbuzz on the launch of Writely that ‘Writely is certainly better than Zoho Writer’. One of the Zoho team, Arvind, got in touch to ask why. I was really impressed – I’d written about countless companies on Gizbuzz before, often negatively, yet none of them had bothered to get in touch. I wrote quite a long email back. What impressed me even more was that Zoho took some of the feedback on board, with the result that much of the criticism contained in that document no longer stands.

About a month after that, I got in touch with Arvind again about doing an interview with someone from Zoho. I hadn’t interviewed anyone for Gizbuzz before, and it was the first Gizbuzz podcast. It’s not uncommon for a company you email about an interview to completely ignore your request (bigger companies, unsurprisingly, are worst about this). This was even more likely given the fact that I had no track record and no audience, as this was the first ever. Zoho did put up someone for interview, however, and it was certainly one of the best I’ve done. And the Gizbuzz podcast now has a fairly substantial audience, with a lot of traffic from our latest podcast being sent back to the Zoho interview. The second second benefit Zoho has got from being helpful.

Since then Zoho has always kept in touch with me, telling me when they have released something which they think I might be interested in. Having built the solid foundations of a relationship with Gizbuzz, I am far more likely to cover Zoho because I find them interesting and use many of their products.

The latest stroke of genius from Zoho, which prompted this post, was the post on their corporate blog about coverage of their latest update. They posted quotes from many blogs, including Gizbuzz, who had covered them, obviously all positive. This post was then used by Read/WriteWeb’s Richard Macmanus (I suspect) find what other bloggers had been saying. Thus by this summary post from Zoho they influenced the blogging conversation by ensuring that the positive reviews were picked up by the A-list blogs where it really matters.

So what have Zoho got from me as a result of being friendly,  savvy and ‘keeping me in the loop’? Quite extensive feedback, on a number of their products. Significant coverage of those products, often positive. More positive coverage on A-list blogs, despite my distinct B-list status. I would say that was worth it! 

A note to Zoho – make sure you hold on to your evangelism team!

If you look at FCOL, you will see that I have most of the features that Vox would provide me with, but with the noticable absence of social networking. It’s not that I don’t think that social networking is a good idea – it is, and Vox does it very well. The problem arises out of the fact that I don’t know anyone who uses Vox. If I did, I would probably be using it. This highlights a major problem for aspiring new social networks. I will only use a social network if my friends are on it, but I’m not prepared to send out the spammy emails required to get the three or so that would actually respond.

If I can’t have the social networking features, I may as well not use Vox, and therein lies the problem. Vox need to get me to use it because it is the best platform even without social networking features, so that eventually people see that I am on Vox and follow (I’m being optimistic about my ability to act as a social leader here!). And right now, for people like me that can set up WordPress but don’t have any friends on Vox, WordPress remains the best option.

I have always used blogs as a way of work posponement. I set up Gizbuzz on Blogger partly to avoid revising for my GCSE mocks. When it came around to the real GCSEs, not only did I move Gizbuzz to WordPress, but I installed Ubuntu Linux on an old laptop, attached it to my network, got LAMP working, set up port forwarding and a static IP address and put Gizbuzz on that.

I’m not sure what it is about blogging which makes it so perfect for procrastination. I suspect that it is something to do with the combination of the technical challenge of setting the blog up in the first place, combined with the escapism of entering the virtual world of the internet, which seems at times strangely disjointed with the world in which most of us live, most of the time. Thus it takes up time, it is interesting and, most importantly, it is utterly irrelevant to the task in hand.

I really need to get on now.

Update: Have now done both essays, 48hrs later. Wow, that was effective procrastination!