Who cares if your content sucks?  Ok probably mostly everybody is, but then again, why should you care whether your content sucks or not. Although this is highly debatable, I’ll get this part into 2 sections.

You shouldn’t give a damn…

1. if you’re writing out of interest and everything you write is just simply out of fun and within the list that makes the time goes ZOOOM.
2. if you’re a zombie and blog just for the sake of passing the time, hence your content does not need to be good, as long as your fingers get their exercise and your brain gets out what it wants to say. Yes there are such people out there that does this, and don’t ask me why.
3. because it’s your own blog, and as long as you get your main ideas out, it doesn’t matter if your grammar sucks like monkey’s balls, or you mix like a million languages in it. But hey, at least make it understandable. Draw if you must. Accept constructive criticism from your readers and improve as you go along, but try to avoid trolls who come and go.
4. if your content is unique, special, different from others, just that it’s not presented the way the “others” want it to be. Remember, you blog because you simply like to blog or probably being forced to blog, the main idea here is not to allow others to fully dictate what and how you should blog. Learn and follow from good examples are good way for improvements, but don’t tie a leash around your neck and let the rest pull you around whenever and however they want.
5. if your main objectives are either to blog to satisfy the mass or you’re just simply blogging to satisfy or express your own personal feelings and ideas. If you’re going for the mass, then criticism is essential to your improvement. Not that constructive criticism is bad, but you need to vary and adapt to different kind of feedback according to your approach. Accept and reject as you see fit.
6. if you’re a hardcore mass blogger producer of the century. I’m pretty sure all of us know of the availability of blog auto generators that can chunk out 100 blogs per minute, and auto posts for you, while you’re sleeping or walking your dog. This is called splogs (spam blogs), which are generally rubbish all over the net. Nobody can control what one can do, but bloggers who do this usually don’t care the quality of their content.
7. if you’re still a rookie blogger and still have no idea on the main elements of blogging. Not that you need to have a license to blog, but I guess in this super sophisticated world, everything has unwritten rules and certain trends that we must adhere to or we will be the aliens of the community. My point is, making mistakes in the beginning are normal, learn as you go along, and your content will definitely improve as time goes by. Practice makes it perfect.

You should give a damn…

1. if your livelihood depends on it. It’s only logical that negative, or should I say constructive criticism should be taken seriously if it provides beneficial future improvements.
2. Great ideas come from a well rested brain, so if you’ve been working way too hard on your blogs, get some rest and continue your world domination conquest later. No point squeezing the very last drop of your brain juice to get your blog rich with super unique and interesting content, only to know that more than half of your readers ended up leaving comments in your post saying that your content sucks!
3. if you’ve been caught red handed stealing content, or “borrowing” content without establishing the proper acknowledgment to the original author. Interesting to know how small key presses of CTRL+C and CTRL+V can actually generate an overwhelming wave of negative responses.
4. if your readers are your treasure. Without them, a blog is not a blog. Appreciate their criticisms and apply the necessary changes appropriately.
5. if you’re a perfectionist.

This might not be new news for some, but for me, who has been hunting for a standalone RSS reader, treats this as an absolute dream come true. Strictly a personal endorsement, I have my reader on as long as my computer is on. What I like about this software is its uniqueness of making it a multi-functional program which allows you to have most of your online activities organised within one window.

Interface & General Features
To those who have been using applications like Outlook Express or Microsoft Outlook, or any other applicatons which are similar in terms of its Graphical User Interface (GUI), should be thrilled to know that Omea Reader has in fact utilizes the same concept. Multi configurable windows / sections / columns which make navigation somehow more manageable and pleasant to work with.

Now, the main topic / function of Omea Reader is of course the RSS Reader, but as obvious as what it actually does, let’s look at the other features that Omea Reader provides. I won’t be covering all of the obvious / more technical features, as I will leaning more on the features one can see being a basic user. On top of an excellent RSS Reader, you’ll get a bookmarking tool, which allows you to bookmark websites, categorized in any categories you may or may not create. You’ll have a News reader, and additional feature which definitely boosts your information gathering sources.

Contacts
You can keep your contacts as well, and all of these are nicely organized in various organized categories, namely date, unread, annotated, clippings, flagged, categories which you saved your information in, etc. I’m sure these additional features need no explanation as they’re as obvious as they can be. I’ll leave it to your own “experimentations” to get to know them better.

Other Features
The other feature which I find exceptionally useful is the Notes section. Write any notes you want to remind yourself of an upcoming event, or anything you fancy. Add related links, images and other form of formatting.

All of us these items can be searched using it’s internal search engine. So if you have a huge database of feeds and news, this’ll come in extremely handy. It has a straightforward type-in-and-search area and its advanced search feature for a more “specific” search.

Flexible Toolbar
The other thing which interests me, although not a new revolutionary feature, is the drag and drop bookmarking toolbar at the top. You can practically drag any items including RSS feeds, news, bookmarks, notes into this toolbar and let you access any of these essential information by a click instead of navigating your way through to the respective information you’re seeking for. If you’re a Firefox user and utilizes the Bookmarks toolbar, then you know exactly what I mean, only this time around Omea makes it much much more interesting.

Now let’s go to the main feature this post revolved around. The RSS Reader.

I like this feature particularly well due to the fact that it stores the older RSS feeds, nicely organized in titles such as “Last Week”, “bla bla”, etc. I might not have tried all the RSS readers out there to provide a thorough comparison, but among the ones that I’ve used so far, most of them only downloads the recent feeds and automatically deletes the older ones, leaving you only with the recent and new feeds. For me, this archiving feature is gold, and exactly what I’m looking for.

Once installed, you’re also given the option to import all your bookmarks from all of your existing Internet browsers, and not forgetting it’s option of installing the Omea browser plugin which allows you discover feeds in the websites you’re browsing and ultimately giving you the option to add it into Omea if the content attracts your attention.

Feeds Categorization
As usual, all the feeds you’ve subscribed into Omea can be further categorized into folders to get them organized. And the folders won’t stop just being folders, you can have subfolders and supersubfolders, super super subfolders if you get what I’m trying to say. Although this is a good feature if you have a complex information structure, I personally wouldn’t recommend having a very complex / deep subfolder structure for the reason that it’ll only make it more complicated. Keep it simple and it’ll make your life easier.

The RSS feeds are displayed in the most right column, depending on the author’s settings, you might see a full post or an excerpt of his / her post. If you’ve subscribed to a blog’s feed, you’re given the option to view the particular post’s comments, RSS style. Now who said you have to go to each blog and click on each posts to read the comments? If you need to add in your comments, fear not as a “Comment” link will be provided at the bottom of each feed which upon clicking will be opened within Omea Reader itself, using it’s internal browser. The browser is pretty obsolete though, as it doesn’t support certain javascripts and flash, but better than nothing eh?

I guess that’s all. Try it out if you haven’t, did I mention that it’s FREE? Yes free. Now go and download and try it out. And to those who are itchy to get more feeds into your reader, drop by here and here and check out the top 40 most popular RSS Feeds, according to Feedburner.

Have fun!

Yea yea yea, why don’t I get a flashlight and scout my path ahead.

I wish it’s that simple.

Although I must admit that blogging something unknown is not something totally impossible, that length of effort you need to throw in is just not worth it. Well don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that all of us (me included) should not do it just because we don’t have the slightest idea on it. If you love challenges and obstacles, why not – this SPELLS fun, literally.

More often than not, all of us just simply don’t have the time to do constant research, opening up the big head of ours so that we can take in more information and totally brand new knowledge, which we obviously aware that it’ll just dissapear in the next day or so.

Some might say, “Hey why don’t you just Google it, get to know more and rewrite everything you digested in that short period of time in your own words? I’ll be the richest and most successful writer in this world if it’s that simple. Sure it’s doable, but heck, nothing beats the natural flow of constructing sentences based on understanding and knowledge.

What am I really talking now? I have no idea myself.

My point is pretty simple really. Just blog something you have some knowledge or experience in. You’ll be doing yourself a big favour by making your blogging life so much easier. However, easy is not the word we’re trying to discuss here.

Predicament, troublesome, nothingness, inappropriateness, etc.

If you find yourself being a magnet to such words above, then look no further. You’re talking about the Internet, and hell yeah, you can find anything you want. Let’s say that for some weird and unexplainable reason or reasons that you want to blog something about mosquitoes (for example), and the only thing you know about mosquitoes is that they need to die and to leave everybody alone, unfortunately, you’re not going to survive blogging just by having that information. Let’s not wipe mosquitoes the heck out of this world though, they are there for a reason, but nonetheless, they’re EXTREMELY annoying.

Having said that, the best places where you can find additional information on your lovely insect friend are :-

1. Wikipedia
2. Yahoo! Answers
3. Google Groups
4. Forums (on mosquitoes) – BoardReader (Forum Search Engine), etc.
5. Articles (Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, etc.)
6. Google News & Yahoo News
7. Youtube (yes Youtube, you don’t have to wipe your eyes) or any other video sharing sites
8. Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc.
9. Free Ebooks – Gutenberg.org, Getfreeebooks.com, etc
10. Online Encyclopedias – MSN Encarta, Encyclopedia.com, etc
11. Search Engines – Google, Live, Yahoo, Altavista, Answers, etc
12. and you can always search for organisations that are specifically established that is closely related to the chosen topic, which in this case, e.g. http://www.mosquito.org/

Now who said it’s difficult to write something you have no idea about.

Come on, start writing something!

If you have such similar experience in writing / blogging something you have no prior knowledge, feel free to share your adventure and how you overcame the obstacles, or rather how it overwhelmed you and made you quit. Anything, please do leave your comments …

China’s Great Firewall has now started blocking RSS, a long known loophole to get information blocked all other ways. An entire syndication standard is now blocked. According to the Ars Technica:

Quite a weird thing to block RSS I must say. Information overload?

Click here to read the full story.

Blogging for Fun
I think this is extremely healthy, the word “FUN” is pretty much what is needed to spice up anything you could possibly be doing. I bet nobody will be blogging if it’s boring or being forced to do it just for the sake of making money online. However, I’m very positive of believing that there is in fact, people who run blogs, whom are mainly motivated or driven by monetary gains. I wouldn’t blame them if that’s the case, as long as they’re contented and happy with what they’re doing, provided that they blog within “ethical” means (if you know what I mean).

Back to the topic.

When it’s fun, the chances of it to persevere for a long time is extremely high, and that is exactly what you want to do.  So if you’re planning to blog, and if it’s not fun for you, then don’t force yourself. It might end up being a heavy burden on your shoulders instead of something that you might want to spend time doing. Maybe try blogging on a trial basis, test it out, do it just out of curiosity and see how it goes, and if through this trial and error you start to develop some element of interest and fun, then by all means, continue on as you’re on the right track!

Blogging for Money
Well, if you’re blogging for the sole purpose of making money, then you should at least have the motivation to make a blog to work for you, even if you’re not taking it as something fun to do. However, chances are that bloggers who monetize their blogs are normally blog enthusiasts by nature (most if not all). There are still bloggers who are generally “sleeping bloggers” who generate blogs in the hundreds and having RSS feeds automatically posted in their blogs to create the impression that they’re in fact blogging.

Whichever way it is, blogging does in fact generates a great source of income for some or should I say for many, if you put a reasonable amount of effort in it. How these bloggers motivate themselves to persist in a constant blogging frequency probably come in various forms. Interest? Fun? Strictly materialistic? All of them?

Blogging for Interest
Now the word “Interest” interests me in a very very special way. It is simply because the fact that by simple means of interest, it could generate various unimaginable results. If you’re interested in something, it’s definitely fun and something that you look forward on doing on a constant basis. With this determination, and probably through an “unconscious reflex of action”, it could generate other form of sub-activities like creating something you like that generates money for you.

Or in some other cases, you might even go as far as blogging just for the sake of sharing your knowledge and information, in other words, helping others to know what you know, to learn what you know, etc. I might go as far as to say that interest is probably what you should find if you indeed decided to embark upon the world of blogging.

Take note that the word interest here refers to itself in the most general manner possible. It does not need to be pointing towards interest(s) towards a certain topic, but rather interest in blogging. If you like or want to blog, what subject you’re jumping into is secondary.

Blogging out of fun, interest and to make some extra dough.
Now, how if you already somewhere at this position where you have the interest, you enjoy blogging tremendously and you’re generating a nice amount of money through it? I would say bravo! Anybody probably would say, the only thing right now is persistence, determination and frequency. If you ask me, “interest” generates all that without you even knowing it, which is why interest is such an important value that you need to seek should you find yourself a blogger.

Now go and blog and have some fun!

1. A good blog is the same as a newsletter; it’s interesting content that’s updated regularly.
2. A good blog is informative, accurate, newsy, and inviting.
3. A good blog is not stale but kept current with frequent and regular posts.
4. A good blog is not necessarily what you say, but what you give credit to by linking out to others.
5. A good blog is when the comments offer just as much insight and interest as the original posts.
6. a good blog is to imitate others who already managed to create and maintain successful blogs.
7. A good blog is highly personal, daring and so stream-of-conscious that it cannot be contained to a prescribed word limit.
8. A good blog is painfully honest to the point of humiliation.
9. A good blog is what Bitsy writes – meaning she walks a tight rope between wanting the entire world to read it and dreading anyone at allreading it.
10. A good blog is to have more beginnings than ends.
11. A good blog is really well connected into the search engines and the key words and other meta tags are primed to be very successful.
12. A good blog is still defined by the readers who patronise the blog for its content.
13. A good blog is one with good content and the platform does not make much of a difference.
14. A good blog is part relevant content, part blogger personality.
15. A good blog is a conversation, not a one-way PR channel.
16. A good blog is a result of interesting posts, the blogger dedication, frequency and different posts from time to time (about the blog issue of course).
17. A good blog is based on facts and opinions and not all facts or all opinions.
18. A good blog is a mix of ads and journalistic content.
19. A good blog is a content management system, where you can easiliy organize and control your high value content, create the necessary backlinks and evoke interaction with your readers.
20. A good blog is one of the few places where an author is able to brand their personality and establish a relationship with readers.
21. A good blog is one that is started by someone who would keep it up if they never made any money at it.
22. A good blog is arguably a community, complete with its differing ideaologies, talking to itself.
23. A good blog is the one who keep the balance between focusing on readers (being impersonal, that is) and speaking his own mind (being personal).
24. A good blog is passionate and authoritative.
25. A good blog is one which the writer enjoys creating.
26. A good blog is a combination of good, well-written material and good presentation.
27. A good blog is a great way for readers “in the business” to keep up with current events and current controversies.
28. A good blog is in its idiosyncratic independence to pursue whatever however.
29. A good blog is to look at the blogroll that is listed on a blog you read.
30. A good blog is actually a task based on common sense and crisp writing.
31. A good blog is someone whose life is not defined by their blog.
32. A good blog is one that builds your brand by mixing authoritative content with a touch of personality.

I’ve never considered myself as an individual who has mastered the English language, but I still blog, as I believe the main objective of blogging is to get your messages out within an environment you see fit. Of course, realistically speaking, if your command of English is on the bad side, then you could probably revert to using the language you’re comfortable with.

There are all kinds of people in this world who are blog lurkers, who instead of appreciating the content right in front of them, decides to fulfill one’s self gratification by acknowledging your “level” of English.

Who cares? Here’s why …

1. People blog. A gajilion people on the Net blogs, regardless of where they live and how they grew up. So expect people with poor command of English blogging their asses off. If you ask me, as long as the messages are clear, you get the idea of the blog, that’s all matters. Some even go as far as to avoid the idea of word blogging completely and decides to embark upon different blogging methods such as vlogging (videos), photoblogging, etc so as to avoid writing. The whole idea here is, as long as you think that your messages go through as how you intended to be, don’t worry about it. You can ask for your readers’ feedback or simply judge yourself by reading your readers’ comments.
2. Quality. If you have quality posts in your blog, readers will go as far as cracking their head trying to break the code in your messages, even if you’ve thrown in 10 different languages in one sentence. Not that I recommend messing up with your readers’ head, but in a worst case scenario, this probably will happen.
3. Change. Who says that you need to write to blog? Too lazy to use your fingers to knock on the small pieces on your keyboard? You could probably take out your mobile or your camera and start taking pictures or videos and make them the main content of your blog instead. In this case instead of having people focusing on your command of English, you might get flooded with a different touch of criticism from a different angle, e.g. Your camera sucks! Or your skills suck! etc. Well, that’s life, you can’t get everybody to sit in the same room as you.
4. Copy, Paste & Add. If you’re the worst of the bunch – too lazy to write, too lazy to take pictures or vidoes, then you can have legal plagiarizing. What I mean by legal copy and pasting is you can copy a small portion of somebody else’s post and label it as an excerpt, and of course don’t forget to give the credit where its due and link back to the original post. Nothing wrong by doing this. In certain cases, other bloggers are nice enough to allow you to have their complete post copy pasted to your blog, as long as you honor the original structure of the article / content. And it doesn’t hurt to get in touch with them prior to your CTRL+C and CTRL+V mission. Of course if possible, add your own content on top of the stuffs you’ve copied and pasted to make it more interesting. Maybe this time you can say – “What? Join the club, my English is as sucky as his!” or “You really gotta get yourself a better camera” etc. Payback time, only this time around, you’re having fun.
5. Majority. Always lean yourself towards what the majority thinks and sees in your blog. Don’t try to change the whole world just because a frog jumped in and start dictating what you should do and improve. Most of the times these frogs will come and go leaving useless feedbacks, so just ignore them. But if you think that the criticisms are constructive regardless of the level of insult and sarcasm, chances are, you can try implementing these changes in the coming future as you see fit. However, don’t deprive yourself of improvements just because the majority keeps on throwing compliments to you. Improve your blog with the flow of time.

I guess that’s all for today. Happy blogging!

1. Blogging Expectations
2. Do Busy Readers Dig Deeper Into Our Blogs?
3. Write The Way You Talk To Liven Up Your Blog
4. Australian Blogging Conference and Why I am Happy I am A Blogger
5. Embracing the blogging chaos
6. Finding Your Blogging DNA
7. The State of Blogging
8. Rookie Blogging Mistake: Posting on the Weekend

That’s all for today! Enjoy the links!

Let the world read what you have to say. Well, that’s what blogging is all about isn’t? So to cut everything short, just click on the link below to get your treasure.

Click here to jump over!
Update: More free blogging ebooks from Getfreeebooks

Well that’s the same thing you can do with RSS feeds. Either download and install your favorite RSS Reader and just read your butt off, or throw in some fireworks into it and make it more interesting. Now I’m not a power user myself, but I just came across someone who might be one.

Steve Rubel.

This guy wrote an article on how you can expand your usage on your typical RSS readers. He calls it “10 RSS Hacks“. I won’t deprive you any longer of this useful information, so click here to start reading on how you can hack your way through for more juicy bits out of the RSS Feeds you know.