Journalists & Bloggers Toolbox Blog

There are two interesting bits of news going on this week that should be of interest to bloggers and perhaps anyone who uses social networking.  The first article was a bit of academic type news that said that studies have shown that humans can really only handle a social network of about 200 people.  Now [...]

So you’ve started your blog with lots of energy and put up some posts and set your goals. And then you realize something. Blogging is taking more time than you expected. Suddenly this hobby or freelance job becomes a drain instead of an exciting way to bring in some money.  We all want to be [...]

I recently ran into a writer who was frustrated because he kept seeing advice for authors to have blogs when his writing professor had confidently told his class that blogging was dead. You know, sometimes even professors get it wrong. But the professor isn’t the only one to predict that social networking sites will completely [...]

The internet has created a trend – content providers.  Now, this isn’t really a bad trend or a new trend. After all, journalists are content providers for newpapers and magazines.  And, yes, they are content providers who often write according to assigned topics (or breaking news) rather than focusing in on topics of personal interest.  [...]

Today is a difficult day for me. I’ve become dependent on a number of tools to help me get work done and particularly to manage my social media needs. I blog, I write articles and I’m an author.  I use Twitter as a quick way to interact with others, let people know when I’ve written [...]

Today I want to address a complicated and issue – copyright.  I’ve found that many bloggers and others often misunderstand the copyright issue and in fact often confuse copyright with plagiarism.  Not understanding can lead to actual legal problems. First I’m going to look at plagiarism because it is the easier topic for most people [...]

I’ve discovered that some writers around me are still unfamiliar with Twitter and don’t grasp how to use Twitter. This amuses me because often these writers are actually younger than I am.  There seems to be a sort of “I’m above Twitter” attitude that the younger writers have while the older crowd is more inclined [...]

You know what social media on the web may have taught us — shorter can be better.  Look at twitter. I love twitter. I can keep up with hundreds of my fellow writers, everyone from professionals to friends. And the reason I can do that is because twitter restricts them to 140 characters. The site [...]

Sometimes just doing a search in Google on a subject that I think I’m acquainted with can turn up a topic for discussion.  In a world with millions of new blogs starting up every day is it worthwhile to consider joining a blogging site that is targeted to a specific lifestyle or audience.  Of course, [...]

I followed another bloggers tweet to his posts about blogging.  Now this seemed like the perfect set of posts for me to read. I wanted to see what advice he had about blogging that might help me.  What he’d experienced that I hadn’t.  And the site did help me with this, but probably not in [...]