Make deadlines, do the work, and work hard to get better with each new project. Make something you love to make, and make it for the audience, not for you. Find the money once you’ve got an audience who cares.

Whether you write movies or television — or write about them — it’s often helpful to be able to include short blocks of dialogue and scene description. Unfortunately, most blogging and forum systems make it difficult.

Let’s change that.

With Scrippets, you can add boxes of nicely-formatted script to your blog. It even works in comments.

Brett Terpstra's excellent selection of Wordpress bookmarks.

Markdown for WordPress and bbPress (Markdown-WPBB) is based on the famed PHP Markdown Extra by Michel Fortin, in turn based on the original Perl version by John Gruber. All I did was make the same package work with bbPress too. ^^

It can be hard to overstate how much of a difference headlines make on the Web. A great headline can be the single difference between a story that spreads and one that sinks.

f you’re original, you don’t even need to be good to advance in the popularity game. Simply by virtue of producing something yourself, of broadcasting an opinion in a slightly different form than anyone else, by expressing your interests and feelings through original creations rather than through recycled garbage, you suddenly become that much more interesting.

Montaigne raised questions rather than giving answers. He wrote about whatever caught his eye: war, psychology, animals, sex, magic, diplomacy, vanity, glory, violence, hermaphroditism, self-doubt. Most of all, he wrote about himself and was amazed at the variety he found within. “I cannot keep my subject still,” he said. “It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.” His writing followed the same wayward path.

Nick Denton ran the company out of his apartment, in SoHo [...] Gawker Media was a deliberately fly-by-night operation: incorporated in Budapest, where a small team of programmers still works, and relying on elegantly jaded bloggers who considered themselves outsiders with nothing to lose. Early contributors tell stories about bounced checks, and receiving payment straight from the A.T.M. The arrangement, many assumed, was a convenient hedge against potential libel claims. (Scarcely a week passes without one or more of Denton’s nine sites receiving a cease-and-desist letter.) It also helped bolster Denton’s image as a kind of digital-sweatshop operator—he initially paid his bloggers twenty-four thousand dollars a year—and cultivated a helpful sense among contributors that they were the crew of a rogue “pirate ship,” as Gawker people sometimes say, initiating stealth attacks on the ocean liners in midtown.

I remember clearly the day I first found out that you could see page view statistics for Wikipedia articles. I came into class and asked the students if they had any idea how many people were reading their work. Instead of the usual assignment of an exam or term paper read by exactly one person, their professor, they were now writing for a real public. 
They were shocked to find out (for example), that the Gabriel García Márquez article that they were rewriting was read by something like 1,500 people a day: 62,000 a month, or close to three-quarters of a million people a year. That really gave them a sense that what they were doing mattered in some way.

A tumblelog was a collection of citations, but it engaged directly with its source material; its citations were to primary sources, rather than to secondary sources who in term cited primary sources. Tumblelogs like Anarchaia also lacked ego or personal branding. They weren’t about their authors, they were about their authors’ interests. If your field of interests overlapped sufficiently with a tumblelogger’s, you could expect to find a collection of interesting sources to check out on a regular basis. You did, after some time, feel like you got to know the person behind the blog, but this was a matter of osmosis: their personality seeped through in their choice of sources and the very occasional, pithy comments that were sometimes appended to links.

Editors Kevin Nguyen and Nick Martens talk with fellow bloggers about favorite new additions to their RSS readers.

This is what @robinsloan uses to snag tweets for blog posts.

The best way to write, preview, and publish your blog.

I think keeping drafts can be counterproductive. The problem is that, once something is a draft rather than a blog post, it’s likely to stay a draft and never become a blog post. And the longer something stays in draft, the less likely it is to ever see the light of day.

"There is no one right way to use Twitter, and you should ignore anyone who says there is. Including me." http://bit.ly/buqqic

In September 2008, Mr. Sicha, Alex Balk and David Cho all found themselves laid off from Radar, the on-again-off-again magazine and Web site. Confronted by the headwinds of a growing media recession, they decided to hand-crank a future by starting their own site.

I don’t want to appear to be giving advice on something I don’t know much about, but here goes: from someone who has gained what I’d call a respectable audience and the awareness and respect of some people he admires, to people who wish for but don’t feel they have those things: all it takes is some patience (and of course effort to be great). That’s it.

I gave a version of my “Dark secrets of the blogging superstars” preso to a group of news directors from public radio stations (including a couple of our Argo stations). The Knight Digital Media Center has posted a video of the session online. Feel free to take a look. Slides used during the session are below.

One of the more dismal feelings any writer can have is that sense of waking up to an empty page that demands to be filled with thoughts. When you write daily and in public, that sensation is particularly acute. Fortunately, you have a wonderfully useful tool to avert that possibility: the precious morning ritual.

Anyway, someone more influential than me has probably already coined a better name for this phenomenon, but here’s what I mean by a lens blog: we all know what a niche blog is. It’s one that is about a single subject. But consider BLDGBLOG. You might say it’s an architecture niche blog, but is it really? There are practically no limits on what kinds of subjects might appear on the blog. Everything is open to Geoff Manaugh’s investigation. What binds it all together is this: every subject is analyzed through the lens of architecture. Likewise, its sister site, Edible Geography, examines everything through the lens of food. For Strange Maps, the lens is cartography.

Red Cross Social Media Strategy

In 2008, full-time blogger and entrepreneur Chris Guillebeau published a report called 'A Brief Guide to World Domination' on his blog. It outlined a plan to take over the world through individuals doing what is most meaningful to them while serving others in a unique way. Within weeks it was downloaded more that 100,000 times in 60 countries. Here Guillebeau expands on his ideas and challenges common assumptions about how people should live and work, motivating readers to create their own ideal life - working harder than they ever have on work that they really love.

Even when you’re quoting or paraphrasing a source you’d like to link to, emphasize the most important part of what they say, not who the person is or that they said it.

A few years back, my friend Steve Gillmor, the long-time technology writer and blogger, went on a crusade against the hyperlink. He stopped putting links into his posts and other online writings. I could never quite understand his motivation, and the whole effort struck me as quixotic and silly. I mean, wasn't the hyperlink the formative technology of the entire World Wide Web? Wasn't the Web a hypermedia system, for crying out loud?

RT @SeamusCondron: Media orgs, don't read this article & think you need a Tumblr. You need to develop relationships with your audience h ...

The future for blogs may be special-interest publishing. Mr Kelly’s research shows that blogs tend to be linked within languages and countries, with each language-group in turn containing smaller pockets of densely linked sites. These pockets form around public subjects: politics, law, economics and knowledge professions. Even narrower specialisations emerge around more personal topics that benefit from public advice. Germany has a cluster for children’s crafts; France, for food; Sweden, for painting your house.

"There’s been a recent retread of the weblogging phenomenon following a few articles at PC Mag, Time, and The Morning News. After posting my own short list of things that ought to be banned from weblogs, I realized that a list of things to be encouraged would be more useful. Some people are new to weblogging. Others want to raise the bar. In the end, everybody wants better sites, and some of these suggestions might help."

"Robin ruminates on applying the economic concepts of stock and flow to the media we produce. In short, flow is the low-impact fluff that reminds people you exist. Stock is the valuable, durable content you produce that conceivably has a long shelf-life."

"If I’m not laughing at your joke, complimenting your insight, or leading the Standing O for something you spent 10 seconds pecking up on your phone, it may not be because I don’t get it; it may be because I think we’re both capable of better and just need to find the courage to say so. In as many characters as it takes."

What happens to your blog post between writing and people reading it? "Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers. Let's say it's Super Bowl Sunday and you're blogging about beer. You see Budweiser's blockbuster commercial and have a reaction you'd like to share. Thanks to search engines and aggregators that compile lists of interesting posts, you can reach a lot of people — and Budweiser, its competitors, beer lovers, ad critics, and your ex-boyfriend can listen in."

"I decided to explore the idea of freelancing when several people from the office complimented my writing one after the other. My problem was that I had no idea what I wanted to do exactly. Yes, it was going to involve writing of some sorts. I discovered I had a knack for words (my boss even trusted me to write a press release about a new product we were launching — not bad for someone 6 months out of university!) but I had never been specifically hired and paid by others just to 'write stuff.'"

"For the past month, I've been away from the computer screen. Now I'm back reading on it many hours a day. Which got me thinking: How do we read online?"

"Great writing doesn’t typically come by chance. And in my mind, it’s an art anyone of any trade should strive to master — designers, marketers, developers, and yes, film critics."

"The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from."

"In 1999, when I left a staff job at a newspaper to start my own copywriting business, I never even thought about writing for the web. A decade later, most of my work consists of web projects. It struck me recently that this medium has led me to develop a different way of writing—tighter, simpler, more transparent. The results, I believe, are greater clarity and persuasiveness, and a speedier, more user-friendly read."

"Being able to express yourself, clearly and forcefully, in less than the 140 characters allowed by Twitter (and SMS) is no small thing!"

"If I’m not laughing at your joke, complimenting your insight, or leading the Standing O for something you spent 10 seconds pecking up on your phone, it may not be because I don’t get it; it may be because I think we’re both capable of better and just need to find the courage to say so. In as many characters as it takes."