Laura’s Winning Ideas

Blogging is a distracting wander through page after page of intriguing to bland offerings. Today I visited the site of a professional Blogger, that is, someone who does this full time. Yikes! Robin Tippins keeps up on the on-line happenings with a routine that starts at 6:30 am and runs until bedtime. She takes breaks for chauffeuring kids and making dinner, but she focuses her energy on reading and writing blogs. Dave Taylor is another fellow whose career is blogging. He has written a book or two and regularly speaks at industry conferences.

These folks read an amazing amount of drivel to get nuggets worth mentioning for their subscribers. I spent an hour researching from Robin’s site today the topic of tagging blog posts. I haven’t found the correct way to put that code on my blog, but have tagged some posts at Del.icio.us a site that somehow collects and distributes posts with key word tags. Most of this process is still Greek to me.

In my travels, from blog to website to wiki, I found techno-babble, undefined download links, expostulations about greatness or folly, pro and con, for any variety of applications of tagging. Moreover, tagging is a small topic among the variety of blogging tools with which I’m trying to become familiar.

The challenge we face is not lack of information, but lack of focused information. In this environment, the professional bloggers will have a role to help the rest of us find the information that is of most concern to us.

Why am I doing this?

My clients depend on me to keep up with new tools that may give them an edge. As more proposal teams become proficient, the bar raises a bit higher each year. I maintain my hit rate by being ready to adopt tools when they are ripe for winning proposals. Now if I can only figure out how to get that tagging plugin to work…