I am delighted to announce that my website is the recipient of three nominations for the 2010 Canadian Weblog Awards!  The Canadian Weblog Awards (CWA) is a juried competition that looks for the best Canadian bloggers in a diverse range of categories and styles. I’ve been informed by this organization that my site has received CWA nominations for the following categories:

• Business and Career
• Best Written
• Best Designed

As you can imagine, it’s a big honour to be one of the Canadian Weblog Award Nominees, not to mention being a multiple nominee for this year’s edition. I’d like to thank the CWA organizers for this honour; here’s hoping it’s a sign of things to come. Finalists for the award will be announced on January 1, 2011.

The following is a guest post by my friend and fellow blogger John Haydon.  John writes about marketing strategies for social media sites on his blog at JohnHaydon.com.

Integrity, as Tanveer has talked about before, is a critical factor in attracting and retaining readers, subscribers and customers.

In the offline world, integrity is something people easily recognize. It could be demonstrated by returning something on time that you borrowed, staying true to one’s convictions, or having the courage to protect others from unfair attacks – even if they are “competitors”. In these examples, integrity and character is demonstrated through the actions of that person.

But how do you demonstrated integrity online, through the proxy we call the internet? How can people quickly get a sense of your trustworthiness and character – even though you’re not actually present?

The Trust Of Crowds

The answer is in your crowd – the hundreds or thousands of readers who, on a daily basis, give you the thumbs up.

Blogs by definition have several features that can easily demonstrate crowd-sourced quality checks, or “social proof“.

• Comments – Comments are a qualitative measurement of our character. How many comments, on average, do your blog posts receive? What is the quality and depth of these comments? Is there a diversity of people making these comments? Getting large numbers of quality comments takes years of hard work – even for people like Chris Brogan and Brian Clark.
• Comment Replies – One advantage bloggers like you and I have over people like Chris and Brian is that we are able to reply to each commenter. Two bloggers who do this very well are Grant Griffiths and Liz Strauss. They both take the time to comment back and forth with each commenter. A quick note: Make sure you have set your commenting system to support threaded comments – at least three levels deep.
• Admit When Your Wrong – Or At Least Not Completely Right – No one can know everything about a subject, and often times, it’s our commenters who help us fill in the gaps. When you acknowledge them, and amend a post in response, it says you respect your readers and can admit when you’re not completely right. Click here to continue reading »”How To Demonstrate Integrity On Your Blog”

This post marks a special moment many bloggers look forward to reaching – writing their 100th blog post.  After giving some thought to what I’d like to write about for this milestone, I decided that I didn’t want it to be an introspective piece.  Instead, I wanted to turn the focus outwards, to the other side of the blogging equation – you, the readers of this blog.

Over the last ninety-nine posts, you have encouraged me with your words of support and appreciation for the ideas and concepts I chose to put to pen and share with you through my writings.  You questioned and pondered my take or interpretations of political and fictional dramas.  You shared how my stories have inspired you or how they connected to your own personal experiences.  And you have touched me with your compliments about how much you’ve enjoyed the pieces that I wrote.

And so, for my 100th blog post, I want to take the opportunity to thank you, the readers of my blog, for making the last ninety-nine posts such an incredible journey.

Here’s looking forward to the next one hundred.

Welcome everyone to the new site for my blog, “So, what were we talking about again?”.  As you can see, we got a fresh and distinct new look that makes quite a departure from what I was using over on the wordpress.com site.  Being able to design the site myself, I was able to create a look and feel that I think really captures not just my writing style, but also me as a person.  That’s why you’ll notice some delightfully bright and happy artwork at the bottom of my site, provided courtesy of my children.  I’ve written before about them and the impact they’ve had on both my life and my perspective of the world; for me it was a given to have some tangible part of them present here on my site.

Of course, all of the articles – and your comments that you shared on my previous site – can be found here.  You can locate that content either by Click here to continue reading »”Welcome To My New Digs”