Okay, as I posted earlier this week, my mind has been completely off from blogging or thinking about technology topics in general. However this week I’ve had the great opportunity to work with a group called Youth Ending Poverty, and help them launch their website. Hopefully I’ll be working with them more actively in the future.

The exercise of working with them gave me insight into how technical expertise can actually help with humanitarian and goodwill projects. You can use almost any type of technical expertise to somehow assist a non-profit organization in optimizing a certain part of their organization, whether it be the financial / bookkeeping aspect, the donation/donor management aspect, or just getting their organization known by helping them with a website or some type of media.

So for the next week to ten days, I’m on the hunt for two things:
1) Individuals that are using technology, specifically their expertise related to the internet, to help good causes around the world

Before I outline the second thing let me explain. It’s been a month since Cyclone Nargis in Burma and stupid news agencies across the board are still more concerned with trivial issues than large-scale humanitarian crises. Therefore it’s been a little difficult to seperate the regurgitation of old hearsay from the current reality. I really want to make a commitment of my time, part-time but for a long-term, to helping people in impoverished communities in Burma, Ethiopia, Somalia and farmers in Punjab, but I don’t know which organizations are doing work out there in a more efficient and reliable manner. So I need to find…

2) Organizations to which I can contribute money and time, which are highly efficient (good result of their work but not too much administrative cost), and are helping directly to alleviate the problems of impoverished communities around the world.

If you can help me with my hunt, please e-mail me at info [at] kulpreetsingh [dot] com, or leave a comment below. Thanks!

stay in high spirits,

-k.s.

Hey Everyone,

So here it is - my first HUNT!

All week I’ll be looking for the best advice on this topic and I’ll update this post as I get new information. You are also invited to post your thoughts in the comments.

The Problem
Many bloggers have faced this issue. You start a blog to focus on a few topics in a general field or industry, but sometimes you feel the urge / need / responsibility to write something out of the ordinary. It might be due to a necessity, or just for fun. You might need to vent, or you might be excited about some personal accomplishment. In any case, you don’t want to annoy your readers who regularly visit for the specific topics you introduced at the start. In fact, let’s say you don’t only want to write these topics once in a while, but you always want to write on different issues. So is it more advantageous to have more blogs to cover the different areas, or should you keep it all on one blog? If so, how?

Update:

Funny…

Source: Speed Bump by David Coverly

Update:

Some good advice from my thread at Cre8asiteForums about this question:

EGOL:

“I think that a person might gauge their ability to depart from their theme by the types of comments that people post on those departing posts. If you get no comments then those posts are stinking up your blog. If you get lots of nice comments and questions then you can get away with it… To be safe you should always allow just a few lines of these posts to display on the front page of your blog…. I don’t want to scroll and scroll and scroll to get past the pictures of a bloggers pets.”

Respree:

“I tend to gravitate toward insightful, thought-provoking styles of writing that I can relate to… Many times, an interesting personal story about a certain situation hits home for me and makes me connect with the author in ways a very clinical, impersonal style cannot… I see nothing wrong with the ocassional vent, but if the blog or site is riddled with them, I find I’m not attracted to negativity.”

Ron Carnell:

“[Do] you want to think of your blog as a series of short stories, related perhaps but otherwise distinct, or whether your blog is going to be a novel? A novel … has to offer a balance of sorts because action gets pretty boring unless carefully woven with less exciting fare… It’s called pacing and it’s often one of the hardest things for a writer to master. In my opinion, yes, a blogger should definitely mix it up a bit. It shouldn’t be haphazard or spontaneous, though. It should be very carefully planned.”

Miriam (SEOIgloo):

“If the blog is a business blog (for example, dealing mainly with SEO, or design) why not have a personal/creative category in addition to your technical categories? If you keep the category name broad enough, you could put pretty much anything in it that didn’t fit in your tech categories. We did this on our blog. We have a section called Inside the Igloo where I’ve posted stuff like news about us, awards, etc. “

Kim Krause Berg (cre8pc):

“I go off topic too. I have a category called “When I Have the Talking Stick”, which is a Native American custom of whoever has the “talking stick”, is allowed to speak about anything they wish to. I didn’t start this until I had developed a following however and established a rapport with my readers. They wanted to hear more from me and my life and responded with positive feedback to my off topic posts.

Update:

And more good advice from my thread at Tazzu:

Ed C.:

“I would leave it all on one blog, as we do here on Tazzu. That way, it’s all in one area, from a Rant, Rave, Promotion of a site, or new business idea - it’s all in one place.”

Jer (Infiniti):

“Think of the bifurcation similarly to how we contrast LinkedIn and Facebook (or MySpace is probably more accurate). Not in terms of functionality but in terms of market and presentation… To split beyond that would be to over-categorize, to divide-and-fail, and to ask the impossible really. Think about how hard it is just to categorize posts. At least they can be cross-categorized.”

Robert Ballantyne:

“It is part of the strength of a blog that all material is presented chronologically. It is also a weakness because parallel streams of topics — like other columns in a newspaper — are not really possible. In that case, I’d recommend running parallel blogs. They could even be at the same web site and have cross links. Another advantage of running separate blogs is you may find that one really finds a niche and becomes hugely popular. It could catch fire without overwhelming its more thoughtful and quiet sibling. “

Also check the comments for great advice from Vivien, Jeanette, and Raul.

Hey everyone,

I’m introducing a new feature on the blog tonight called The Hunt. Almost everyone’s seen images or video of a predator hunting its prey in the jungle. The lioness, the zebra, the natural elements, the suspense, the thrill, etc. etc. Well every Monday morning I’ll define a prey (in the theme of the typical corporate manager on a Monday morning!!), or more specifically a problem with some business or technology issue, and all week I’ll be trying to kill the problem. Not quite as thrilling as the lions and zebras, but as the solutions to the problems get more useful for you and me, I’m sure you’ll start enjoying it.

The basic rules: I’ll continue updating The Hunt throughout the week. I might find the answer early on, but I’ll keep discussing the topic to provide insight on all angles. You can let me know in the comments if, by the end of the week, I killed the problem, just got a bite, or if I missed it. You’re welcome to help me out with your comments, or you can e-mail me at info [at] kulpreetsingh [dot] com.

Lion Photo Source: Chris Gin

-k.s.