I wanted to take a quick moment to thank you all for the support I have received.  Both on and off the blog, the feedback has been overwhelmingly gracious.

I have gotten a lot of ideas, and I have read many, many new view points on blogging.  Here’s some recent commentary, and how I put that to good use on ZimmThought.

1. To Tag or Not to Tag? That is the Question

The idea for tagging is to label the main topics in each blog piece.  Often times, tag “clouds” are then displayed on a blog.  The tag cloud is useful as a visual representation of the most frequent topics (words are larger the more times the tag is used).  They also serve as a visual table of contents of sort.  However, tag clouds can often be distracting, and the infrequently used topics are hard to notice.  Tagging posts is also time consuming.

2. Today’s Jeopardy Categories Are…

Categories have two camps of followers.  The first is categories which group together content.  You can see that we have added 4 categories: Business & Management, Software Development, Blogging & Branding, and Recommendations.  We have also added two categories for Charity Wednesday Posts, and Guest Posts.  Categories force organization.  After I write a blog, I have to link it to one of those four topics.  Although I like cooking, you aren’t here to read about my pico de gallo (it’s delicious, by the way!).  This is a blog about and for a particular business (software engineering) done in a particular fashion (bootstrapped).

Alternatively, some bloggers use categories like “Top 10 Posts,” “Favorite Posts,” “Must Read,” etc… to highlight articles that are the author’s favorites, has the most comments, or another form of subjective measurements.  I decided against categorizing like this because (1) I could easily lose my focus, and (2) they need updating as the site moves.

3. The Navigator

The best thing that an blogger can do for her audience (or my audience, or yours) is to make it easy for them to read, participate, and enjoy your blog.  A friend of mine who’s been blogging for longer than they were called blogs (anyone remember opendiary.com?) noticed that I didn’t have previous or next links on the top of each page.  I was forcing the reader to click the home page and then find the next post.  In other words, it was one extra step, one more hassle, one more chance to lose a busy reader.  ZimmThought now contains links at the top of each post, so you can easily scroll through posts.

4. Links

I have added a new category of links titled “Inspiring Authors.”  So many great business leaders, authors, marketers, and inspiring people have blogs.  What an amazing resource!  I am listing the authors that I turn to, in hopes you will also find inspiration in their words.

Blogs on Blogging: for more great tips check out these blogs

So what do you think of the new changes?