starnes dot com

I've been advocating Google Buzz as a blogging platform since its start early last month and posted a general example of a Buzz Blog about two weeks ago. After writing my first true Buzz Blog post yesterday, a review of the iPhone Buzz client Buzzie, I am even more convinced that Buzz is a powerful, real-time blogging platform.

For most people, I think the best way to get thoughts, shares and ideas noticed is to put them directly in front of the largest number of people in the places where they spend the most time. Today those places are the feeds at Facebook, Twitter and now Google Buzz -- The Big Three. I should note that private posts in a Facebook feed are invisible to Google and don't have as much value as public posts.  I use a Facebook Page, which Pages are now indexed by Google in real-time.

I will not argue that the traditional blog or that RSS is dead, just that people should be exposed to your thoughts, shares and ideas where the people already congregate.  The more influential folks can still elicit that crucial mouse-click to their respective blog sites, but for everyone else the best opportunity for exposure is in the feeds of The Big Three. I've previously laid out the reasons why I think Buzz is The Superior Sharing Network.

The ideal Buzz Blog should be less than about 800 characters -- any more than that collapses the Buzz formatted text field into about four lines of plain text. Don't expect folks to make that one extra click to expand and reveal your writing -- format your Buzz Blog to appear in its entirety. See my quick primer on Buzz Blogging at Buzz. If you've spent the past few years distilling your thoughts into 140 characters tweets, don't think of Buzz as a way to say the same thing in 800 characters.  A Buzz Blog requires the same economy with words, you just have room to say more. A Buzz Blog can be spontaneous, but should still be edited as carefully as a traditional blog post.

When I read that the first iPhone Buzz app was released yesterday, Buzzie [iTunes link], I immediately saw the opportunity for a Buzz Blog. I bought the app, went through each page, grabbed screenshots, explored its functionality and compared Buzzie to the Mobile Safari interface for Buzz. I could have written a blog post here, but expecting folks to click through and read it was simply too much to ask. I figured that putting a quick review with pictures right in front of my Buzz friends was likely to get more attention.

I think it worked.  I not only received Likes for the Buzzie Buzz Blog post, but a discussion emerged. I've only been blogging for about a year and have had very few discussions and comments here at starnes.com.

It's great if your new blog post notifications are now broadcast in real-time across your social networks, but Google Buzz offers the opportunity to bring your thoughts, shares and ideas directly to the people.  Such a strategy, in my opinion, is more effective than trying to bring the people to your blog.

Finally, as I was thinking about how I would express my own thoughts this morning regarding Buzz Blogging, I came across this Buzz Blog post from DeWitt Clinton, who has quickly become Google's thoughtful, intelligent voice on Buzz:

Buzz has reminded me how much I enjoy blogging.

In the year since my last actual blog post, I've sent several hundred Twitter messages, posted over a thousand comments on FriendFeed, and left several dozen or so comments on Facebook, Disqus, Blogger, and elsewhere. But no blog posts.

Yet since Buzz launched less than a month ago I've written 47 updates here, each one of them essentially a blog post in itself, averaging 208 words per update. That's more than one post a day, which is far more than I ever wrote on my blog.

I'm not exactly sure why I post so much long-form content on Buzz, especially after I effectively abandoned my old site.

But I am doing it, so Buzz is obviously doing something right

Google _is_ doing something right with *Buzz* and I like it.