2 Tips For Eliminating Blogger’s Block

You’re browsing sites, left and right. You come across something that interests you and you say to yourself, “Self, this is something worth blogging about on your blog.” But you forget to make a note of why you want to write about it. What will you do? What will you do?

Something I use to help me out is Google Notebook. This fits snugly in the lower corner of my Firefox browser. When I find something I want to write about later, I pop open it’s little window and “clip” the page I’m viewing where it sleeps until I return. (It’s also how I store my Drum Corps candidates. ) I can even save content from the page and store it in my notebook.

While in my account, I can easily move notebooks around and even add comments to those to ensure I won’t forget a thing.

Another tool that helps me is Diigo (pronounced “dee-go”). It’s a social bookmarking site with abilities far beyond those of mortal bookmarkers (okay, maybe others have the same powers, but work with me here).

While viewing a web page — any web page — I can highlight content and also have it stored in my account. But I can also leave notes on that page. These notes can be for my eyes only, or I can make it to where anyone with Diigo who chooses to view anyone’s notes can view them.

The purpose of these notes is for me to “mark” parts of a page like I would printed paper. Diigo says you can make notes on web pages for anyone who doesn’t have the toolbar installed. So, conceivably, you could point your visitors to other places and markup the content for further reading. Perhaps you’re commenting on an article that would make more sense to viewers if you could actually show them where on the page you’re talking about. I haven’t tried that yet, but sounds promising.

Adding a special tag to my discoveries (e.g., “articles”, “posts”, “to-write-about”…whatever) can make it easy for me to find them again, thus de-cluttering my browser’s bookmarks.

So no more excuses about not knowing what to write about.

[tags]diigo,google notebook,productivity,web2.0,bookmarking[/tags]