Category: About

Kyle’s Blogging Tips (80% of which are too specific to be useful)

Kyle 1 Comment

I am probably the worst kind of blogger (OK, maybe not the worst kind: see Exhibits A, B, and C). I know a lot about blogs (I used to evaluate them for Newstex) and about blogging best practices (having edited many words on the subject), but I don’t put that knowledge to very good use. For better and worse, I primarily write posts that explore rather vague and abstract notions of complementarity and wholeness, because these are ideas that seem central to my life/work/ministry/interests (it’s hard to resist the forward slash when your life/work/ministry/interests have something vaguely and abstractly to do with complementarity and wholeness).

Thus, CSC has a theme but no focused topic, except maybe the worst topic any writer can have: him- or herself (e.g., the experiment with video blogging to keep in touch during my first year of seminary, regarding which experiment: thanks for all the good feedback this year, friends). Prompted by a couple of recent incidents (a retweet by David Meerman Scott of my post about BEA and then a very minor burst of secondary exposure on Twitter because David also mentioned in another tweet that I was the one who filmed this video), I took a look at the CSC stats today to try to glean what (silly) tips I might have for bloggers (silly because, for the reasons outlined above [and more], this blog is no example to follow). Here goes:

  1. Name your blog after a snobby Latin expression. Almost all of my traffic from Google comes from people searching for the phrase “Contraria Sunt Complementa,” presumably trying to figure out what it means. Sorry, y’all, I’m afraid you’ll find only very opaque, inductive help here (I guess with the exception of my first post, which actually does do a decent definitional job and is–probably not coincidentally–my most popular post).
  2. Know some important bloggers. I know two, sorta: David Meerman Scott–whom I rather shamelessly mention here from time to time and who as I said has been very kind with comments, retweets, etc.–and Freakonomics co-author Steven J. Dubner. OK, I don’t actually know Steven J. Dubner, but I know (and currently live with) his pirate-obsessed research assistant, Ryan Hagen. And Ryan once saw my post about the Wikipedia article for “real life,” which in turn prompted a post about what fantasy is for. The h/t traffic from that post has made freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com my fourth-largest all-time referrer, although I now believe that stat to be skewed because of a rather hideous record-keeping blunder on my part (see No. 4 below).
  3. Have lots of time off and/or periods of isolation and a desperate need for concrete goals during same. As the last two weeks have reminded me, I am–like Sports Night‘s Dana Whitaker–terrible at having “unstructured time on my hands.” Blogging has typical been for me a great way to manufacture some structure. I first got into blogging during a summer when I lived with my aunt and uncle in Cold Spring, NY, worked a pretty mindless job as a totally unqualified assistant to a medical equipment company field engineer, and had pretty much no friends and nothing to do. I started this blog during a Christmas break from grad school, by which time most of the high school friends I still kept in touch with had stopped coming home for more than a couple of days at the holidays, and anyway my parents now live pretty far from “home,” or at least where home used to be. Point being: I do my most productive blogging during long school breaks. I recommend getting some of those.
  4. Keep your counter’s URL information up to date. This one is only silly because it’s sad, though it’s also only a problem if you care about your visit stats. When I bought my own domain name about a year and a half ago, I went ahead and moved http://contrariasuntcomplementa.blogspot.com over to http://blog.kyleoliver.net. However, I failed to enter this piece of information into my profile over at Blog Counter. Thus, I have like sixteen months’ worth of statistics wherein the only recorded visits are via an outdated URL. I only discovered this blunder when I checked to see how many people had visited the site after David’s recent retweet of my post, only to discover that only one person had. David currently has 40,558 followers on Twitter, so that number seemed pretty unlikely. (If only tinyurl.com, which I use for all my tweeted links, offered statistics the way tiny.cc does. Perhaps I should switch my allegiance.)
  5. Write about your adventures wrangling household bats. What can I say? My most popular post not about physics (or about BookExpo America, but see Nos. 2 and 4 above) is about my adventures trying to usher bats out of St. Francis House while working as the House Fellow there. I guess it was funny.

So there you have it, my probably-not-at-all-helpful blogging tips. By the way, in other news of blog traffic suddenly and rapidly expanded, the secret is now out (thanks to the enthusiastic and tech-savvy clergy and parishioners of New York’s St. Luke in the Fields [the former parish of my favorite VTS professor, incidentally]) that my smart, observant, and unusual-adventure-having girlfriend, Kristin Saylor, blogs about life as a port chaplain, St. Luke’s parishioner, Wisconsin transplant, and amateur urban anthropologist at Wisconsin meets NYC. Since the cat’s out of the bag, I can now offer a whole-hearted recommendation. It’s a highly entertaining read, and she’s got lots of interesting insight on the challenges of port ministry.

(P.S.: Apologies to any cat bloggers, cat lovers, or cat blog lovers reading this. You all can and should continue to blog or read about whatever you want.)

News: Local and Blocal

Kyle

Happy Saturday. I’m sitting in my pajamas listening to Michael Pollan on a “special encore edition” of Whad’ya Know and catching up on my online life.

First off, special encore editions can only mean it’s fund drive time at Wisconsin Public Radio. Fund drive time is many people I talk to’s reason for not listening to public radio. But, to borrow a phrase Michael Pollan just used (I’ve done that before), I don’t think that argument “passes the 60 Minutes test”; the lack of commercials and overall non-inanity of the programming the rest of the time more than compensates. So let’s all sign-up and pledge, especially in light of the now seemingly annual budget cuts (little shout out there to my old hometown newspaper, which just happened to have the first Google News hit on the subject). And if you take your public radio station for granted, don’t forget about Milwaukee’s formerly great Jazz 89 (RIP).

On a much more uplifting note, it’s International Writing Centers Week, and the UW-Madison Writing Center is celebrating. Among the events I’d heartily recommend are the Podcast Premiere (I heard some early drafts and think they’re going to be great), the Madison-Area Writing Center Colloquium video conference with Nancy Grimm (I’ll be there), and the Writing Fellows Program info session (I’m bummed I’m no longer a Fellow, since the stipend just increased like 400 bucks per semester). If you’re at UW-Madison and have never been to the Writing Center, you’re missing out. I’ve never been part of a more supportive-yet-scholarly community. At the very least, check out the event’s Web page (much to my chagrin, you might spy a picture of me with my old fellow Fellow Shivani).

To zoom in still further to this very URL, I wanted to update you on a few CSC developments. I pushed my web-language abilities to the limit the other day and pieced together (with some help) the code to get the sharing icons you see below each post added to my blog template in a format that hopefully isn’t too obnoxious. Please share any posts you find useful or interesting!

I’ve also, after reading my advisor’s comment on my “News Dump” post, joined del.icio.us and thus exited the dark ages of news sharing (where you just email articles to yourself and blog about them). You can see my del.icio.us tagroll at right, which includes the tag “ToBlog.” That’s where you’ll see the stories I’m thinking of blogging about. Don’t be surprised if the unblogged divergence through this node is pretty high, though; it’s easy to feel ambitious about what I’ll write about when I read the news in the morning but less so when I sit down to blog at night.

Finally, a couple of brief commercial-ish announcements for friends of mine:

(1) David Meerman Scott just announced a “free virtual book tour teleseminar” to promote his new e-book The New Rules of Viral Marketing (with editing by yours truly). It’ll take place Tuesday, Feb. 26 at 5 p.m. eastern, and I highly recommend you join David if you’re interested in learning about how to spread your ideas online. If you are but can’t make it, you should at least join the 42,810 readers who have already downloaded David’s e-book.

(2) My former Wisconsin Engineer partner-in-crime Marty Grasse, who has joined the throng of my friends who have up and moved to the Twin Cities, will be in town Monday and Tuesday to present with his design team at the College of Engineering’s Innovation Days. Stop by and hear about his and the other teams’ inventions. I’ll be there sometime between noon and three.

Update: Marty’s team took home first place in the (lucrative) Schoofs Prize for Creativity competition.

Balancing Act, Part II: Scott, Free

Kyle 2 Comments

I mentioned in my last post that the timing of the launch of this blog was no mere coincidence. Indeed, I don’t think I could have started one at any other time than during a holiday’s week away from the place where I practically live.

But the other motivator was that over the break I thought a lot about blogs, thanks to my friend David Meerman Scott. I connected with David back when I was interim copy editor over at EContent. He offered me some editing work on early drafts of his book The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly. The book became a best-seller and made BNET’s list of 10 Underrated Business Books. It was my first crack at any book-length editing, and I had a really great time working on it.

Since then I’ve been fortunate to work with David on a couple other projects, one of which was released yesterday. You can download his new e-book, The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free, from his blog Web Ink Now. And as you’d certainly guess if you’re familiar with his ideas, it’s available for free.

What I appreciate most about David’s work is the way he teaches with analogies (a subject I’ve written on a bit myself). My favorite is his simple admonition against creating content the consumer has no interest in: “Think like a publisher.” That’s wise counsel, and it’s an analogy rich with plenty of takeaway examples. (It also reminds me of the advice we give engineering students in writing classes about the similarities between the writing process and the design process.)

Anyway, his most recent analogy is that those keen to harness the power of viral marketing would do well to “think like a venture capitalist.” The research university is increasingly spinoff-centric, so David’s comparison of the success rates of startup companies to those of viral marketing campaigns immediately resonated with my otherwise not-at-all business-savvy mind (I’ve spent some time on the receiving end of the laughably one-way PR pitch “cycle” [David describes it as “begging the media to write about you”], but I knew absolutely nothing about marketing before I started working with him).

Anyway, you can’t work with David for long and not see the value of having a blog. Even if you don’t draw huge numbers (I don’t) and can’t post every day (I can’t), David reminds you that everyone benefits from having a forum for bouncing ideas off a few friends, colleagues, or total strangers.

CSC is now such a forum for me, and it probably wouldn’t exist but for the spark David’s books lit in my head. Whatever your business, some of strategies he suggests should probably be part of your stock-in-trade.

Balancing Act, Part I: Introduction

Kyle

If you’ve been following CSC, you’ve probably noticed that it’s been a little science-heavy for a blog that aspires to straddle the letters-and-science spectrum. Blame the lopsidedness of my life, in part, but also blame the NFL playoffs.

You see, my not-so-double life as a full-time engineering grad student and part-time freelance writer and editor (the latter more to preserve my sanity than to pay the bills) dictates that almost all of my freelance work gets done on weekends and semester breaks (the timing of this blog’s launch is no coincidence). Thus, the writing/editing/humanities-grab-bag aspect of this blog is (I believe) going to take shape on the weekends, which is when I try to temporarily forget about science (at least when GENIUS is behaving itself and the homework situation is favorable). But since I’m a good green-blooded Wisconsinite, that weekend shape-taking has been usurped of late by Packers playoff games–at least until yesterday’s frustrating loss (what happened to the run game, Mike?).

So, to even things up, I give you a trifecta of posts that don’t mention science any more than I already have (unless I just can’t help myself or it becomes genuinely necessary, which latter would only serve to reinforce this blog’s complementary M.O.).

Hitting the Links

Kyle

I added a bunch of links to my work today, and it occurred to me that two of the items I posted do an excellent job of representing the kind of complementary writing I’m trying to do in this blog of letters and science. I wrote them both a few years ago, but I’d still love any feedback you might have.

Wisconsin Engineer: “Mercy mercy me”

I took two courses this summer. The first was Afro-American Studies 156: Black Music and American Cultural History, taught by UW-Madison’s Professor Craig Werner. The second was Nonproliferation Issues for Weapons of Mass Destruction, a symposium at the University of Missouri. In retrospect, I’m grateful the order wasn’t reversed.

As I have argued in the past, I believe courses from both ends of campus can complement each other in sophisticated ways. For instance, I certainly expected that my year of studying some history of science would have prepared me for a class on WMDs, and it did to a certain extent. Not long after I got to Missouri, though, I found myself much more grateful for my newfound knowledge of black music than for my perhaps more applicable knowledge of Niels Bohr’s idea of the complementarity of the atomic bomb or Donald Mackenzie’s commentary on the history of weapons testing. That’s because, by the end of the first day of the symposium, I was in need more of emotional support than historical or scientific background information.

Read on…

Wisconsin Engineer: “Resonant frequencies”

In February, Scientific American reported what fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien had written half a century before. The creation of the universe, it seems, might be better summarized by “Give us some music” than “Let there be light.”

It’s high time Tolkien agreed with a scientist.

The article, entitled “The Cosmic Symphony,” described how cosmologists have come to reason that the big bang “triggered sound waves that alternately compressed and rarefied regions of the primordial plasma.” Scientists have a record of this compression wave phenomenon in the form of the cosmic microwave background, a nearly uniform spread of radiation that has guided cosmologists in their quest to explain some of the mysteries of creation.

Read on…

The Bohr Identity

Kyle 2 Comments

I have a favorite physicist. While that puts me in a relatively small subset of the American population, I suspect that among members of that subset my choice is relatively common. After all, few physicists this side of Einstein and Newton are more well known than Niels Bohr, and even fewer of them have had a greater effect on physics.

The title of this blog, Contraria Sunt Complementa, is the motto on Bohr’s coat of arms. It means “opposites are complementary.” As is well documented by, among others, Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb) and Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics), Bohr was fascinated by paradox. Take, for example, the dual nature of light and other electromagnetic radiation. One of the more fascinating mysteries that modern physicists had to sort out is the observation that light behaves sometimes as a wave (it reflects, refracts, interferes, etc.) and sometimes as a particle (it collides, billiard-ball-like, with electrons in a phenomenon known as Compton scattering. Because it obscures imaging and delivers unwanted dose to patients, Compton scattering is the bane of medical physicists everywhere, but it’s OK by me because deriving the formula for its scattering angle helped get me though my modern physics qualifying exam for the doctoral program in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Engineering Physics.).

What made Bohr a visionary physicist was his readiness to see this dual nature not as a contradiction but, in the words of one physicist I know, as “two sides of the same coin.” What made him an influential physicist, though (at least in my opinion), were two of his other traits that captured my interest: his insistence that the language with which we describe physics is as important as the physics itself and his warm and collegial relationships with his students, many of whom became great physicists themselves.

This is not a blog about Niels Bohr. In fact, as time passes, I’ll probably talk less and less about him. But I hope his playful, collaborative, often interdisciplinary approach to a range of subjects (physics, writing, philosophy, and world affairs, to name a few) can inspire and serve as a model for much of what goes on here.

I’m not a first-time blogger, but it has been a while since “X-ray”ted Summer, the blog I wrote about my time as an x-ray repair man in New York, came to an end. In the mean time, I’ve read an awful lot of blogs. The most interesting ones, in my opinion, are those that refuse to treat their respective subjects as islands. I think Bohr, who agreed with Schiller that “Nur die Fuelle fuehrt zur Klarheit” (“only wholeness leads to clarity”), would appreciate that sentiment. Thus, with Bohr as my epistemological guide, I’ll be offering up thoughts and analysis on the subjects that make me whole: science, engineering, teaching and tutoring, writing and editing. Maybe a little music and baseball for good measure. I hope you’ll join me.