Good reading precedes all good writing. And ReadPrint aims to provide a selection of good reading for the avid blogger!

If you are interested in turning your blog into something more than a daily listing of what you ate, what you did, and who you talked to, supplementing your reading is necessary and addictive.

In our world, too many people spend time specializing in their jobs and in their reading, yet reading outside your specialty can increase your vocabulary, your writing skills, and broaden your perspectives: so don’t be afraid, read more, and enjoy it more! The benefits of broad reading will allow you to communicate more clearly those ideas that you really care about.

And it needn’t cost a lot of money to enjoy the classics, thanks to websites like Readpring.com.

Having been blogging almost daily since late 2006, I am beginning to understand what I used to teach as a writing teacher to my students from a new perspective: good blogging is a recursive process, not a product oriented approach.

Let me explain: in our world, we are all obsessed with the final products that we see all around us. Books in bookshops have covers, neatly printed pages, indexes, etc.. Magazines in newsstands are glossy, full of great pictures, well-written and relevant stories. It seems that the articles are all ‘finished’, and that because they look finished, we assume that they must have always been that way. In other words, to borrow an allusion to biblical fundamentalists (with apologies), that the words were somehow ‘breathed out’ by the authors (as opposed to the Author) in a final form right onto the page, and then were published ‘as-is’. That is how it so often ‘appears’ to bystanders. With the advent of blogging technology, it appears even more so that way: words are typed into the blog interface directly, bloggers hit ‘publish’ and that’s it. Except that’s not ‘it’.

In fact, it is rarely the case that a piece of writing is delivered ‘as-is’. Many of my writings have gone through a number of discrete stages before I hit ‘publish’, and in some cases, have gone repeatedly through some stages, and are still sitting in my publish queue because they are not ready. Recursive writing means exactly that. That as we write, we develop more and more clarity about the subject of our writing, whether the individual post, the series of posts, or even the whole blog. That clarity, whether it focuses on content or form, allows us to recreate and reinterpret the earlier writing for greater clarity. That process of writing, rewriting, and editing can be gone through many times before publishing a post.

So, if you have lots of posts sitting in your queue, don’t worry. This is natural: some posts are still at the concept stage, some are still at the writing stage, some are being edited and/or rewritten. Perhaps one or two are even nearly done, just waiting an opportune time.

How do you handle your posting? Do you write stream of conscious or do you rewrite a lot?

I just read a report called “PageRank Anyone? Yes Please! | John Cow dot Com” that notes that PR updates are just around the corner.

It’s that time of the season again. Bloggers and webmasters will be all over the DigPageRank site for the next week or so. Someone on the Digital Point forums wrote that he saw one of his sites went up to a PR7 last night so this means Google is busy doing the dreaded pagerank updates currently.

Of course, it’s difficult to tell if anything’s really going on right now, but checking future page ranks is a sport for the prophets or for the clairvoyant. Most of the tools I have used either tell me what I already know, or tell me something that proved not true last time! The only way to know if your site PR is changing is to find a tool that queries multiple data centers, then see if any of the data centers are reporting a different value from the current one. That might be indicative, though final PR won’t be known for a few weeks. A simple visit to SmartPageRank.com, that should be fine to find out if things are changing for your website. Currently, you can view 67 data centers on the left side after you enter your website address.

Let me know if anything is happening to your website!

Update: Kat provided me a great link to http://livepr.ezer.com/url/ that I checked several times. It seems to indicate something is now happening, as two of the centers are recording 0’s for all of the links I tried. That suggests that an update is now beginning, but I could be wrong. Thanks, Kat. Keep upto date on the discussion by following this link.