Don’t publish – What are your insane? blogs are all about publishing! What I meant was that when writing your post don’t hit the publish button but instead save your post first as a draft to review it the day after(a few hours is also ok). Of course you just spend some time writing the post and are anxious to publish but when you wait one day you will reflect on what you have written the day before in a more fair way. Therefor don’t publish (directly) and also try previewing your post on your site before publishing.

People love structure – So use this! Paragraph your text to make it more readable. This will also structure your text in such a way people can skip it when they find it boring. Also be not afraid to use lists of any kind because somehow people like reading lists.

Extend your content – You can only make up so much crap therefor try to involve other peoples information as well. Link to other blogs that share or disagree on your opinion, make use of media like youtube and wikipedia. Also include a link to anything you reference in that text itself.

Summarize – Add the end of your blog post ask the readers a question, state the moral of the post, Reflect or express your opinion in one short sentence. This will bring a good ending to the story and might even invite people to post comments on your blog. But never ever end with a question to asks your readers to drop you a comment if you liked this piece of creative(read crap) writing. Comments should be about content. The title & introduction of your post should also give an explanation of what the post is about. The title should be one catchy sentence and the introduction should be one paragraph.

Improve – There will be times when you posted a story which contains errors. The first thing you should do is fix them. There is no need to put update tags on a post where you only fixed some minor spelling errors. If you change the content of your post dramatically you might want to consider this and inform the users of the update in the beginning of the post and at the end.

Of course I often make mistakes myself and do not follow this 100% but it is a good guide to measure your posts. I try to always hit at least four out of five points before publishing my post. This way I make sure the blog post lives up to at least some degree of expectation.

My tipping point top 10:

1. Learning Mandarin. After a few months with Chinese people I am starting distinguishing and perceive more sounds. When I first arrived at this place I never had a clue what they were talking about, nowadays nothing has changed except: I hear more, A lot more… Somehow before I was deaf for this Chinese language. I did not experience this with German and Bahasa Indonesia.

2. Dropbox, Twitter and Jaiku for being great services but with lousy business model. Don’t get me wrong these are all great services and they should be cheap. But they have no way to get paid… Almost nobody minds paying for something good but these services have almost none or no payment plans at all.

3. Digsby and Google Chrome for almost being great applications. You guys will be great when you are available for OSX(and Linux). How can you expect to bring something revolutionary when you bring it only to windows? Hurry up with the versions on OSX…

4. My fellow blogger Saiful Rizal with his plan to inspire us all. He is a bit late with the twitter thing but this also tells us twitter still has momentum. He made a list of youtube videos that I found motivating, this made me check his blog once in a while.

5. The book Reality Check of Guy Kawasaki. It is the book I am reading now and it is really good so far and if all the books were this interesting and fun to read at the same time the next point won’t be a problem at all.

6. My plan to read one book a week. My New Year’s resolution, it’s HiDef

7. Arie.nl werkkleding & werkschoenen, Poetsplaza.nl, Baliday.com and some other projects I am working on.

8. Inscorta is the name of an open source project I am starting. It is actually the code behind Arie.nl & Poetsplaza.nl. Until now the development has been done solely by me. It turns out to be a great software package but further development is slow and difficult since I am do it all. That is why I decided a long time ago to make this software public so everyone can use it and help to improve it.

9. Me turning into something usually named blogger. This is not a New Year’s resolution, I just enjoy it. 

10. Me turning into an Apple Fanboy! Like the attack some M*$*&*F*#^%*rs did on my villages in Tribalwars, I am afraid there is no stopping to this Bill and Steve.

Ok, this is not exactly a tipping point list.

“Whaddaya gonna do, life goes on” (My favorite quote from The Sopranos)