Insanely Interesting Links: Blog Action Day

Last Monday, October 15th was the day that many bloggers had been looking forward to already for a few months: Blog Action Day. On that day 20,603 bloggers joined their forces by writing 23,327 blog posts about a common cause, the environment. While it’s hard to measure how many readers were reached, at least the 14,631,038 RSS feed readers of the participating blogs got to see a post related to the theme.

I wrote two posts: on this blog I share some thoughts on getting ready for the consequences of global warming, and on my family blog I wrote about diapers as a way of being environmental friendly (in Finnish).

Here are some Blog Action Day posts from my favorite blogs:

1. 5 innovative environmental business ideas from Young Go Getter: Most of the time in the news you hear companies say that being environmentally friendly is costly and harms their business. But that doesn’t have to be the case. These 5 ideas prove that being green can also be good business.
2. 29 Simple Ways to Become a More Environmentally Friendly Freelancer (+ Help Us Donate $500 to Charity!) from Freelance Switch: Being a freelancer is great because you have total control over your actions. With these 29 simple actions you can use that power for common good instead of just reaching for your own benefit.
3. Top 5 reasons green workplaces make their employees happy at work from Chief Happiness Officer: “[...] companies that take the environment seriously can not only make more money, they can also make their employees happy at work and reap all the benefits that happy workplaces experience, like increased innovation, better customer service and higher profits!”
4. We Can Make A Difference – Blog Action Day from Blogtrepreneur: Adnan explains the basics of being an environmentally aware blogger. While most of the things listed are already pretty commonly known he does a good job in presenting them clearly and convincingly.

And some other insanely interesting links from the past week:

1. 7 Incredibly Unique Business Cards from Create Business Growth: A business card is a great way to make people notice and remember you, most importantly because only a handful of companies really use their full potential. Check out these images and be inspired.
2. Big Dreams: Chapter 1 from Ravi Vora: Some time ago, Ravi Vora asked his readers to send their big dreams to him. Now he has received the first batch, and shares it with us. Check it out, and if you still haven’t sent your dream, you can do it now.
3. Climbing Up The Walls, Gravity Is Just A Joke from 52 Lives: Parkour sure looks like fun, it somehow reminds me of my childhood and all the trees we climbed in. Maybe I’ll try this out some day.
4. Design Decisions: Backpack’s new “Add Anywhere” feature from Signal vs. Noise: Some of my favorite posts on the Signal vs. Noise blog are the ones in which the guys from 37 Signals explain decisions behind their designs. These posts give you an interesting view behind the scenes of one of the most ingenious Web 2.0 companies and teach important lessons about remembering the user while designing your software .

Small change to my posting schedule

For a few months already I have been posting on this blog six days a week: five full blown blog posts and a link post every Saturday. This has been a great pace for creating lots of content to build the blog on, but now that I have a collection of well over 100 posts, it’s time to try something different. Instead of the six times a week schedule I have been having so far I am now going to go for half of that: 3-4 posts a week.

There are some reasons for the change, but here are the two most important ones:

1. With the pace I’m currently putting out new posts I feel that my old content is being obscured by the new one. By posting a bit less often I can keep each post in the spotlight for a little longer.
2. I am writing an e-book. The writing takes some time and I don’t want to take that time away from my family. While I do most of my writing on a bus on my way to work, I need to do some of it also at home. To make sure I don’t sit all my free time in front of my laptop, I need to cut down some of the blog posts. The book is something I hope will be useful for many of you, and I will post some new information about it in a few weeks. Stay tuned!

I will keep up this pace until the end of this year to see how it works and then depending on how you like it, either keep going at the same pace or get back to my original six posts a week. Let’s see how this schedule works out, all comments are welcome!