Michael Hyatt – who writes Working Smart and From Where I Sit has written an excellent article "How to Start a Blog" explaining the first steps to writing and publishing a weblog.  If you’re thinking about joining the Blogosphere – read him.

One of the useful things about using Newsgator as your RSS reader in Outlook is the ability to follow certain blogs and see where they go, what they point to. Here’s a new one – found through reading Marc Orchant’s blog – that I think could be interesting…

Micro Media is Changing the PR Practice
The proliferation of Weblogs and RSS news feeds has changed the practice of public relations forever. Despite all of the hype about media consolidation, we are no longer living in a mass media world dominated by conglomerates.

Today we’re just as likely to be influenced by something we read on a blog like Scobleizer as we are by an article in the Wall Street Journal or a segment on Good Morning America.

I probably read 50+ weblogs via RSS each day. Some in my Radio Userland aggregator and others in NewsGator (within Outlook). Over the years I’ve also bookmarked various discussion boards or forums as favorite reads. I visit them daily. Some of my interests have also led me to subscribe to Yahoo! discussion groups. Those daily digests of threaded discussions also arrive in one of my inboxes daily.

What’s fascinating is when the information starts to intersect. I found Manila and then Radio at Userland software. That led to Robert Scoble and the Scobleizer weblog. (Yes, Scripting News too.)

I found CityDesk and Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek) via a link while looking for content management systems.

I read David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” and have been trying to implement that system for over a year.

Recently there was a GTD thread on one of Joel’s Fog Creek forums. Earlier this week Scoble started blogging about GTD and today points to Jason Womack’s new blog. I recognize names or aliases posting at the GTD forum, Ask Joel forum, Yahoo! Groups – GTD for Palm, etc.

Some people have suggested that the weblog world is just an echo chamber. I read your RSS feed and re-post or echo the item. Some of that does occur. But what is more interesting – is it reassuring or scary?- is that these intersections of information are available and increasingly obvious.

Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s evangelist for their future Longhorn operating system and and avid blogger read by one and all will be in Lafayette on Monday, March 22. Worth a look.

Won’t you join my RSS Neighborhood?

I’m going to be speaking in the “RSS Neighborhood” in Lafayette, CA, on March 22. Topic: Why is blogging hot and why does it matter for business? Hope to see you there.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Greg Reinacker just posted about a new way to use RSS feeds through NewsGator – could be very useful..

Wow, I just get done talking about some cool extensions for NewsGator 2.0, and another one pops up.

John Bristowe and Jeff Julian have built an ESF extension for NewsGator. With this extension installed, if a feed publishes information about an event in a certain way, a new item will get added to Outlook’s calendar with the event details.

John has a sample feed and a screenshot in Outlook on his weblog…check it out. This is really beginning to demonstrate the power of RSS extensions, when used with an extension-aware client. Nice job, guys!

[Greg Reinacker’s Weblog]