Jason Unger

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I'm gonna make it there. Well, actually I'm already here. In New York, that is.

I'm spending Thursday at the Writing for the Web seminar of Usability Week 2008.

Put on by the Nielsen Norman Group — yes, as in Jakob Nielsen, the guy who provides a ton of super-informative content in his Alertbox postings — Usability Week has four stops throughout the world. Well, it's silly for me to talk about it — find out more about it here.

While I can't credit all of my Web knowledge to the stuff Nielsen teaches, I've always found a way to improve my delivery with his research.

I'm hoping to get a little more "formal" education on content presentation and publishing, considering pretty much everything I know I've garnered through experience doing it … not formally learning about it.

Even though I only graduated from college 3+ years ago, it's not like there was a Web journalism path. The only Web publishing class I ever took consisted of people learning Microsoft FrontPage.

Yeah, exactly. The name of that program just shows how little Microsoft (and many still today) understand about how online publishing.

PS. To my friends in New York who I may not have told I was coming in to the city, I apologize — but I'm only here for the day and driving back home when I'm done tonight.

One of the problems I have when coming up with topics for this blog and for the Online Savings Blog is choosing subjects to speak authoritatively about.

It's not that I can't or that I won't — it's just that I don't get that much enjoyment from it.

When I'm blogging, I'd rather share my experiences and stories living life than try and provide "useful" and informative content. It's a lot more fun to just shoot the breeze and post funny links and insights.

Every day, I read a number of amazing blogs like Copyblogger, Penelope Trunk and Get Rich Slowly, who are there to provide compelling and timely content. This is what I do every day at CE Pro — but it's not what I want to do when I write here.

Bloggers have been getting a bad rap lately, but a lot of that has to do with the different expectations and meanings that term has to people. Engadget might be a blog, but they are much better tech journalists than anyone in the mainstream media. Top it off with a strict policies regarding relationships with who they're covering and they've got a much cleaner rap sheet than many "professional" journalists.

But because anyone can start a blog, "bloggers" all get lumped together — the ones redefining journalism and the ones simply telling you about their day. But does that mean you should only start a blog if you really have something useful and informative to say? Of course not.

When you come to CE Pro, you get the informative content and breaking news. On this site, I get to talk about whatever the hell I want.

So what's the take away from this? You always have something to say — and you can speak authoritatively about it: you. As Gary Vaynerchuk recently laid out, you have to look inside yourself to find happiness.

I don't pretend to bring you compelling content with every blog post on this site — I only post things that I find interesting and want to share. That's our agreement.

Thanks for being a part of it.