Welcome to swing that gas. I am Martin Lindeskog and today I will talk about my background as a Moderator for almost 20 years. And that started out when I started blogging in 2002 on Blogspot Bloggers tool. But then later got acquired by Google and I got the hoodie from Google later on or from the founder there that started Blogger as a private enterprise. And that's a side note.
But it's also important there to see that if you are an entrepreneur starting something that catch on to have then the resources for the long run. This service got so popular that it got pretty slow for a time when you logged in and wanted to create a blog post. And that was probably with servers and resources and space and whatnot. So then you could become a premium user. So I was a VIP, you could call it and paid for the service. It was free. And then he introduced that a premium.
So. And then blogging got acquired by Google. They saw the opportunity with that and you had other services out there like Tumblr and what more. It was still around, I think somewhere, but some different tools for producing blog posts and like a system in. In a sort. And then of course later on came WordPro WordPress around. So during that it was not so many blogs out there. And you have blog roles.
And I will come back with that in podcasting 2.0 features called Pod Roll or recommendations for other podcasts. You put that on your site and then you could then click on a list with blog posts and blog other bloggers and find new reading material. And you got exchanged and you got to know each other and so on. So that was early times. And thanks to that, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends and myself, we got in contact and she had started a
blog for her like a newsletter for her service. And that turned into Small Business Trends as an online publication. And then had a forum or you could say a share site bookmarking site called Bis Sugar based on this PHP program language. So you did like a summary of a blog post on an article in English and then it got a link back to that in the cyberspace that plays in cyberspace where you could find the blog or the article. It was a nice way of
sharing good stuff. And over time that increased replaced the search for different categories. And then you had this voting that you have what got hot the top list. And also as a moderate event to take care of spam or things that got in trouble. So to keep it clean and a nice place. And that's what I wanted to land the Next gig. That would be nice to become
a moderator for an online community. I like to call it a digital town hall because the word online or a community is like political labeled in a way. And digital town hall, you could see that you could visualize it by yourself that you have a building and you go there in and you open the door to the entrance and there is somebody in the reception. You have guidelines of how the community, the online place is working,
how you should behave. And then you have like you could have an introduction place like a room or a space for that and then different topics, categories and so on. So that would be a thing. And thanks to podcasting again. I listened to a podcast on marketing and it was an interesting conversation there with a guy called Niklas Lohrmann and he's a co founder of Service, an online community tool that you could build and it's called Heartland. And with startups and
so on IT companies it's funny spelling. So it's Heartland with several A's in the beginning. So H, A, A A R T L A, N D Heartland. So that's something that'd be fun, interesting and valuable to work with. And I see that in the future that to have your own online place again, as I'd repeated with the BNP acronym that in Swedish is called Brutto National Product or Gross Domestic Product. In English you have your blog, you have your newsletter and then you have your podcast.
And adding to that is to have a place that you could have and control by yourself. So you're not on these big tech companies like Facebook group or LinkedIn group or Google. Back in the day you had with Google, what do you call it? Google Circles or was it. They had Google Groups. Yeah, there too. And of course that could be fine also. But it's their walled garden and their agenda
and their rules. If you create something yourself without algorithm, without this kick, dopamine kicks in different ways and then advertising that you don't that you are not interested in then. And there are other tools out there like Circles. You could have discord. I have an issue with that service. I don't really know who is behind that service. Something to come back with, with the security and what could become popular and also do the background check of a service company
and so on. But again I'm for a free market. So as long as it's legal, as long as following the rules, it's okay. And that also to build your
own thing there and become a part of it. Like I often say that the moderator could Be the one that greasing the wheels in a positive way getting this conversation started, checking on people users and welcome them getting conversation going, adding your two cents to the conversation, helping out if you have any issues or questions about how the digital town hall is working, et cetera. So recently it was here and Twitter space or Xspace by Deborah Anderson Create Social Cafe Social Web Cafe and
it's my co host. She's a co host. We are having a podcast called StudioFusion FM. I think it's domain and there I will double check that or if it's studiofusion.com again so we do this with the URLs and remember it. And so she has this Twitter space and I was pretty active in Twitter conversations and hashtags and the Twitter chats also. And there
you could moderate that. So and I was involved in that with small business Trans also they have sponsored Twitter chats that was pretty interesting to participate in and I have some stories that I could share with how I for example won a printer one time in a Twitter chat and a webinar and yeah, all kind of interesting things but that you could do online. And we'll see here now the time again if what were in sani time running.
That's interesting if it's on with all the two when you do it in solo show if you see it's clock so I have to check maybe it's better to go into the studio room on other two in order to check the clock because I want to have it again short and sweet. But I will maybe do a part two of this. So I will link to the Twitter X spaces because the topic there for the month was online communities. So and Deborah and Eileen asked about my experience there and my work as a moderator for a long
time. So I thought this could be this second episode of this new podcast Swing that. Yes. And with that I take a sip here of my favorite beverage tea and talk soon again. Bye for now.