I’ll repeat what I said last week. Do you remember when you first started on Twitter, and you didn’t know quite what to do with it? Who do I follow? What do I say? I didn’t really “get” Twitter for months. But as I found interesting people to follow and got the hang of it, I began to see the appeal of Twitter and started using it more often. I’ve noticed Buzz is tracing that same trajectory for me: an initial burst, followed by a bit of a slump, and then a steady climb as I found people that make Buzz interesting.

Buzz fits nicely between tweeting and blogging. Twitter is perfect when you want to share a link or a single crystalized idea. But Twitter isn’t as strong for group discussion or expressing medium- to long-form ideas. At the same time, blogging is great when you want a permalinked url that will stand the test of time, but it can be a real pain to write a blog post. I always feel like I have to polish my blog posts and it seems to take me at least an hour to write a blog post no matter what I say.

Buzz has the casual feel of Twitter, but you can dive into a topic pretty deeply. Buzz is easier than a blog post, but can look almost as polished. I find Buzz especially good for asking opinions, because the signal-to-noise ratio is (at least right now) quite high. I think Buzz is incredibly strong for internal company discussions too, so I’m looking forward to Buzz rolling into Google Apps.

If you haven’t checked out Buzz, or haven’t checked it out recently, you might want to give Buzz another look. You can follow me on Buzz if you’re interested; we’re having a nice discussion about favorite Chrome extensions right now.

So what should I do now? So far I’m playing with two ideas:
- no email after 10 p.m. Email remains the biggest part of my life where I lack balance, and I still need to get it more under control.
- read 50 pages a day. This is one that my wife has been doing, and she’s been enjoying it.

Other possibilities include:
- 30 days as a vegatarian.
- read the Bible (or the Qur’an) in 30 days. I’ve never read either all the way through.
- 30 days of trying to learn to play guitar.
- meditate 10-15 minutes a day for 30 days.
- try one new thing a day for 30 days.
- draw something everyday for 30 days.
- try polyphasic sleep for 30 days.
- go 30 days spending as little money as possible.
- learn as much of a new language as possible in 30 days.
- 30 days to get my finances in order (I haven’t really paid attention to financial stuff as much as I should).
- try to write a novel/book in 30 days.
- write down one thing I’m thankful for each day for 30 days.

Okay, those are a few that I’ve come up with. Tell me your suggestions and then I might put up a poll to let people vote.

- I did a monster-long interview with Eric Enge. I think the interview lasted an hour or something like that, and we covered several areas in depth.

- Next, take a break and go read this post by Rhea Drysdale. Heck, maybe send her a donation by Paypal. Rhea took on a big fight for the benefit of the SEO industry, saw it through to the end — and won! In the process, she earned the sort of credibility that you just can’t buy.

- We continue to answer webmaster questions over on the YouTube webmaster video channel. My recent favorite video is an eight-minute discussion of “What are some good link-building techniques?”

We now have over 200 videos live on the webmaster video channel, including topics such as “Is it worth spending time on tags and categories?”

You might want to check out the video channel; there’s a lot of good material there. You can also follow me or the Google webmaster account on Twitter; we often tweet when new webmaster videos are released.

And here are the slides if you’d like to follow along:

The talk is almost half an hour, so I hope you enjoy it and learn something new!

I’ll embed the first video in the new series below (it’s about how PageRank flows from Twitter and Facebook in our web search rankings):

But usually I won’t blog about each new video. Instead make sure you follow @googlewmc . That way you’ll always find out first when new webmaster videos come out.

For the last few months I’ve been doing 30 day challenges:

- In May 2009, I walked 10,000 steps a day.
- For June 2009, I didn’t watch television for 30 days.
- For July 2009, I biked to work.
- In August 2009, I tried to read 15 books in 30 days. I only made it to twelve that month, but I knocked out three more later.
- For October 2009, I stopped using Microsoft software (both Windows and Office). That went so well that I’ve switched to Linux as my primary operating system.
- For November 2009, I needed something easy to do. I unsubscribed to Robert Scoble on both Twitter and FriendFeed. Robert is a fantastic guide to what’s new (and I like him personally)–if you’re just starting out there, he’s like training wheels to show you cool things. But back then he was going on about Twitter’s lists feature. It’s a fine feature, but I find talking about it as dry as dust, so I went Scoble-free.
- In December 2009, I went off caffeine.

So the question is: what to do for January 2009? Well, I’ve already been off Twitter for a week. I think I’m going to stay off Twitter/Facebook/FriendFeed for the rest of January.

Do you have suggestions for other 30 day challenges I should try? If so, leave me a suggestion.

P.S. We have some new webmaster videos almost ready. Normally I tweet about those instead of blogging them. So if you want to hear when those videos are released, follow googlewmc on Twitter.

That’s right, I’m going Twitter-free for a week. I don’t really use Facebook, so that’s not a problem. The only other social networking website I use is FriendFeed, so I’m cutting that out too. To keep me on track this week, here’s what I did:

• Tweeted that I was doing the digital cleanse and changed my Bio line to mention that I was doing the digital cleanse.
• Removed all Twitter apps from my mobile phone.
• Removed the Twitter and FriendFeed shortcuts from Chrome’s new tab page.
• Hard-coded a bunch of websites so that I can’t even access them. In Linux, you can type “sudo vi /etc/hosts” and add the following lines:
  
127.0.0.1 twitter.com
127.0.0.1 www.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 friendfeed.com
127.0.0.1 www.friendfeed.com


  What these lines say is “Computer, when you try to use the domain name system (DNS) to resolve twitter.com to an IP address, hard-code the IP address to be 127.0.0.1.” Note that 127.0.0.1 is a special IP address that corresponds to your own computer. In essence, these entries make it impossible to browse to Twitter, Facebook, or FriendFeed. You might need to reboot your computer too for the settings to take effect.

I’m thinking that I might blog a little more now that I’ve stopped tweeting for a week, so I’m doing one extra step–I’m linking my blog in Feedburner so that when I publish a blog post, it will tweet a link to that blog post. Here’s how to do it:
1. Log in to http://feedburner.google.com/ and click on your blog’s feed.
2. Click on the “Publicize” tab and then the “Socialize” service on the left.
3. Add your Twitter account and select the options you want. Here’s how it looks:

Then click “Save” and that’s all you need to do.

So far, I’ve been Twitter-free for twelve hours. In that time, I’ve
- worked out
- taken down our Christmas tree, chopped it into sections and put it out on the street
- typed in three months’ worth of data for a project that I’m working on
- taken down our Christmas lights and packed them away
- stored all our various Christmas decorations
- run a couple loads of laundry
- put out the trash
- gone shopping and had a couple meals with my wife
Oh, and written a blog post. We’ll see how the digital cleanse works for the rest of the week.

The suggestions for videos don’t have to be about search or SEO. I really enjoyed doing the barcode scanning video, for example. So I’d love to tackle a few more general questions like “What settings or Labs do you use in Gmail?” or “Do you have any power user tips for Twitter? What does ‘OH’ mean, anyway?” I’m happy to tackle some broad questions like “What do you think the future of search is?” So post some interesting topics and we’ll see which ones we can tackle. Thanks!

We just finished up the most recent round of videos, and now the question is whether to keep them going, or try some new way to communicate with webmasters. Tell me what you think in the poll below:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

Thanks for voting! Here’s a sample webmaster video, where I discuss what effect site load times may have on your site now vs. in the future: