I don’t care how “stressful” his travel day was; it’s pretty awesome to be Larry Stone right now.

Source: HamburgerJung's Flickr page

If you’ve been blogging for any length of time, you’ve probably got a folder in your RSS reader packed full of subscriptions to blogs that follow your same niche. That’s good—it’s smart to keep up with your area of interest. But it’s a good idea to wander outside of your usual haunts on a regular basis. Two reasons:

1. You avoid the echo chamber

2. You’ll have more original ideas

I thought I might list a few of my favorite non-journalism blogs to give an idea of what inspires my writing:

Kitsune Noir

“…an art and design blog that dabbles in music, movies, food & fashion, all filtered through the brain of Bobby Solomon.”

This may be one of my favorite blogs period. I found it via the handy Explore option in Google Reader and I’ve been loving it ever since. It is what the tagline says and the most important part is the “filtered through the brain of Bobby Soloman” part. This guy’s just got an eye for cool stuff. A lot of the visuals he picks out have inspired me to incorporate my own visuals into this blog lately (scroll through my recent archives—every post has had at least one photo with it) and to not really care if what I’m saying doesn’t sound easy-to-read or whatever. Bottom line when you’re running a blog is that it’s yours, so make it something you like first, then worry about traffic and all that other crap.

Conversation Marketing and Copyblogger

“Common sense internet strategies” and “Copywriting tips for online marketing success” (respectively).

Speaking of “all that other crap,” these two blogs have been invaluable. Once I’ve been inspired and have produced some content, I like to take some time to hone it and make it as nimble and effective as possible—that’s where advice from these guys comes in. I think of them as the editors-I-no-longer-have. They’ve helped out tremendously with advice on how to craft text for the Web and also with SEO headline writing—great for me, since those are things I use on this blog and in my day-to-day at the office.

Lookout Landing, USS Mariner and Geoff Baker’s Mariners Blog*

(A bunch of Seattle Mariners blogs.)

These are just straight-up for fun. Your RSS Reader can’t be all work, all the time—you have to have something to unwind with. Sure, you’ve got books and all, too, but what’s nice about just-for-fun blogs is that you’ll probably accidentally soak up some advice that’ll help you improve your own blog. What makes your for-fun blogs so enjoyable? And what about that can you copy over to your own blog? (For the record, I could do better at this. The only thing I’ve really ‘ported from my Mariners bloggers is, in fact, the Mariners.)

*For more on Geoff Baker’s blog as it relates to blogging and journalism, see this fanboy post I did a while back.

Mariners GM Jack Zduriencik talks a lot about “improving the ballclub”—in other words, making forward progress, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem at the time. Every move he’s made since his arrival in late 2008 has been with an eye toward making the Mariners fundamentally better than they are today. This philosophy may not seem like anything new, but it’s rare to see someone adhere to it so well.

Z has done something with the Mariners that every blogger/social media manager/newsroom editor/etc. should learn to do in their office: make the most of what you’ve got right now.

The knee-jerk reaction fans always have to a losing season is “let’s dump a bunch of money into marquee free agents” — well look at how well that served the Yankees between 2002 and 2008. It’s easy to look at money as anyone’s biggest asset, but it’s useless if you don’t use it right. And if you aren’t making the most of what you have right now, you can’t expect to change just by blowing your budget.

Z knows this. The Mariners were in trouble when he came in. Moves were made, but most of them were budget neutral or better. The “biggest” free agent signing to date has been Chone Figgins’ $36 million-for-four-years contract — not entirely spendy by modern MLB standards.

I don’t know exactly what checklist Jack Z is working off, but here are some of his tactics I’ve observed that I think could benefit anyone else in any other field:

• Take stock: Know what/who you have that’s good and what’s/who’s essential;
• Know how you know who’s/what’s valuable (e.g. If you don’t know anything about social media, how do you know if your social media manager is doing a good job?);
• Jettison your liabilities/time eaters/excesses;
• If you can’t afford something, see if you can collaborate with someone to drive down costs (in this analogy, the Cliff Lee trade);
• Don’t waste time worrying about that which can’t be changed;
• When a deal comes along that makes sense for you, don’t hesitate.