“We make money because we blog not from our blog. We earn because we learn from sharing our experiences with others, not because we let advertisers hitch a ride on our writing for a fee. No one pays attention to the ads, so it doesn’t matter if you include them or not.”
— Dave Winer quoting Doc Searls
The guys at Podcasting News share highlights from a new report by Universal McCann that suggests new media is becoming mainstream media. Among the research highlights:
“Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and a collective rival to traditional media (184m bloggers world-wide, China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers) – 73% have read a blog, 45% have started a blog.”
Key social platforms mentioned in the report: Blogging; Micro Blogging; RSS; Widgets; Chat Rooms; Message Boards; Podcasts; Video Sharing; Photo Sharing.
If you’re in media now and these terms are foreign to you, or seem silly and pointless, the Cluetrain doesn’t stop here anymore.
I’m always on the lookout for good (or bad) blogging stories. I found one in our own back yard during the last few days. The story isn’t complicated but I think our corporate blog tells it better than I can. Just read the original post and the comments. It’s all there.
I’m really proud of how our company and our CEO has used the blog to explain a difficult decision, and allow interested parties to tell us how they feel about it. I’ve been thinking about how this would have been handled pre-blog.
We might or might not have put out a news release. This had to do with an unpleasant decision. If the public wanted to tell us how they felt about it, they could write a letter or send an email, to which we might or might not have responded.
Whatever communication took place, it would have been slow and not very public. With a well-established corporate blog, our CEO just put it out there. The reasons for the action we took… comments… and his response to some of those comments.
Not everybody is happy with the outcome but nobody can say we haven’t been open about it. As an employee –and blogger– I’m proud of how this was handled.
Full disclosure: My wife works for a law firm that represents one of the companies mentioned in the post and comments.
Chris Pirillo was –and remains– an early thought-leader for me. Blogging, RSS, video… Chris was always out there on the front edge. So, when he says Twitter has become one of his primary sources of information, I’m inclined to listen.
“Back in ‘the day’, we used to have to visit web pages to get our information. Those pages didn’t tell us when they updated, so we had to find out manually. Then, along came RSS. The idea was you could subscribe to something, and it would tell you when there was a new update. Now comes Twitter, with its flood of information that allows me to spot trends in general. Twitter has supplanted the information I used to receive in my news aggregator. I don’t follow many websites anymore, and don’t really ’subscribe’ to anything. For me, if something is going to be relevant, I’m going to read about it on Twitter. With Twitter, I’m able to follow people much easier. As disorganized as it is, it’s easier for me to learn about personalities. You can understand thoughts and feelings much easier than you could with a simple RSS feed.”
I’m not quite there yet, in part because I don’t “follow” as many people as Chris does. But I’m starting to see what he’s talking about. A few of the folks I follow on Twitter are very plugged in and I can count on a line or two with a link when something in their area of interest breaks.
“James Karl Buck helped free himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word blog post from his cell phone. Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator Mohammed Maree were arrested April 10.
On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.
The message only had one word. “Arrested.”
Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted he was being held.” [CNN]
The J-Walk Blog is very popular. For all the usual reasons. He writes well about interesting stuff and he posts every day. Usually several times a day. John Walkenbach (Mr. J-Walk) was called away to a meeting and didn’t post for a week. Upon his return, he checked his stats and did a little trending to determine he would lose all of his many readers in 17 days if he stopped posting altogether. One assumes it would take less time for blogs with fewer readers. I wonder how long –if at all- it would take for visitors to return. And why would they?
From Out & About: “Local Nashvillian and host of The Remix, a popular Christian youth show, Azariah Southworth, announced today that he has come out.
“This has been a long time coming. I’m in a place where I’m at peace with my faith, friends, family and more importantly myself. I know this will end my career in Christian television, but I must now live my life openly and honestly with everyone. This is my reason for doing this,” Southworth says.
Southworth has been hosting and producing the popular Christian TV show, The Remix for a year and a half. It is in syndication and can be seen in more than 128 million homes worldwide. It averages more than 200,000 viewers weekly on one of three networks.”
As I read this I recalled my recent exchanges with anonymous (ok, pseudonymous) political bloggers who justified blogging from behind the curtain with concerns for their jobs. Props to Mr. Southworth. That takes courage.
I quote Seth Godin so often I gave him his own tag. And sometimes he writes/thinks something so dead-on that I have to quote the entire post. Every word is gold:
"You can improve your writing (your business writing, your ad writing, your thank you notes and your essays) if you start thinking like a blogger:
What would happen if every single high school student had to have a blog? Or every employee in your company? Or every one of your customers?"
I’ve been corresponding with a few political bloggers who I chided for being anonymous. Because, they explained, their ideas are so controversial, so inflammatory, so powerful… they risk their jobs or worse if they sign their names. But –they insist- they aren’t anonymous. They are “pseudonymous.” I had to look it up in the dictionary:
pseudonymous – writing or written under a false name
anonymous – not identified by name, of unknown name
So, if I write something and don’t sign any name to it, that’s anonymous. And if I sign a false name, that’s pseudonymous. Yes? Is this a distinction without a difference? Or, if I sign my letters “The Shadow,” readers won’t know who I am but they’ll know the letter was written by someone who calls himself “The Shadow.” And if I don’t sign the letter at all, the reader will have no way of knowing subsequent letters were written by the same person. Is that it?
I went to two of the smartest people I know for clarification. First, Bob Priddy, a long-time broadcast journalist and author:
“One hides behind a fake name. The other hides behind no name. Steve is a name. Anonymous is a word.
It’s the difference between hiding behind a red curtain or hiding behind a blue curtain. I suppose those who use pen names do so because they don’t want to be anonymous. It’s much more rewarding to hear people discussing who Howard Beale is than it is to hear people discussing who anonymous is because anonymous can be anybody and Howard Beale is somebody. Nobody discusses anonymous. Everybody discusses Howard Beale and therefore the sniper feels some kind of importance. Both are gutless but one is gutless with an ego.
My friend Kay Henderson (also a journalist) wrote this:
“I have never heard or seen the word “pseudonymous” before. Interesting. My first thought was of George Eliot who wrote under the male pseudonym because writing, at the time, was a “male profession.” My second thought was “Primary Colors” was written by “Anonymous” as you’ll recall.
I may be behind the times here, though. Is “Alice Cooper” or “Marilyn Manson” a pseudonym? How about “Madonna” or “Cher” or “Diddy” or “Snoop Dog” or any number of professional athletes who adopt a stage name? Our culture has grown so used to people who adopt another name/character/stage name in public that perhaps it’s not that much of a stretch to expect it to happen on-line.
Is political “speech” subject to different standards than are considered the norm for the rest of the culture? I will agree with my colleague that the cloak of a pseudonym is too often used by bloggers. But who will be the blogger police? Perhaps it will take something akin to pulling back the curtain and having Dorothy expose The Wizard to change the on-line culture. Perhaps more sites will forbid “anonymous” posting in the comments sections. I find the requirement of a name, however, laughable in most instances if you read the “names” which are used.”
I suspect we got such passionate response to this because the phantom bloggers would like to be out. No doubt all of their friends know of their secret identities (“That ‘Howard Beale’ guy? That’s me. Seriously.”). Questioning their ethics or courage stings. I’ll try to stop.
Jeez, I hope not. But according to this article at NYTimes.com, some bloggers are working in what amounts to a “digital-era sweatshop” and it’s affecting their health. A few well-known bloggers have recently died of heart attacks.
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to blog for my supper. That would take a lot of the fun out of it.