Anybody know where I can order a sports jersey with the number 26 on the back? Because according to TechCrunch, I'm one of the top tech bloggers around... Number 26 to be exact.
Now these statistics are kind of meaningless, because it's just a breakdown of top stories that showed up on Techmeme over the past four months. And while Techmeme is a handy tool for keeping track of conversations in the tech corner of the blogosphere, the site certainly doesn't track all blogs or news sites. But hey, it's still nice to be recognized for my work at Download Squad.
I should point out that this is not a dubious distinction I hold all by my lonesome. Two other people also managed to get 33 posts on Techmeme so far this year, which means that Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb and Saul Hansel of Bits, the New York Times tech blog are also #26. It's an exclusive club I belong to now, but it's still a club, not a... umm... solitary thing. And of course, I don't blog alone at Download Squad. We have an excellent team of about 20 bloggers, most of whom have day jobs and therefore can't post as frequently as I do. If they did, I'm sure they'd outrank me on this silly little list.
There are literally millions of blogs littering, or umm, I meant to say lining the internet these days. Many are personal diaries from folks who have some thoughts to share. Many have a newsier bent. And while many people make no money at all from blogging, some make a few bucks or more every month from advertising or selling items. And a handful of the folks treat blogging like a part time or full time job write for larger blogs that are part of networks. I personally do most of my writing for Download Squad, Green Daily, and TV Squad, three blogs that are part of the Weblogs Inc network owned by AOL.
While there are a ton of web sites out there that offer tips on blogging and on making money by blogging (ironically most of the blogs about making money are set up by people who hope to make money by blogging about something that many people are interested in. I'm not convinced that most of the people trying to give out free advice about making money online actually have much advice worth giving), there are very few sites targeted at folks like me: those who write for a blog network/employer.
If you think about it, writing for a boss is very different from writing for yourself. If you're a network blogger you tend to get paid either a salary or paid per post. If you write for yourself, either the work is its own reward, or you're trying to sell advertising. In both cases, page views are important. But aside from that, they can be two very different jobs.
So I was pretty happy to see the emergence of a blog about blogging that actually looks pretty useful to me. Network Blogging Tips is an independent site run by two network bloggers who write for a whole slew of b5media blogs. The site is still pretty new, but it already had some useful advice in posts like:
- Should you sign a confidentiality agreement?
- 12 Ways to find blog post ideas
- 5 Reasons you should write a list post
- Being a team player at a blog network
- The pros and cons of being a network blogger
[via ProBlogger]
About a month ago I decided to weather the writer's strike by pulling out my collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs. I have the full set, with all 7 seasons on DVD. I bought them one at a time although I've now discovered that you can buy a 40 disc box set with all 7 season and one bonus disc (affilliate link).
At first I figured I'd just watch Seasons 2 or 3, but 30 days and change later I've watched every episode from S2e1 through the series finale. And I have to say I find myself kind of uninterested in watching anything currently on TV, even after we start to see new episodes again. I mean, I'm sure the feeling will pass, but it's just sad to think that there's nothing on the air right now that seems to have the character depth and interesting plot lines that Buffy had. I mean sure, I'm looking forward to new episodes of BattleStar Galactica whenever that comes back. But it's just not as much fun to watch.
So I pulled out a book for the first time in a while today. When I was a kid I used to read a lot. Like a book every two days, a lot. They weren't particularly dense material. I'm talking about Piers Anthony, not Fyodor Doestoevsky. But some time around college when I found that I had to read things because people told me to and not because I wanted to, I kind of got out of the habit of reading regularly. And as much as I love some good TV or cinematic content, there's nothing like a good book to spark the imagination.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to craft the sort of Sci Fi stories that I enjoyed reading so much. The kind that were as much about people making difficult decisions under difficult situation as they were about completely unrealistic situations like individuals flying across the galaxy or living forever. After a while I guess I decided that I didn't necessarily have those stories in me, but I'm constantly amazed to realize that I do actually make my living today by writing and telling stories. They just happen to be true stories instead of fiction with an aspect of the truth in them.
But it's been a while since I feel like I've really challenged myself as a writer. Watching Buffy reminded me of what really good writing looks like, even if it was in a televised format. Sure, it's been my favorite show for the better part of a decade. But it's been years since I actually sat down and watched an episode. And once I started watching, I couldn't stop.
I don't plan on writing a screenplay anytime soon. But I'm starting to feel like it's been a while since I've truly challenged myself as a writer. I really hope I have it in me to craft the sort of story that once you start, you can't stop. In the meantime, I think I've found some temporary inspiration to start reading again, seeking out good stories and good storytelling. And that can come in many forms, from the big or small screens, to radio, to books. But in a way, I feel like watching Buffy again after all these years was a good reminder that I still have a lot to learn as a storyteller.
I've been a freelance writer and journalist for about a year and a half now. I really thought I was just going to do it for a few months and then look for a full time job, but somewhere along the road I realized I really enjoy working for myself and unless a terrific opportunity throws itself at me, I'll probably keep it up for a while.
I work longer hours than I used to, but I set my own hours. And while some months are better than others, and I have to pay self employment tax, I make more money than I did at my last full time job.
But my experiences might not be representative of... well, anything. So it's interesting to take a look at the results of a survey conducted by the folks at Freelance Switch. 3700 (self-selected) people participated in the survey. And while their results might not hold true for all freelancers everywhere, they're still interesting.
If you didn't participate in the survey, you'll have to shell out $3 or more for a copy of the complete report. But you can find some of the highlights on Freelance Switch. Overall, it looks like most respondents work fewer hours than they did when they held full time jobs. The majority of people also make less money than they used to, but are happier.
Having talked to a few other freelance bloggers and journalists, I think this is probably more typical than my experience. They quit their full time jobs for more freedom, and wind up with lower salaries, but generally they're happier unless they start to run out of money. While I don't expect to become rich from blogging and freelance radio production, I've been working my behind off so that my annual income has gone up. Now if I can just keep up with inflation.
[via Web Worker Daily]
Since I know I'll probably forget to grab a screenshot when I pass the 3,000 mark tomorrow, I thought I'd post this little image today.
This is just the number of posts I've written in Blogsmith, the blog client used by Weblogs Inc. So those 2,997 posts span Download Squad, TV Squad, Green Daily, and the now-defunct PVR Wire. FYI, I've also written 252 posts for this site and 119 for Eee Site. So post number 3,000 actually came and went some time ago. But it's still.. something.
In other news, Engadget's Ryan Block recently passed the 6,000 post mark, while author Neil Gaiman has written 1,071,213 words on his blog over the last 7 years. It seems like a good week for bloggers to list their stats, so feel free to share your milestones in the comments.
And I'm still accepting bets for when I'll hit the 4,000 post mark. At this rate, it looks like Alex from TiVo Blog is going to be closest, but there's still plenty of room to get in on the action. The fate of a shiny nickel hangs in the balance.
While the founder of online dating site Plentyoffish may be working 10 hours a week and making $10 million a year, most of us who are making a near-full time living doing web work hardly ever sleep.
My work day is a little unpredictable since I spend about 2/3rds of my time doing blog-related work and 1/3rd doing radio and audio production gigs. But Ryan and Ashley over at CyberNet seem to have honed their blogging workday down to a science. An exhausting science.
If you've ever wondered what it takes to produce a daily software news and tips web site that generates enough revenue to (barely) live on, their post makes for excellent reading. It also might serve as a cautionary tale for anyone thinking of quitting their day job to start blogging full time. While you can certainly make a living this way, don't count on it being any more relaxing than what you're doing now.
This week we launched Green Daily, a new environmentally-focused blog from Weblogs Inc.
We've been working behind the scenes to put together a site with everything from shopping tips to recycling crafts to news about alternative energy.
As a radio journalist I've been covering environmental issues for years. It's been interesting applying that experience to blogging. For the most part, the subjects I write about for Download Squad and TV Squad are miles apart from anything I've ever done for the radio. But one of the first stories I wrote for Green Daily is actually based on a radio report I filed a while back.
Anyway, it's exciting to see the blog develop and launch. It has a unique look and feel that I think sets it apart from a lot of other Weblogs Inc blogs, and indeed from other sites on the internet. For example, check out our awesome photo galleries and photo essays.
A year ago I was had just begun blogging for Weblogs Inc's PVR Wire when I hopped on a train from Princeton to New York to spend a day at Digital Life, the miniscule East Coast version of CES. I wandered around for a while, got to see a handful of cool products that I hadn't seen up close before, wrote a few blog posts and did a few interviews. I expect to do the same tomorrow when Digital Life 2007 opens. Except now I live in Brooklyn, so my commute will be shorter.
But this evening I stopped by the ShowStoppers event first, and got a sneak peek at a few products which I've been writing up for Download Squad and TV Squad.
Overall I was pretty underwhelmed with the amount of new hardware and software companies were showing off. That's not too surprising. Change is incremental, and when you spend your days writing about new products and services, it's hard to be impressed by anything that stops short of revolutionary.
The thing that did surprise me the most was a little thing. The USB thumb drive I was handed when I signed in at the registration desk. Last year, I picked up a similar drive at Digital Life. It was 64MB. Large enough to store a few documents, but too small to be really useful for much more than that.
At ShowStoppers, they gave me a 512MB drive. More than 1/5th of the space is already filled up with promotional materials for the companies showing their wares, you know, so it's not just swag, it's also about as useful as PR materials get. I'd much rather have a thumb drive filled with JPG and PDF documents than folders and folders filled with dead trees.
So this is my takeaway point. Technology moves at an incremental pace, and the new laptops, cellphones, and software look a lot like the new items launched last week, and the week before. But if you take a longer view, things do change pretty rapidly. Last year, companies could afford to give away a 64MB flash drive as a promotional tool. This year, it's 512MB.
Disclaimer: It's also possible that the 512MB drive this year cost more than the 64MB drive last year, and that the price is being written off as the cost of PR. But I don't think that's the case.
1 year, 1 month, and a week or two of blogging.
I'll send a nickel via PayPal to the first person who correctly guesses the date on which I'll reach my 4,000th post.
You might have to remind me though.
Farrah and I are in Chicago for the week. She had to come for work, so I was able to tag along for just the price of an extra plane ticket, which wasn't too much. And since I'm light on radio work and heavy on blogging this week, I knew I'd be able to work just as effectively from Chicago as from our apartment in Brooklyn.
We woke up at 4:20 this morning, landed at 8:30, and dropped off our bags at hte hotel, where can't check in until 3:00. We can get WiFi for $4/day from the hotel, but I'm thinking most days I'll probably head out to the local coffee shops to get work done. WiFi is free at several nearby locations, including the Panera I'm sitting at right now.
We're in a university area, with access to Roosevelt University, DePaul's downtown campus, and the Art Institute is nearby. This probably explains why I'm the oldest person in the room. It doesn't explain why the guy sitting next to me has been talking on a VoIP headset for the last hour. At least he's not being too loud. Or maybe my hearing isn't what it used to be.
I haven't lived in Chicago for 8 years, and I never lived downtown, so I used Walk Score to scope out things to do/places to eat near our hotel. We get a pretty good walkability rating, and we're just a bit south of the Magnificent Mile. Sure, it's tourist central, but it turns out that One Ring Zero is doing a free show at Borders Books in about a half hour, so I'm getting ready to pack up and go check it out. I think Borders has WiFi, but again its not free, so I'll probably just check out the show and then walk over to Argo Tea, which is only .09 miles away.
I love Chicago. I also love my laptop. I whine about it occasionally, but for $650, this trusty little Toshiba A135-S4527 has become my primary computer at home, and it performs just as well on the road. It has pretty lousy battery life, maxing out around 2.5 hours. But show me a coffee shop with free WiFi and a plug and I can work all day. From anywhere.
This morning NPR ran my piece on Jelly, a casual coworking group that started in New York.
I first read about Jelly a few weeks ago when Silicon Alley Insider mentioned that the group would be meeting at an apartment in Brooklyn about a mile away from where I live. I love things I can walk to. Grocery stores, restaurants, or coworking spaces. At first I figured I'd get out of the house and do some blogging. And then I remembered I was a reporter and pitched a story to NPR, which became part of their regular series on the workplace.
The idea behind coworking is that you can kind of recreate the traditional office work environment even if you work independently. Self-employed, contract, and telecommuting workers pitch in some money rent an office space and avoid the distractions of the home office space that's a bit too close to the TV/cat/video game console. You also get to bounce ideas off of other people in the office and have people to grab lunch with.
Jelly is a bit more loose. The group doesn't meet every day, just once every week or two. And you don't have to pay a cent to join. You just sign up at a Wiki and show up. Many of the people at events know each other, but pretty much each time you're at a Jelly you'll be introduced to someone you've never met before. Almost everyone works on something technology related. There are a lot of web developers. But even the folks who are working on something else, say industrial design or crafting electronic musical instruments, have web sites and work that you can be done on the go with a laptop.
Amit Gupta and his roommate Luke Crawford founded Jelly in Manhattan, and for the first year and a half, events were held at their apartment. But Gupta is moving to San Francisco soon, and that's launched Jelly into an exciting new period that I didn't have time to touch on in my piece. There's now a rotating list of Jelly regulars who are opening their homes to strangers. Not only do you get to meet new people, discuss interesting ideas, and take a break from the regular grind of home office work, you can see different parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn (so far).
Related groups have also begun popping up in Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and people have expressed interest in setting up Jelly events around the world.
Web Worker Daily has published an excellent post on GTD for Bloggers. Essentially GTD (Getting Things Done) is a method for you know... doing stuff. But more than that, it's a set of guidelines for organizing your work and increasing productivity while reducing the amount of time you spend doing useless time-sucking stuff.
At least, that's what I assume. I have to say, I've never been fond of self-help style guides, and so I've kind of avoided the whole GTD movement. But after reading WWD's article today, I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I've already doing a pretty good job at getting my own things done.
For example, I've been using one email inbox for the last year. I've got multiple email accounts set up, but almost all of them dump into my Gmail account, and I use filters and labels to help sort my email. Personal email and communication with readers and other bloggers, I respond to right away. Other emails like story tips I usually sift through just a few times a day.
Probably my most useful blogging tool is Google Reader. I sift through hundreds of feeds every day, including some custom feeds made of keyword Google, Technorati, and Digg RSS feeds. Early in my blogging career (you know, a year ago), I would start reading and pause every time I found an article to blog about. This kind of works, but I've found that it's more efficient to quickly scan through all of my unread articles first, starring items that I might want to write about. That way, I only have a few dozen potential items to blog about instead of a few hundred. And if multiple news sites and blogs have written about a topic, I'll have more context for the article I plan to write.
The only thing I'd really like to do to make my day more efficient is do a better job of setting time limits for myself. If I have non-blogging work to do, I need to do a better job of telling myself to blog until 1 and then switch over to another project. Or vice versa.
Anyway, if you're looking for ways to improve your blogging efficiency, I definitely recommend checking out the Web Worker Daily post.
Yesterday some kid who happens to share a name with a product manager at Google sent a juicy tip to several high profile tech blogs about some soon to be announced new Apple products and upgrades.
Gizmodo went ahead and published an article based on the tip, labeling it as a rumor, albeit one from a trusted source. Engadget received the same tip and after a little digging debunked it as a prank.
But here's where things get interesting in a new media kind of way. Shortly after the tip was proven to be false, Gizmodo went back and edited the original article. The author left an explanation and apology in the comments. And today, Gizmodo's editor published an internal memo to the site's writers on the web page, outlining his thoughts and what should be the site's policy for dealing with rumors.
The truth of the matter is an old media newspaper or broadcast station probably wouldn't have run with the rumor in the first place, at least not without thoroughly checking it out first. And probably not even then. But if they had run a story like this, there's little chance that the "mea culpa" would have been so public. Corrections don't usually make the front page. And internal memos pretty much never do (assuming this is actually the letter Brian Lam sent to his staff).
For the most part, the Gizmodo readers who have left comments to the original post and to the memo have been understanding and supportive. The writers work fast and they work long hours. Mistakes happen. Fortunately, so do corrections. But I think it's the sense of a conversation between the writers and their audience that contributes to that sense of understanding.
Related Posts:
Newspapers put their best stories (the ones most likely to sell issues) on the front page, above the fold. In other words, since most newspapers are folded in half, you can only see the top half of the paper from a newspaper box. That's the half that the top stories have to be on, because it's the part that people will see first.
As AOL's Milissa Tarquini points out, the same basic principle has traditionally been applied to web sites. But things become a bit complicated when you think about all the things that need to be "above the fold" online. With a newspaper, once you've convinced someone to buy the paper you've already got their money (and the money advertisers are willing to pay for their eyeballs).
Online, you need to grab their attention with your content, describe what your site is about and why they should keep coming back, and in many cases try to make revenue. That means you need a combination of branding, advertising, and content all to come above the fold. Doesn't leave as much room for content as you may like.
And then there's the trickier issue. Where exactly is the fold? While most users may be reading your site on displays with 1024x768 resolutions, there are many computers with higher, lower, or widescreen variations. And that's not taking into account the many different web browsers people may be using. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Konqueror all have different toolbars atop the screen affecting the size of your display window. And in many cases users can customize those toolbars so that two people reading your website using Firefox on a 1280x800 widescreen laptop might still have different "folds."
But here's Tarquini's little secret. People know how to scroll. Shocking, but true. While you probably do want to grab a visitor's attention right away when they land on your site, you don't need to kill yourself trying to fit everything into the top few hundred pixels on your screen. If they're even vaguely interested, readers will scroll down the page. In fact, she says the top link on TMZ is all the way at the bottom of the page. It says "Next Page."
[via Information Week]
A few months ago Engadget's Ryan Block wrote his 5,000th post for the technology blog. I'm no Ryan Block, but a week or two ago I noticed that I was about to hit my 1,500th post for Weblogs Inc sites including PVR Wire, Download Squad, and TV Squad. I made a mental note to take a screenshot when that happened, and it totally slipped my mind.
Today I checked again and wouldn't you know it, I shot past 1,600 while I wasn't paying attention. So I figured I'd just stop now to pat myself on the back. Now, I believe good blogging should be a quality over quantity thing, just like good journalism. But it's still pretty astonishing to look at my body of work over the last year (it's almost exactly a year since I left my full time reporting job in Philadelphia to begin the perilous life of a freelance journalist/blogger).
In that year I've written an average of 5 blog entries per day, weekends included. Some are just quick snippets of the day's news, while others have been far more detailed (and fun to work on):
- Windows Mobile tools and toys for commuters
- Interview with Picnik co-founder Mike Harrington
- Download Squad Switcher podcast series
- Q&A with Craigslist's Jim Buckmaster
- Interviews with the folks behind ReplayTV PC Edition, BeyondTV, and SageTV
And the list goes on. In fact, every time I start to think that I'm about to become a full time blogger whether I like it or not, I wind up with several radio stories on my plate that pretty much leave me struggling to remember what free time felt like. I just picked up two new stories that should be a lot of fun to work on, but I'll tell you about those later.
Duncan Riley is hardly the first person to get hit by inappropriate ad placement. Thanks to contextual advertising, Google AdSense advertisements and others use an automated system to find the perfect text or image to place on your website based on what you've written about.
Unfortunately, AdSense uses a script that fails to recognize the nuances of human communication that would let it know when an ad is in poor taste or completely contrary to the article you've written.
There are a few good examples, including the one above, on this list of 15 unfortunately placed ads.
[via Google Blogoscoped]
YouTube, Odeo, and other services that let you embed audio and video files on your website are great tools for bloggers. Need a funny video to emphasize a point you're making? Just find one from YouTube.
In fact, some web sites have based their entire business plan around finding the best videos from online video sites and reposting them in one central location.
But there's at least two problems with embedded videos.
- Since they're not hosted on your site, you have no control over them. If they're deleted by the user who uploaded the files or by the hosting service, you're left with a hole in your blog post, and you won't even be notified until some irritated visitor to your site sends you a nasty email
- Many of the files uploaded to audio/video sharing sites are copyrighted files. If the user who uploaded the file didn't have permission to post the song or video, you can be pretty sure that you don't either.
The Citizen Media Law Project takes a pretty detailed look at this question. In a nutshell, it's hard to say. On the one hand, you're incorporating copyrighted works into your site. Whether you know the items are copyrighted or not is beside the point.
But because you're not actually hosting the files, it's possible that you're not actually liable. After all, if you're clearly linking to a YouTube video, it's unlikely any but the most determined litigants will sue you when they could go after Google with its deep pockets. And if YouTube receives a legitimate takedown notice, they will remove the video, which effectively removes it from your site.
In other words, it's both a blessing and a curse that you have no control over videos once you've embedded the links on your site. Sure, you could be left with a hole in your blog post. But isn't that a lot better than a hole in your wallet?
Probably the best practice is to avoid linking to any materials that you know have been uploaded without the permission of their owners. The videos won't suddenly go missing from your site one day, and more importantly, the law in this area is still very new and very subject to change.
So the Wall Street Journal has an article on the 10th anniversary of blogging. Just one problem, blogging is a few years older than that. Blogger Duncan Riley points out that the WSJ incorrectly labels Jorn Barger the first blogger -- even though he's widely attributed to be the first person to popularize the term "blog."
Justin Hall and Dave Winer are actually considered to be among the first actual bloggers. Both had sites up for at least a year before Barger. That doesn't make the WSJ retrospective any less interesting. The article includes some interesting interviews with old and new media types ranging from Mia Farrow to Jim Buckmeister.
But Riley's article was predominantly a slam against the newspaper for failing to check their facts. And as Donna Bogatin points out, what's that I see to the left of Riley's criticism? Advertisements asking me to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal.
I disagree with Bogatin that readers will think this is an implicit endorsement of the WSJ. I think you'd have to be a few chips short of a cookie to think that Riley actually wants you to subscribe to the newspaper. And I think that most savvy readers are well aware that "Ads by Google" means... ads by Google.
But this incident does show a flaw in contextual advertising. If you write about the Wall Street Journal and use its title as many times as I have in this post, odds are Google's going to serve up a few ads, whether you've been bashing the paper or praising it.
On the one hand, this just goes to show that contextual advertising does help keep a firewall between advertising and editorial content. You can pick your nose, but you can't pick the ads that will show up on your site. On the other hand, readers may rightly think that some authors write about topics specifically to attract high-paying ads related to those topics. So in a way, the advertising is clearly affecting the way some people write. Fortunately, it's usually pretty easy to spot and avoid web sites that are designed more with Google in mind than readers.
Traditional news organizations have a long history of maintaining separate departments responsible for advertising and editorial content. Sure, you can look at many magazines and television programs these days that don't seem to have gotten the memo. But at most news organizations the reporters will never speak directly to the business managers.
Coming from the world of journalism, this is one of the things that scared me most about blogging. Most bloggers don't have that background, and more importantly, they don't have those resources. If you're running a company of one, or even a company of 5 or 10, you probably can't afford to hire someone to handle the business while you crank out content.
And that's why it's not surprising to see the latest mini-controversy to hit the blogging world. (I say mini, because like most news about blogs, its 15 minutes of fame will probably last through the weekend and disappear the moment there's something else to focus on, like the iPhone).
In a nutshell, Web 2.0 gossip site Valleywag, which is usually filled with speculation, allegations, and generally unreliable information, lobbed some accusations against top bloggers including Om Malik and Mike Arrington Friday.
Basically, Federated Media designed an advertising campaign and website for Microsoft, asking "when did you know your business was people ready?" A number of prominent bloggers wrote answers to that question, and snippets of their replies were placed into banner ads which appeared on their sites and other web pages. While they weren't paid directly for their quotes, the bloggers did receive payment for every ad click from their web sites.
Several bloggers, including Om Malik later thought better of their involvement (after the Valleywag article), and withdrew the ads from their site. Others, including Mike Arrington defended their campaign, even after Federated Media pulled the ads. If you want a more detailed description of the controversy, I recommend checking out Jeff Jarvis's thoughtful post on the topic.
While some have tried to turn this into a question of whether bloggers should be accepting advertising revenue (the answer is obviously yes, ads have been a major source of revenue for media for over a century), the larger question here is the blurring of the lines between advertising and editorial content.
In my old newsroom I never once had a conversation about underwriting (I worked in public radio, so I won't get into the fine line between underwriting and advertising -- I would guess that most listeners don't notice the difference).
When I began blogging I was a bit concerned that it would be hard to keep a strong editorial firewall. But Weblogs Inc and AOL (the parent companies of Download Squad and TV Squad), are at least as good at maintaining a separation of church and state as most old media companies. And for this personal blog, I use services like Google AdSense, because they take most of the control out of your hands. You're not picking and choosing your advertisers, and there's no real pressure to write positive reviews of any particular product, because you never really know what's going to be advertised on your site.
But once you get into campaigns like the "People Ready" one, you're seeing bloggers taking an active role in advertising. And once that happens, you'll never know if you can really trust that blogger's words in the future, or if they're making sponsored endorsements. In fact, probably the best thing about the Federated Media campaign is that it was so blatantly obvious. It highlighted who some of these bloggers are.
I respect Om Malik, Mike Arrington and the others, so I doubt I'll stop reading their blogs. But this incident might make me pause to think a bit more about what exactly it is that I'm reading.
Last week Dave Zatz organized a little blogger get together in New York. And the digital prints have finally been developed (uploaded from a flash card) to prove it.
From left to right, that's Kevin Toefel of jkOnTheRun, Mari Silbey of Connected Home 2 Go, me, Dan Dorato of Uneasy Silence, and Dave Zatz.
Considering how much time I spend reading blogs and corresponding with bloggers, it's always interesting to actually meet the people behind the websites. One of the strange things about this web 2.0/blogging world, is that you can collaborate on all sorts of projects without ever meeting your coworkers.
When I was still living in Princeton, I traveled into Manhattan exactly one time to attend a brief Weblogs Inc training session at AOL headquarters. I met a few folks who wrote for other blogs, but nobody who was writing for the blogs I worked on at the time.
In fact, there are at least 17 bloggers over at Download Squad, and we send a pretty health number of emails back and forth. But the first time I'd ever heard any of their voices was when we started our first limited podcast series a few weeks ago. It was actually kind of exciting to have an active conversation about operating systems, software, and some of the other things we're all so passionate about.
Anyway, it was great to have a chance to talk with Kevin about podcasting, Mari about switched digital, and to tease Dan mercilessly about being a Apple fanboy.