blogging-for-dollars
Kill your blog
Paul Boutin · 10/21/08 09:40AM@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won't find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook? That's all you need to read from my essay at the front of Wired's new November issue. The rest is good, thanks to stellar editing, but these days a 600-word essay — and a headline like "Kill Your Blog" — only stand out in print. See? They changed it online.
Doonesbury declares blogging over
Paul Boutin · 10/16/08 09:00PMRobert Scoble, please get back to work Twittering
Owen Thomas · 10/13/08 02:00PMWe remain impressed, if not dumbfounded, that Internet-obsessive videoblogger Robert Scoble talked his way into the absurd title of "managing director, Fastcompany.tv." We'll be even more impressed if he keeps the job, now that the guy who hired him has gotten the boot. But there's evidence that Scoble has buckled down a bit! Or slacked off, depending on how you look at it.Followcost, a website which quantifies just how annoying a particular Twitter user is, has adopted the "milliscoble" as a metric. One-thousandth of Scoble's average daily output on the 140-character-update service equals one milliscoble. By his own standard, Scoble has been falling behind; in the past 100 days, he's been running 32 percent below the 1,000-milliscoble mark. If it falls to zero, will he suddenly be three times as productive in real life? Nah. It will just mean he's shifted his timewasting entirely to FriendFeed.
Tina Brown to waste $18 million on Daily Beast blog
Owen Thomas · 10/13/08 01:40PMJulia Allison's 500,000 imaginary monthly readers
Paul Boutin · 10/13/08 01:20PM"My mom and Julia spent most of the time comparing their respective startups," Tumblr jockey Nick Noyes blogs about his dinner with New York's notorious nobody, Julia Allison. "Interesting statistic of the night: her site garners 500,000 visits per month." Does Nick mean Julia, or his mom?Because Quantcast places both Julia's personal site and her startup, NonSociety, at "fewer than 2,000 U.S. monthly people." Either way, Julia wisely lets her dinner guest publish the claim, giving her plausible deniability. That's part of Julia's cover-of-Wired appeal — she doesn't need a website. (Photo by Nick Noyes.
Seattle tech reporters ditch newspaper jobs
Owen Thomas · 10/10/08 09:00AMAs I've been digging into the strange fraud case at Seattle startup Entellium, I wondered what had become of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's top tech reporters, John Cook and Todd Bishop. Turned out they jumped ship last month to start a blog. It's trendy, I hear! The as-yet-unlaunched venture has a placeholder site, wherearejohnandtodd.com, which is doing some great reporting on Entellium.
Uncov relaunches with loser-generated content
Owen Thomas · 10/09/08 06:20PMThe downturn has an upside: Uncov, the vicious startup blog run by Ted Dziuba and Kyle Shank, has returned to life. The twist in its new incarnation: Anyone can write for it, and the best takedowns of overfluffed ventures will be published to Uncov's homepage. We can better that offer: The best things published to Uncov's homepage may well get plucked from obscurity and featured on Valleywag.
New York blogger worries himself sick over conflicts of interest
Paul Boutin · 10/08/08 07:00PM"If we want NYC to kick ass in the world's tech community, we have to stop favoring a few 'friends' and let everyone get time on stage." CenterNetworks founder/writer/editor Allen Stern doesn't just complain about inbreeding in New York's Web 2.0 scene, he documents it by listing the companies that presented at last night's NY Tech Meetup, and speculating on their potential conflicts of interest. Jeez, Allen, wait'll you find out I used to be on the secret MacArthur committee. Here's what we're group-thinking out here in our Valley chatroom:We sure do love to watch New Yorkers catfight on Twitter. But if you literally "let everyone get time on stage" you won't have a punk-rock utopia, you'll have a boring parade of bad ideas and worse PowerPoint. Think TechCrunch50 expanded to TechCrunch52,157 and you get the idea. Still, we sense it coming: Look for CenterNetworks' own startup event in early 2009. (Photo by Brian Solis)
Om Malik Arrington-proofs his blogs with $4.5 million funding
Paul Boutin · 10/06/08 12:00PMThe founder of the GigaOm blog network isn't one of those guys who just wants to write, write, write. Om Malik, who reported on Valley VCs for Red Herring and Forbes in the '90s, is now on his second stint as a venture capitalist. His announcement this morning of a $4.5 million round of investment led by Palo Alto-based Alloy Ventures isn't aimed at readers, but at competing blog businessmen — specifically TechCrunch owner Mike Arrington. Malik's message: Kiss your dreams of owning me goodbye.Arrington headlined his own post about the news "GigaOm ignores my advice," linking to a long, telling post from earlier this year in which he attempted to explain why blogs should remain financially independent. What he really means is: GigaOm shouldn't take VC because TechCrunch is the only blog that's supposed to get VC, so Arrington can buy his competitors. Arrington has said publicly that he wants to be the one to consolidate the blogging sector into one big Voltron-like online publishing empire. When he wrote this morning that "we are one of the last large blog networks to remain independent," he probably wasn't intentionally lying. But his Web-2.0-centric worldview ignores bigger non-tech networks such as the local Sugar Publishing and the British Shiny Media. By taking on five million dollars in further investments, Malik hasn't just picked up capital to expand his staff and marketing. Like a pufferfish circled by sharks, he's made GigaOm a much bigger ball for Arrington or anyone else to try to swallow. (Photo by Brian Solis)
All about those benjamins you aren't making by blogging
Melissa Gira Grant · 10/02/08 09:00PMWant a fantastic formula for a bit of search-engine optimized cash? Drop a bunch of blogger names into a story, add a few five- and six-figured monthly income claims, et voilà! Readers just click, click, click on it, trying to answer the question of "Why can't I make that kind of scratch?" just by being "passionate" with some "thoughts" and "feelings" on the Internet. Slate's story on blogging for real money doesn't tell you how it's done so much as throw out a few names and figures of who does. "Do we get the blogs we deserve?" Slate contributor Michael Agger asks. Kick in for my retirement fund and you can find out:The business of blogging has been run into the ground by, as lovable former productivity fetishist Merlin Mann put it, "a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web's glistening riverbed for easy gold." Competing with "thought leaders" in your "space" isn't just cocky, it's foolish dollar-for-dollar. Besides, as Agger points out, the hardcore blog audience of yore is migrating to Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook to discover blogs — not Google, and not other blogs. The audience a baby blogger has to impress has already said, "You know what, you get 140 characters of my attention." Good luck with that. To answer Slate's question, it depends on what you feel you deserve. If you want to join the private jet-set class, you'd be a fool to take up any form of writing as a career. But if you are blogging for your own sense of intellectual and civic pride, as fast-fading and uneasily monetized as that may be, then forget about the Benjamins. (Diagram by Jay Hathaway)
What tech pundits talk about when they're not talking tech
Owen Thomas · 10/02/08 03:20PMAOL shutters homepage, blogs
Owen Thomas · 10/01/08 11:20AMThe hardest working suit vest in the blog business
Alaska Miller · 09/30/08 07:00PMMashable founder Pete Cashmore will say goodbye to his American friends tonight in San Francisco. The faux-blogging CEO caps off his six-month visa stay with a party, booze, food, and — as always — startup pitches. The Scottish whirlwind came to the U.S. and stayed long enough to snag a documentary, as well as gals left, right, and sometimes both sides. What's the secret? Perhaps it's his dapper outfit. We chronicle Pete's magical suit vest:February 23, 2008: FlashMash Meet NYC Februrary 25, 2008:
VentureBeat loses its lone businessman
Owen Thomas · 09/29/08 09:20AMMatt Marshall, the founder of tech-startups blog VentureBeat, is a former newspaperman. As such, he's handwringingly scrupulous about his ethics. In a recent story about Glam Media's layoffs, he included this disclaimer: "Disclosure: VentureBeat recently employed a business manager who was related to one of Glam’s cofounders. However, he no longer works at VentureBeat." Why not name names?Shown above is Jacob Mullins, the manager in question. He started at Microsoft last week, but is still listed as VentureBeat's ad-sales contact on the site. We take that to mean Marshall has yet to find a replacement. Odd: Marshall seems eager to explain a now-irrelevant personal connection that couldn't possibly prejudice his reporting. But he's reluctant to come out and state the obvious: He's lost the only guy bringing in money for his blog. That's worth disclosing. Matt, consider this a gratis job listing.
Even conservatives are tired of Fox hogging the debates
Paul Boutin · 09/26/08 01:40PMNormally if I saw Arianna Huffington, Craig Newmark and Markos Moulitsas coauthoring a statement, I'd click my Back button and Move On, as they say. But Instapundit editor Glenn Reynolds has joined the mostly leftospheric collection of bloggers who've dubbed themselves the Open Debate Coalition. They want two things, which I've helpfully edited down to 10 words each:1) Fox News, please let us post clips instead of threatening to sue. 2) Adopt a Digg-like voting system to let the audience choose the questions. The first demand seems as easy as the second is sure to be rickrolled. (Photo by The Fun Times Guide)
Mac blogger makes getting a job at Apple look easy
Owen Thomas · 09/26/08 12:00PMAviv Hadar, who writes about Apple at MacBlogz.com, got curious about how one joined Steve Jobs's elite priesthood — so he applied for a gig at the local Apple Store, and landed it. The interview process was revealing: According to the manager Hadar talked to, most of his current staff couldn't pass a test with 20 basic technical questions about Apple hardware and software. Some Geniuses! But Apple had set itself up for exactly this kind of comeuppance the day it labeled its stores' repair department the "Genius Bar." Here's the offer letter Hadar got:
How to build your brand as an Internet addict
Paul Boutin · 09/25/08 09:00PM"The more you participate the more people will subscribe to you ... or like you," promises Fast Company teleblogger Robert Scoble, whose answer to "How do I build my brand?" starts 20 seconds into this one-minute clip. My 15-word version: If you spend all your time on FriendFeed, you'll be a big deal. On FriendFeed.
Another naked conversation with Scoble
Owen Thomas · 09/24/08 11:00PMJAMESON'S IRISH BAR, BOSTON, MASS. — If you'd gotten over that unclothed photo of Robert Scoble and Naked Conversations coauthor Shel Israel, here's a new one to haunt your memories. Scoble, Fast Company's pet videoblogger and social media guru, was in Boston for the EmTech conference, and he wanted to go to a bar. Why? So he could sit at a table and ignore everyone around him, constantly reloading FriendFeed, the Web-activity tracker on which he relentlessly documents his nonparticipation in the world which surrounds him. Two startup executives who had just watched the Red Sox play at Fenway Park with Scoble told me he Twittered nonstop through his visit to the Green Monster. The only time he was separated from his iPhone? When he lent it to me to take a picture of him. That didn't turn out, but I found another pic Scoble had taken of himself, fresh out of the shower.
PopSugar publisher's Tumblr clone
Nicholas Carlson · 09/23/08 01:20PMSugar, the blog network which runs celebrity site PopSugar and fashion site FabSugar, among others, just launched a new blogging tool called OnSugar. Sugar says OnSugar is "sweet and simple publishing." A bit too simple, it turns out. OnSugar looks like a blatant ripoff of Tumblr, the kindergarten-simple blog site popular with Brooklyn and San Francisco's most self-involved Internet users. OnSugar seems to have copied Tumblr's look, feel and features, adding some girly pink. But Sugar's copying was more than just superficial.Many popular blog services offer "bookmarklets" — software tools, installed in browsers, which allow users to quickly post an article they're reading online. The "Share OnSugar" bookmarklet's source code appears identical to the code Tumblr founder David Karp and engineer Marco Arment wrote for the "Share on Tumblr" bookmarklet. Compare the two, above: Sugar hasn't bothered to do much more to the user interface besided adding tags and categories, which are hidden "advanced options" in Tumblr's bookmarklet. The code is an even closer copy. Here's the problem for Karp: Though popular with a certain crowd, Tumblr is far from mainstream. So users who fall in love with OnSugar blogs may never learn about the original. We'd point out that Tumblr itself is just a happily dumbed-down ripoff of LiveJournal, which predates it by nearly a decade and offers all the privacy features Tumblr users have been begging Karp for, but after OnSugar's more blatant blow, that seems cruel.