Online Media Cultist

As the blogosphere starts to mature in bits and spurts, earning a full-time living as a “professional” blogger is a notion and dream for thousands.

A New York Times piece from the weekend looks at the growth of jobs stemming from the blogosphere. Interestingly and perhaps not surprisingly, blogging gigs tend to be much more lucrative – at least from the start – for paid positions from corporations who need bloggers rather than the advertising income one could hope to gain from blogging on one’s own.

This really highlights the power of blogging as a marketing and promotional tool, and shows that some companies see the benefit of paying full time employees to enter the blogospheric conversation.

Robert Scoble is quoted in the NYT piece, noting that just being a “blogger” is not enough; you have to bring some other qualities or expertise to the table. While I’m not a professional nor full-time blogger, I can relate to this. It’s part of the reason why I shed writing about politics and television, subjects I’m passionate about but do not have the time to cover as authoritatively as I’d like.

Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests brings this conversation to a whole new level in thinking about what it would (and likely will) mean when bloggers in the third world can make full time livings through writing online full-time.

Tony mentions Philipino bloggers who can write “pound for pound” with their North American counterparts. I immediately thought of the huge and bright English-speaking population in India and the chapters focused on India in Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat.

In essence, bloggers will face the same competition from the “flat world” as many other industries. Which is all to the good: more writers making more money in more parts of the world can only help to facilitate better communication, better ideas, more innovation, and more cooperation throughout the world.

One of the many reasons I’m proud to be involved with Blogcritics is that it truly is a global community of “superior writer/bloggers.” The company is run by three dudes from three different US time zones who have met in person exactly once, has editors around the globe who help bang out edited pieces around the clock, and receives on-the-ground unique coverage and perspective from places like Israel, Northern Ireland, India, Pakistan, Germany, and on and on.

And speaking of India and Pakistan, Desicritics is a BC Network site and web community that focuses exclusively on that part of the world. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of our best Desicritics (of which there are many!) are making a full time living through blogging before too long!

A gentleman who goes by the handle Spincycle interviewed me over at Blogcritics. Lots of Blogcritics-related stuff for anyone interested!

I couldn’t sleep early this morning and wound up catching up on all manner of web geekery (you get extra points for web geekery on the weekend, I find, and triple if it’s before 8 am) when I was struck by something that Jason Calacanis said on CalacanisCast, with reference to Weblogs, Inc., the blog network that he founded:

We broke out when we went to a multi-brand strategy.

This is something that I think about a lot at Blogcritics (where I’m exec producer): how to take a highly (but not massively) successful online magazine of 1,800 writers and two million+ monthly page views (on pace to hit three million this month!) to the vaunted “next level.”

Now, I know that Jason’s (correct) argument is that Weblogs grew to be massively successful because it hit the consumer channels – web gadgets, cars, gaming, gossip – where there was already demand online. To do this, Weblogs found talented writers and paid them to be stars within their sphere, and then paid for advertising to draw readers on the hope that they would stick around and spread the word themselves.

Blogcritics began slowly embarking on a “multi-brand strategy” of its own in 2006 with the launch of Desicritics, a “spin-off” of the Blogcritics model (lots of volunteer writers, a bunch of editors, and a massive content publishing system developed by our whiz of a Technical Director, Phillip Winn) that focuses on India and South Asia.

In 2007, the pace of this strategy has both quickened greatly and changed to some extent. If Blogcritics and Desicritics can be thought of as online magazines or group blogs (we prefer the former!), the new batch of sites are more like “sole proprietorships,” where we turn over the reins to a highly motivated and talented writer who is looking to focus on a niche area of content. The ideal people for such gigs are not only talented and savvy in their area of expertise, but they are also self-promoters and online entrepreneurs in their own right.

So as you might guess the tricky part is finding the right people to run BC network (that’s what we call our blog network) sites. The great and tremendous advantage of being part of a strong grassroots online community that has been around for 4+ years is that our talent pool is rich and deep. Which is lucky too because unlike Weblogs, Blogcritics doesn’t have a budget to pay BC network publishers a salary – all the more reason for the need for self-motivated online entrepreneurs of the first rate!

Despite this challenge, the BC network is growing and has been a huge success thus far. Glosslip, helmed by Dawn Olsen, is a deliciously gossipy dream, bringing cutting sarcasm and real writing chops to the crowded but galactically enormous gossip space. BC Goodie Bag, run by the multi-talented Anna Creech, is a showcase of video clips and other fun schwag from around the Interwebs. And Josh Hathoway’s Confessions of a Fanboy (or COAF, as I like to call it) is a delightful and manic exploration of music and the mind of the music addict.

Then there’s little old Online Media Cultist, the latest BC network venture. While I’d love to have three million page views straight out of the gate (and wouldn’t we all?) I’m extremely pleased with how things are going thus far. The comments have been great, and I can’t tell you how much fun it is to chat about webby goings on.

The next phase of the BC network rollout is ambitious, with sites covering independent film, television, theater, comics, politics (a big announcement coming here down the road) and one or two others I can’t think of at the moment in the works.

So the challenge here is to reach multi-brand success without start-up capital (read = ability to pay writers or buy advertising). Because of the experience and expertise of the Blogcritics organization in the blog space and its pool of homegrown talent, I believe that the model is there to be not just highly but massively successful.

And whatever the case, it’s a hell of a fun ride!

I just realized that Blogger allows you to add tags to blog posts.

Actually, I must give credit where it’s due and that belongs to my online pal and fellow member of Blogcritics Magazine and The Mondo Project, Mat Brewster. I’ve seen tags appear on blogspot blogs countless times, I’m sure, but absolutely assumed that they were part of some fancy plug-in that was not for the likes of me.

Part of my reintroduction to blogging from my own site on Blogger (as opposed to writing exclusively for BC, which I did for about a year) is that I’ve been able to better tune in to how bloggers are organizing themselves and their information, promoting themselves, and building audience.

This post is a bit of an experiment. Since I started posting here regularly since the first of the year, I’ve noticed that the majority of my traffic comes from the following sources:

* MyBlogLog: A great networking site for bloggers, it also helps to bring in some traffic.

* Techmeme: Great great source for following current tech and online media stories and the conversations springing up around them. I’ve been able to hit this page a nice number of times, and have brought back some visitors because of it.

* Blogcritics Magazine: Cross-publishing at the old battleship BC absolutely has a positive effect on one’s “home site” bottom line.

* Search traffic: mostly Google.com, but drips and drabs from Yahoo!, Ice Rocket (I think mentioning Mark Cuban’s name helps, which is indeed worthy of another experiment!), and Google Blog Search.

Search traffic is that great randomizer. If you can pull lots of it, you can sail off to Tahiti for six months and still have rip roaring traffic stats when you get back. If you don’t, it’s a grind-it-out battle to itch and scratch each reader home for supper.

This is somewhat the topic of a raging debate of the online moment, with entrepreneur and provocateur Jason Calacanis setting off fireworks with talk of SEO (search engine optimization, or rigging one’s code to harness more search engine traffic) being “bullshit” and a swift and immediate blowback from the likes of Neil Patel following, who challenges Jason to allow him to increase his own traffic “by a minimum of 10 to 20% after 30 days of putting my changes into effect” with promises of no shady dealings on route. And it seems Jason has accepted – the great SEO throwdown is on!

In any event, without being shady (I know so little about code that this would be very difficult anyway!) and as openly as I can, I’ve placed a nice number of wide ranging links and references here that hopefully add up to nearly a coherent whole.

I’ve listed the following blog tags as part of this post: blogger, blog, blogs, google, search, SEO, ice rocket, mark cuban, google blog search, techmeme, mybloglog, blogcritics, jason calacanis, neil patel, page rank

So the questions are: did I “optimize” this post by writing a decent piece and linking out to fellow bloggers and engagers in the online conversation? Or will dropping a deluge of tags at the bottom help auto-magically bring home some visitors? Or, perhaps, did none of this pile up to a hill of e-beans in the vast vacuum of the blogospheric realm?

I’ll report back the results, and look forward to your thoughts.

Crunchnotes notes that high profile blogger “Robert Scoble got sucked into the PayPerPost machine” because he accepted a fee from PayPerPost – a company that pays bloggers to write reviews about products and services – to speak at a conference.

It’s a clever strategy on the part of PayPerPost: throw out enough money in enough different ways and all of the sudden everyone is complicit in its activities. Not that its activities are implicitly or necessarily ill-intentioned. As I just commented over at a Deep Jive Interests piece that defends the right of “blue collar” bloggers from making a living:

I take sort of a middle position here. While I don’t begrudge the blue collars from trying to squeak out a living in the online blog-mines, I’m fearful that services like PayPerPost will help to lower the whole of the blogosphere’s credibility. Like it or not, “blogs” as a whole have a reputation (good, bad, and ugly in the mind of the general public) and if web surfers and searchers sense that paid services have sullied the bloggy waters (via paying writers to write paid editorial without clear disclosure), that can have adverse reaction in terms of traffic, page rank, and the overall health of the blogosphere.

Scoble has since backtracked and says that he will now reject PayPerPost’s honorarium but oddly still seems to imply that he will take travel expenses. Talk about ambiguity!

TechCrunch has announced that they have refused to take on PayPerPost as an advertiser with the intention of keeping a “fence” between the likes of PayPerPost and themselves. Just as a point of note, Blogcritics decided against running PayPerPost ads that were offered to us through a third-party service. Not only would it be a strange conflict of interest, but it goes against the grain in terms of our philosophy that money is neither efficient nor valuable compensation that a company can offer to an open pool of bloggers. And that’s not taking into account the ethical thicket that PayPerPost writers can get into if they’re not super right-sharp in declaring loud and proud about how and why a review came to be.

I’ll be curious to see how many blogger luminaries and high profile conferences PayPerPost can lay some money on, and how many well known online media sources will end up running paid ads.

Can PayPerPost buy its way around and through the blogosphere’s defenses? I hope not. I’d like to see the hub bub die down and generally go away, but I fear that won’t be the case. For now, I’ll continue to follow the money.

Growing up on Long Island, it was my daily ritual to grab whatever part of Newsday I could get my hands on to read during breakfast. These days, I have my laptop and while I do a cursory scan of the news headlines (and typically get a shot of politics via ABC.com’s The Note), it’s the online media blogs that have emerged as the places I spend most of my reading time.

Compiling a Top 10 list was both easier and more difficult than I thought it was going to be. My favorite of favorites were quick plucks, but near the bottom of the list it got rough going as to who would make the final few slots.

This list of course reflects my own interests and passions, which include: online media and the web 2.0 world in general, blogging-as-profession, the blogosphere, social news, social networking, the MSM-blogospheric convergence, start-up culture, and online entrepreneurship.

I’ll try to update this list over time to see what additions and changes may be warranted.

#1 - mathewingram.com/work - Mathew Ingram
Ingram, a technology writer with The Globe and Mail in Toronto, combines the best elements of journalism with the best of the blogosphere, making for a smart, interesting, and opinionated take on news related to a wide range of online media- and tech-related issues. I find I most often agree with Mathew’s takes, which occasionally are controversial, so more than anything this is the case of an online publication that perfectly suits me, the reader. That more than anything is a wonderful endorsement of the blogosphere and online media as Long Island (and, now, Pasadena) is a long way away from Toronto!

#2 - The Jason Calacanis Weblog
Jason Calacanis is fun to follow. Former CEO of Weblogs Inc. and “relauncher” of Netscape as new styled social news engine, Jason is for the moment an “Entrepreneur in Action” for Sequoia Capital. He also can’t help but write brief, passionate, and decidedly outside-the-norm opinions on a wide array of subjects. From following his blog babies from Weblogs to strategizing the LA housing market (no easy feat!) to making an impassioned blogospheric plea regarding the Genarlow Wilson case, this is a must read blog for ambitious bloggers and online media cultists.

#3 - TechCrunch - Michael Arrington
TechCrunch has become something of the daily online newspaper for all things web 2.0. This is the preeminent place to find out what start ups are up to and what moves the big guys are making in the online space. Arrington is opinionated and occasionally self-inflated, but the information that he pumps out day-after-day makes TechCrunch an absolute must to stay afloat in the 2.0-ish rapid currents.

#4 - Mashable! - Pete Cashmore
Mashable! has evolved into a TechCrunch for those interested in social networking and the massive changes going on in that space. No one else keeps up with the dizzying myriad of social networking, widgeting, and third party add-ons like Cashmore and Mashable!

#5 - ProBlogger Blog Tips - Darren Rowse
Yet another must read for bloggers, this is Blogging 101 for bloggers who are serious about increasing readership and making money from self-publishing online content (extremely difficult feats, both). It helps greatly that Darren is relentlessly positive and upbeat and provides a steady stream of tips, updates, and strategies for the blogging life. He’s also deeply enmeshed in the community side of things, which is certainly leading by example!

#6 - BC Magazine – Sci/Tech - Phillip Winn, Daniel Woolstencroft, Steve Wild, Raoul Pop, Diane Kristine, Bruce Kratofil, John Vaccaro, and many others!
I can’t leave out my brethren and sistren over at BC Magazine’s Sci/Tech section. Each day you can find a great variety and diversity of news and opinions on the tech and online media worlds.

#7 - How to Change the World - Guy Kawasaki
On his about page, Guy boils down his entire mission statement to two words: empower entrepreneurs. And that’s what each post gives you: tightly focused advice on how to reach the next level, whatever that might be. Again, I must gravitate toward positive and forward-thinking personalities, and Guy is nothing else if this. Inspirational and practical stuff both.

#8 - Publishing 2.0 - Scott Karp
Scott is unmatched in shedding “web 2.0″ and the current state of online media in a philosophical and intellectual light.

#9 - Blog Maverick - Mark Cuban
Self-made millionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is delightfully blunt and compelling on a myriad of subjects, from the massive repercussions of the shift from TV to the Internet, to why men shouldn’t wear ties, to how NBA referees should do a better job, and that’s just for starters!

#10 - Deep Jive Interests - Tony Hung
I discovered Tony through a recent guest blogging stint on ProBlogger, and he’s quickly become one of my favorites. The good doctor goes deep on all aspects of blog-world, from the blogger v. journalism debate, to the use of widgets, to linkbaiting, and onward.

Honorable Mention
There are many, but I’ll hold to just two:

* Micro Persuasion – Steve Rubel
* Mapping the Web - Aidan Henry

Update: None other than Mathew Ingram was kind enough to point out to me that I mistakenly labeled the great Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 as Steve, not Scott. Sorry Scott!