Brad Feld Managing Director Foundry Group www.feld.com “In 2004 when Technorati started, the typical reaction to the word ‘blog’ was ‘huh - can you repeat yourself?’ Today, blogs are everywhere —even presidential candidates have blogs. The blog has forever changed the way publishing works —now anyone can be a publisher. The issue is no longer distribution; rather, it’s relevance.”

Chris Pirillo

Internet Content Producer (Since 1992)
chris.pirillo.com

“The idea of blogging will never disappear, but the process by content is created for one blog or a series of blogs will continue to undergo radical upheavals. This past year, we saw the introduction of countless “microblogging” platforms, to the point where they (themselves) have become a commodity —further pushing individual voices to the Blogosphere’s melting pot. Brand will continue to decentralize, and micro-communities will form within any one of the loosely-structured services (like FriendFeed, which values the continuation of conversation as much as it does the initiation portion).”

“Video will also become increasingly important to convey complex messages that are often lost in text - while audio will continue to fall away to this new medium, save those ‘casts with high production values. YouTube will continue to be the place where most people will view their on-demand Internet video. Live video events will soon saturate the landscape, and our attention will become even further fragmented —lending more credibility for the need to archive and index certain video clips and wrap them with text for Google and other search engines to discover.”

Martin Varsavsky Founder and CEO, FON english.martinvarsavsky.net spanish.martinvarsavsky.net photo source “I blog in Spanish and English for different reasons. In English I blog to communicate my ideas and views, in Spanish, where for some unknown reason many more people comment, I write to learn. The collective intelligence of my commentators is greater than mine.”

David Weinberger Writer Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center Johotheblog.com “Blogs will fill every niche in the ecology of public writing. They’ll be good examples of blogs and a far larger range of sites that are sort-of, kind-of blogs. This is as it should be. It’s also as it already is.” Read a full interview with David at Rebecca’s Pocket

Joichi Ito CEO, Creative Commons Venture Capitalist joi.ito.com photo source “Blogging has gone from a cutting edge, mostly American phenomenon to a global main-stream activity generating an increasing larger share of the world’s ‘user generated content’ and the sharing economy driving up the value of search and advertising worldwide. In addition to increasing in scale, bloggers continue to become increasingly diverse become both a core economic as well as social driver online.”

Dan Gillmor Director Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication, Arizona State University startupmedia.org

“From a journalistic perspective: Blogging and other conversational media are entering a new phase when it comes to community information needs — they’re growing up. Traditional media are using these tools to do better journalism, and are beginning to engage their audiences in the journalism. Entrepreneurial journalists are finding profitable niches. Advertisers are starting to grasp the value of the conversations, and so on. The big issues remain, including the crucial one of trust. Here, too, we’re seeing progress. The best blogs are as trustworthy as any traditional media, if not more. The worst, often offering fact-challenged commentary, are reprehensible and irresponsible. But audiences are learning, perhaps too slowly, that modern media require a more activist approach. We need to be skeptical of everything, but not equally skeptical of everything. We need to use judgement, to get more information — and to go outside our personal comfort zones.”

Stay tuned for the next part of this series - coming soon.

Bloggers Blog But Why?

How Did You Get into Blogging?

Passive Income is where you make money from sources with which you have minimal input into. You set up assets (websites with ads) and sit back and watch the money come in.

Why do we want passive income?

• After setting up the asset you gradually do less work and get paid more
• Increase your income by choosing to create another asset
• Time does not limit your capacity to earn income
• You can earn money whilst sitting on the beach in Bali
• With multiple assets setup it is your choice to have a break
• When your expenses are met by your passive income you are retired!

Online Passive Income Sources

1. Referrals - when you refer one of your online readers to be a customer of an online business you get a referral fee.
2. Affiliate Programs - sell a parent companies’ product by joining their program. With each sale the parent company gives you a cut of the commission. They may be pyramid structured meaning if you recruit an affiliate they belong to the tier below you meaning each sale your recruit makes you get a cut.
3. Reseller - resell other people’s services such as internet domain names. You pay a wholesale rate for their product and sell their service at a marked up price.
4. Advertising Commissions - You have created content on your site that brings in the eyeballs each day. 100 users. Put a big banner at the top of the page charge a fee for whoever advertises in that spot. AdSense place multiple ads in your designated banner spot, place ads in your newsletters, eBooks, and mass emails all the while charging an advertising fee. The more readers the more money.
5. Create an eBook - become a specialist on the new thing and write a ‘how to’ guide for dummies to distribute from your site for a fee. Have others sell your book and give them a commission to help massively increase distribution.
6. Create Software - charge a $5 fee for your cool new Wordpress widget or $10 for that futuristic blue Xoomla theme.
7. Site Membership - give non-members a glimpse of the fruits inside and allow them access with a small monthly fee.

Above are seven ways to make money online. Build up your readers, setup the passive income source and watch the money roll in with online banking on a beach in Phuket.

Back to BlogMonies

As the above demo shows, we will now be able to hit two birds with one stone. Logging on twice to Google’s blogging cornerstones is a thing of the past. You’ll now be able to find out exactly which pages generate what income at what time from what referrer. Tracking your users through your blog has never been so easy allowing us bloggers improved financial gain. Invites will be out soon it is now being gradually rolled out.

Will we now see only money making content on blogs with all else suffering economic cut backs? Well no. Luckily economics shows us one product swamping the market will drive down it’s monetary value allowing other niche topics back in the game. The diverse blogosphere will continue to evolve even under Google’s analytic/adsense microscope.

(B-Day Tuesday, 27th May 2008)

Check out the stats from Nielsen Online:

1. Blogger - 34,104,000 users - up 58% from last year
2. Wordpress - 11,440,000 users - up 444% from last year
3. Six Apart TypePad - 10,601,000 - up 20 % from last year
4. TMZ.com - 7,107,000 - up 10%
5. LiveJournal - 3,366,000 - up 27%

Trailing in their dust come 6- Xanga 7- Thatsfit 8- Gizmodo 9- Autoblog 10- StyleDash

C’mon WP fans! (Do you think it’s the scraper blogs fobbing the stats?) Comment below..

Nick Denton won’t talk to me. I’ve been after him for weeks. But the man behind the wittiest, bitchiest, most irresistible weblogs going–the gossipy Gawker and Wonkette, the gadget pageant Gizmodo, and the smut aggregator Fleshbot–is shutting me out, claiming he’s overexposed. He’s so serious about not commenting that he’s ordered his stable of blog writers not to talk to me either.

An oldie but a goodie - article about the creator of Gizmodo and his rivalry with the creator of Engadget.

Calacanis is late to the blogging game, or at least later than he was to the rise and subsequent overinflation of New York’s Silicon Alley. His strategy appears to be to exploit Denton’s weakness. Rather than paying bloggers a pittance, he’s partnering with them, letting them keep their sites and half the revenue generated by ads. His company is the Weblogs Inc. Network. Get it? WIN.

Snippets from the original article by Greg Lindsay