I started blogging back in 2003, and I learn something new every day about writing, attribution, and basic research when I write a story. When i was in art school, my drawing instructors told us to draw something every day. It’s a skill, not a gift. Skills need work and practice.
Friends of mine who do SEO (search engine optimization) consulting have told me that I should be running several different blogs, each with a different domain name. My mobile technology posts could go in one blog, while my Honolulu political posts could appear at alohapundit.com, for example.
There are some benefits in writing for a larger web site. At BrightHub, I have three editors that provide feedback and topic suggestions. BrightHub sells ad links to the articles, and maintains the site and its content management system (CMS).
FriendFeed is another service that I use. It’s a social media aggregator that collects my posts, comments and items from other services like Twitter, StumbleUpon, Google Reader and my Amazon Wish List.
While I enjoy posting a new entry at billso.com every day, I may scale back that commitment so that I can post more articles on BrightHub and other services.
I’ve set up a billso.com page that displays my social networking activity from several different web sites. It took a bit of coding, but SimplePie handled the RSS formatting with little effort on my part.
Here’s an example of the WordPress template code that I wrote to handle the different time zones among Honolulu, my web server and FriendFeed’s RSS server.
IDG, the publisher of InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, MacWorld and other technology magazines has been shifting away from paper to online editions. This New York Times article mentions that the transition has generated more revenue than the company expected:
Today, I.D.G. says, the InfoWorld Web site is generating ad revenue of $1.6 million a month with operating profit margins of 37 percent. A year earlier, when it had both print and online versions, InfoWorld had a slight operating loss on monthly revenue of $1.5 million.
This is remarkable given that some IDG titles like CIO magazine are distributed free of free of charge. Advertisers subsidize the content for both the web-based and print editions. While some IDG titles like InfoWorld are online only, CIO is still available in a twice-monthly print edition, largely because advertisers believe the target audience is less likely to read the online version. CIO also features longer articles than InfoWorld these days.
IDG has also added multiple RSS feeds to its web sites, to capture readers who prefer to use feed aggregators.
Many of these IDG magazines have been cited in previous billso.com articles, such as this post from 7 May 2008. I also list some of these titles on my references page, which contains many reliable and authoritative sources for researchers, managers and my students.
I recently read a review of the Amazon Kindle on BlogNButter.com. The Kindle is a nice idea… but Amazon charges a conversion fee for every DOC, TXT file or PDF you want to put on your device. Since the Sprint connection charges are built-in to the purchase fee, these seems really petty. RSS and newspaper subscriptions are also on a pay-as-you-go basis, which is a shame. I’d use Kindle if unlimited RSS reading was bundled into the purchase price.
US$399 is a steep price tag, especially when the Kindle was on backorder for several weeks after its initial release. Amazon has the Kindle back in stock, and I won’t be ordering one any time soon.
If Amazon really wanted customers like me to use the device, they’d give me a free Kindle. I buy enough books from Amazon every year, after all. We can’t get Amazon Prime here in Hawaii, but we still get free shipping on most orders over US$25. I’d rather get the content through a device.
If the Kindle does survive, expect the price to drop through the floor within 2 years. As I mentioned on 24 March 2008, Kindle would be a great tool for students if the content was free. Perhaps universities could build the textbook charges into the usual fees that get tacked onto tuition bills.
I have made one major change in my blogging model. I’ve started writing articles about
