billso.com

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.

I have made one major change in my blogging model. I’ve started writing articles about home office technology, the Mac and small business security for BrightHub.

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).

BrightHub keeps the copyright over the articles I write for them, I do earn some revenue on each article. My BrightHub articles are listed in my profile on that site, as well as my BrightHub page at billso.com.

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.

I have set up a page at billso.com that lists my recent FriendFeed activity. It’s not as pretty or as organized as my FriendFeed.com page but it was a fun way to do some RSS filtering.

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.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• BrightHub
• 25 June 2008: Honolulu Advertiser blogs need more content and authority

On Saturday, 5 April 2008, I discussed the issue of stress in the blogging industry. In this billso.com article, my topic is how I use my blog as a teaching tool.

My interests in technology, privacy and management are a good fit with two graduate courses that I teach at Hawaii Pacific University. My IS 6100 course is an overview of corporate information systems. I teach an advanced course called IS 7010, which focuses on technology strategy.

After several attempts at blogging, I’ve learned that I can’t write a headline-driven blog that comments on up-to-the-minute issues. As I mentioned on Saturday, I can work a bit ahead of the east coast news cycle by reading the major newspapers online, just after their web sites are updated for the next day’s print editions.

While I can write and post an article in less than an hour if the topic is timely and appropriate, it’s not fun. Writing on a tight deadline is the kind of stress-maker that I’d like to avoid. I used that model for most of my blog articles until 2 months ago.

Now, I jot down some story ideas, and edit the piece a few times before I put it on the site. I always have at least 10 stories in my inventory, and they are in various stage of editing and development.

I stumbled into this system of writing after years of printing, filing and using examples from magazines and journals in my courses. By posting articles and examples on my blog, I can point students to a growing selection of topics.

Social bookmarking

I’ve made thousands of bookmarks and favorites in my web browsers, and every year or so, I was archiving these to files. Back in 2004, I started using Bloglines to keep track of articles I had read on the Web. Bloglines had a very limited commenting tool that I started using to post blogs for my courses. I’ve been importing the best of these old articles in my billso.com blog, so I can keep using these posts in my courses.

I also started using a social bookmarking service called del.icio.us to keep track of my bookmarks in their web site. I can add or use my bookmarks from any computer, which has become a big time saver for me. Social bookmarking services also suggest new links for their users, based upon their interests. Lately, I’ve been using a similar service from eBay called StumbleUpon to save and find new pages and videos.

Knowledge management

In January 2007, I decided to move my course-related blogs to billso.com so I could create my own little knowledge management system for my courses. I don’t expect to make a living from this blog. The ad links on my site barely generate any revenue. I use this blog to test and evaluate features and enhancements. To remove the ads, I may move my course-related posts to different domain names later this year.

For now, it’s easier for me to post assignment announcements and readings for my students to this web site. The assignments are almost always papers. I haven’t been using discussion forums in my courses. Forums are an interesting tool, but my students are scattered around the world. Synchronous chats are hard to schedule, and deadlines can be difficult to manage. That’s why my assignment deadlines are listed in Hawaiian Time (GMT -10 or HT).

Also see my 28 March 2008 billso.com article on blogging as a business model.

The New York Times published an article that analyzes why bloggers get into the business. More bloggers are using their sites to earn revenue from advertising links, promote their products and services, and gain authority in their fields of interest. As the economy stumbles, bloggers face a variety of choices. Should they concentrate on their regular jobs and abandon their blogs? Should they leap full-time into the blogosphere and try to make a living from the web?

One thing’s for sure: few bloggers really do a reasonable income from their blogs. It is possible to make a living from blogging, although it can take years to build enough readers and advertisers to generate sustainable revenue streams. I mentioned Perez Hilton on 20 March 2008. His income has increased quite a bit over the last year, although keeps getting sued in court over his blog’s content, according to this Wikipedia article.

BoingBoing grows

BoingBoing’s four co-editors each have paying writing jobs that they promote heavily on BoingBoing. For years, the web site has posted weird news items focused on technology and the Internet. Over time, the blog became one of the most popular sites of its kind on the Internet. According to an article on Wikipedia, BoingBoing added a business manager in 2004 to administer the site’s operations.

Advertising was added to the site and its RSS feeds soon afterwards, to defray the site’s bandwidth charges. Popular web sites can rack up a large bill for their Internet connection. Adding ads to the site’s pages and overall design is a key success factor.

In the last few months, BoingBoing’s web site has been redesigned to include discussion threads and a subsidiary blog focused on electronic gadgets. The core writers still post articles every day, but they have brought in more people to administer the site and run the site’s discussion forums. Honda has signed on as a sponsor. There’s also a video site, although BoingBoing’s writers seem stiff and uncomfortable in front of the camera. Perhaps they will get better over time, as they build an independent media empire from their quirky web site.

A uniform approach

Paul Lukas’ Uni Watch is a good example of how to build income from a blog. Paul is a freelance journalist who has appeared in the New York times. His blog is an obsessive study of sports uniforms. Paul posts one article each day, with a long trail of links and miscellaneous items. By the end of the day, users have posted at least a hundred comments as they debate the topics of the day.

The blog had been funded by advertising links and user memberships. A basic membership included a uniform-themed wallet card, while more expensive packages included a custom designed logo and an interview posted to the blog.

A few days ago, Paul announced that ESPN had picked him up as a regular contributor. Paul had been writing freelance articles for ESPN’s Page 2 web site. He had already hired an intern a few months ago to manage the discussion boards and post articles on the weekends. Paul has decided he can scale back the blog membership program to the basic level, now that ESPN is supporting him. After almost 2 years of blogging, he can take a vacation or two without shutting down the blog completely.

Wikipedia is a great place to look for a quick answer, but graduate students need to find credible sources for their papers. After all, graduate students are training to become credible sources in their fields.

The Economist published this article in the magazine’s Technology Quarterly supplement about Wikipedia’s editing policies. Two factions are battling for Wikipedia’s very soul:

• Inclusionists want Wikipedia to have articles about any and every topic, with even the most trivial details of real and fictional items;
• Deletionists want Wikipedia editors to exercise a more selective policy, which would require the deletion of many articles and trivial details.

A third moderate faction, the mergists, is seeking compromise. There are more details in the Wikipedia article on this inclusionism.

Nicholas Carr addressed this debate in his 5 September 2006 and and 8 September 2006 articles in his blog. Carr recommended “forking” Wikipedia into deletionist and inclusionist versions, which brings to mind visions of Unix. He also mentions the mergists and 18 other factions. Perhaps Monty Python should write a skit about Wikipedia.

This article by Nicholson Baker in the New York Review of Books has another perspective. Baker reviews Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, and Baker’s article is a long, funny look at how Wikipedia has evolved in the last 7 years.

Baker also includes a link to Reid Priedhorsky’s scholarly article on Wikipedia article creation and deletion.

• 27 January 2008: Authority and convenience
• 15 January 2008: Wikipedia is 7 years old today
• 6 December 2007: The Truth
• 7 December 2007: Wikipedia co-founder recasts his advice
• 24 November 2007: Citing Wikipedia
• 7 March 2007: Wikipedia promises to review writers and editors
• 7 March 2007: Fake professor stops editing on Wikipedia
• 24 January 2007: Microsoft wanted to pay for Wikipedia edits
• 24 January 2007: More thoughts on cheating, copyright and paraphrasing

Courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education, I found links to two articles in the Times of London. In the first article, Professor Tara Brarbazon describes the research policy for her first-year students: no Googling or Wikipedia. Students should consider the authority of the source material, instead of PageRank or convenience. In a response, Times columnist Magnus Linklater portrays Brabazon’s ban as a short-sighted elitist, while praising Wikipedia for its low error rate. Wikipedia has announced that it will conduct a survey of its users and editors, with the assistance of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

Of course, balance is important, as I mentioned in my 15 January 2008 article about Wikipedia’s seventh anniversary. Wikipedia and Google are convenient starting points for research, but students need to develop their own search skills.

More library databases are available in surprising ways. This Chronicle article from 7 January 2008 discusses how university libraries are posting their own Facebook applications, to provide their students with easier access to reference materials.