And interesting post on Techmeme started my day this morning called Time To Hang Up the Pyjamas. It was an article by Daniel Lyons who had set up a highly-trafficed blog called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs a couple of years ago. The gist of the article is that he put loads of effort into monitising the blog, but failed to generate anything that would surpass what he could earn holding down a normal job. Here’s a poignant part of his article:

My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I’d kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81

A number of other blogs were quite quick to point out that the blog resulted in his rise to relative fame, a book deal and his new job at NewsWeek, but millions of bloggers around the world will never earn as much from AdSense as he did. What he DID DO, however, was raise his profile so that his net worth was much higher than it would have been otherwise.

Articles like this always help put blogging in perspective and help people focus on the why they blog. Using a blog to earn money isn’t impossible, there are a number of companies out there who will pay a blogger for their efforts, but it’s no different to being paid for dropping leaflets in someone’s mailbox. The amount you can earn is constrained by the time you have available and the moment you pull back you’ll see your earnings dry up. Selling advertising space on blogs is another money-earner, but without fresh, compelling content and the traffic it brings, well, that’s another non-starter. In my humble opinion, the worst reason to start a blog is to generate enough income to quit your day job.

On the other hand, a blog can do wonders for your profile, image and self-esteem. It can serve as an outlet for you to talk about your passion, to meet like-minded individuals, to show off your strengths and seek opportunities. A blog can help you build online relationships which will benefit you in the long term in many diverse ways. Monetary benefits are a possibility, but they’re always much harder work than you originally imagined when you decided to set down the blogging path.

photo credit: Dan4th

Interesting development today with Salon launching a new facility to allow bloggers to make some money off their posts. The mechanism allows readers to leave a tip to the person who wrote the post, if they feel that they post has real value to them and if they’re feeling generous. It’s an interesting development from Salon.com who have been relatively active in the blogging space for some time.

There are a number of people posting about this, but the consensus seems to be, that if a reader can get something for free, they’re not going to bother leaving a tip (like what happened with In Rainbows). Salon.com is seeding the initiative by giving people who sign up a free $10 in their account to allow them to tip people, but once that dries up, will people really put money into the system. Thoughts range from the fact that bloggers are better off starting up and monetizing their own blog to fears that this will affect the quality of the blogosphere. All in all, it’s still an interesting experience into human nature, but I suspect Salon will be the only one making a net gain out of this (more traffic, more exposure).

Intrigued? Join up at Open.Salon.com

UPDATED: btw, it’s only open to bloggers and readers in the U.S. at the moment. Great way to eliminate 90% of your potential market!

• Create link clusters within your blog
• Rework HTML title tags of trafficked posts
• Invite your readers to connect with you on StumbleUpon and Facebook
• Save your best posts for the best times of the week
• Edit your post one more time
• Stop writing about yourself. Start solving problems
• Subscribe to the feeds of your industry’s major players
• Give a great post to a prominent blog
• Go to the store
• Answer your email and comment questions

Some good suggestions there, which should improve your blogging game better than a set of Callaway irons. The points above are just a summary. Check out the whole post.

Anyway, the Entrecard widget on your website has a “Drop” button, however there’s no way to show who were the last few people who dropped their card. EntreDroppers works hand-in-hand with this widget and lets you list as many past droppers as you would like. You even have the option to show a description of their blog in your sidebar.

So, if you use Entrecard, check out EntreDroppers.

p.s. and I just wanted to thank Lisa and Tina for their kind help in testing the widget

Unfortunately, so far, I’ve installed it, am writing a blog post and nothing has come up, so I’m not quite sure what to be expecting. Still, I’ll leave it plugged in and see if anything kicks into life

(p.s. I know I’m using a supported blog, currently the plugin only supports WordPress, Blogger and Typepad)

Update: it’s working now! .. Yippee!

• A customizable dashboard
• Multi-file upload
• Built-in galleries
• One-click plugin upgrades
• Tag management
• Built-in Gravatars
• Full text feeds
• Faster load times

I’m looking forward to playing with this, as it seems to be designed with the end-user in mind. I am a bit worried about some plugins I’ve written which hook into the admin framework. Unfortunately, writing a plugin can be a bit like buying a car cover for your car. If all of a sudden you buy a new car, the cover may not fit anymore and could require modification! You’ll notice from the screen shots that the changes are quite pronounced. Here’s what the new dashboard looks like:

Pretty radical change huh? Anyway, there’s quite a bit of buzz around about the new styling, but what I was thinking of doing was downloading the release candiate and installing it on one of my blogs, just so that I can give it a whirl. I’ll pick a quiter blog though, as the upgrading can tend to break things.

Welcome aboard!

My favourite part of the article is this:

The blogging world has tremendous strengths – original voices, provocative opinions, imagination and intimate knowledge of a variety of subjects. But it is also an industry struggling to mature, many observers argue. They say blogging companies must overcome the industry’s reputation as a sort of digital Wild West where anything goes, and confront such questions as conflicts of interest, product hype, bias and low standards of accuracy.

It sums up the current state of play around the blogging world at this point in time. We’re currently at an interesting turning point, where the world is noticing blogs. I remember a point in time around 10-15 years ago where the Internet was no longer the realm of geeks and hackers, but come to the forefront of everyone’s lives and I’m working if blogs are approaching this point now. Did you know, for example, that 50% of UK companies undertake some form of blogging?

If you want to try your hand at it, blogging is available to everyone nowadays. You can set up an account on WordPress.com or Blogger, or even on our own local WorkConnexions and give it a try, see if it sticks. Who knows, this time next year I might be reading YOUR blog …

I suppose it was only a matter of time before a show like this came about. We’ve all used our blogs to spread news, parts of our life and even gossip and some celebrity blogs out there do read like a TV series. It was a very small jump to come up with an idea for a TV show centered around this idea, especially now that blogs are becoming more and more part of our lives.

I think one of the effects of the show will be to make blogging more prevalent and available to the masses. It’s easy for someone immersed in the blogosphere to assume that everyone knows about blogging, social networks and all the things that surround us. However, the majority of people out there are oblivious to all this and we tend to forget it. I just hope that the show writers are actual bloggers and don’t get their jargon mixed up. I still cringe when I hear some of the technical mumbo jumbo you hear in shows like 24 etc.

And Sam isn’t the only person I have this type of relationship with. I also read Scott Hanselman, Hugh MacLeod, Robert Scoble, Andy Beard, Seth Godin and a host of other bloggers. I read their posts, I mention them to friends/colleagues, I use their work, yet they don’t have the faintest idea who I am. Am I’m sure there are people who read this blog, whether on a regular or occasional basis; who are familiar with me, my posts and my work, yet I wouldn’t know who they were or anything about them.

It does bring things into perspective however. I always thought of blogging as a conversation, initiated by a blogger and responded to by readers leaving comments, however it’s a bit more one-sided than that. A reader will absorb a post, but more likely than not, won’t be leaving a comment or contributing to the conversation, leaving a clue as to who they are and why they are here. And this is where social networks start to pick up where blogs leave off. Social networks make the relationship more balanced. Now that I have “befriended” all the people mentioned above on FaceBook, they can check out my profile page and learn a bit about me. If they’re so inclined, that is.

(On an aside, there’s a scaling issue here. You may have thousands of people as friends on your social network, but how many do you really know? But well talk about that some other day)

What about you, do you have any problems “connecting” with bloggers you read?