Connectivity: My Problem with Blogging

I haven’t blogged in months, and I think I just identified one major reason: connectivity. I have too much connectivity…

I’m sitting here listening to the radio because the cable is out. I get my Internet over the cable. It’s how I check my email. It’s how I know if someone’s played a word in one of my Scrabble games on Facebook. It’s how I know the weather forecast (which changes rapidly here this time of year). It’s how I farm (on Facebook, of course); I’m at level 101 on FarmVille.

Being connected is how I know whether the other teachers made it home today. We left school early this morning. From what I hear, the kids all made it home safely. Stupid me, I live in a neighboring county. So it’s a half an hour of driving to get from school to my house – through the strip mine across Gary 14 Mountain and then over Stoney Ridge. I had to stop after I got over 14 Mountain and shift to four-wheel low. Then there were wrecks on Stoney Ridge. So I sat about halfway up the north face of that mountain for almost three hours, wishing I was driving down the south face, about a mile away. Oh well, once each year it seems like we play chicken with God. Thirteen months ago we lost. Today I think it was a draw - which is to say that none of my friends went to the hospital as a result (as far as I know) and no one ended up sleeping in their car...

And I’m taking time to blog about it because, well, I’ve lost my connectivity. I’d usually be sitting here checking the school closings on several different websites, half-watching the television, harvesting my FarmVille crops, looking through Google for educational games I can use, and browsing my reader for news and blogs. I really need to see the various responses to last night State of the Union (especially since I watched a rerun of Law and Order). But I can’t, since I’m not connected.

So instead, I’m blogging.

And I’m hoping that the radio gets around to telling me what schools are closed soon. When I’m connected I can get info like that on demand, and this irritating idea of waiting until they decide to tell me is for the birds.

Well, maybe soon my cable company will figure out where in all this snow their line is broken and they’ll restore my connection. Then I can post this blog. Of course, that will happen after I harvest my carrots on FarmVille, check the school closings, and update my status…

Recent Blog Posts Elsewhere...

Some recent blog posts I've written:

• Venture Capitalists Karen Gordon Mills Nominated to Head the Small Business Administration December 20 at Bizinformer.
  
• Are You LinkedIn? Why...? December 26 at Bizinformer
  
• Do You Make a Good Impression on People? December 20 at BizPlanHacks.
  
• What is a Bootstrapper? December 24 at BootStrapMe
  
• Fear Not! In a Recession, Fear Will Kill Your Business... December 25 at BootStrapMe
  
• Wine Without Clothes: The Naked Wine Show December 18 at Celebrate Wine
  
• Job Hunters Flock to Emirates December 26 at Global Mobility Report
  
• Tasmania: It's Summer Down Under... December 20 at Hidden Travel Gems
  
• Empty Beaches in Goa December 27 at Hidden Travel Gems
  
• China's BYD Auto Puts a Plug-in Hybrid on the Market There December 20 at IfEnergy
  
• Biofuels May be Obsolete Before We Can Make Enough to Matter - Part I December 26 at IfEnergy
  
• Mexican Christmas Eve Dish: Bacalao a la Vizcaina December 20 at Latina Viva
  
• Creative Destruction? This Recessions is Partly the Change of an Era... December 26 at TJ's Weblog
  
• 2009: The year of the Travel Deal? December 22 at FlyAway Weblog
  
• Protecting Your Online Privacy December 26 at The Search Engine Weblog
  
• Looking for a Raise in 2009? Don't Hold Your Breath... December 22 at Personal Finance Weblog
  
• What's Your Name (Really)? December 20 at The Social Networking Weblog
  
• Twitter Relaunches People Search December 26 at The Social Networking Weblog
  
• Google Blogger: And Now... Imports and Exports! December 20 at The Web 2.0 Weblog
  
• Amazon.com Big Christmas Retail Winner December 27 at The Web 2.0 Weblog
  
• Strike at Hong Kong's Airport Delays Flights December 27 at Wandalust
  

Things I Did Today...

Wrapped Christmas presents (between midnight and 1am last night).

Watched West Wing while I wrapped presents. (I own all seven seasons on DVD.)

Slept.

Got up at 7:30 to turn the heat back up. Went back to bed.

Got up at 8:30 and made coffee. Put the dog out.

Cooked breakfast. Scrambled eggs with chorizo sausage and cheddar cheese, grits, and a biscuit with butter and honey. Biscuits and sausage gravy fro Cheryl. We also sliced up a store-bought tomato.

Read my email and my Google Reader.

Got dressed for church. Wore my Blue suit.

Some time online. Facebook (I friended my cousin Lee), tetras, news.

Went to Church. The Pastor preached a good message on the Old Testament prophesies that Jesus fulfilled.

Went to town: CVS and Food Lion.

Ate at Big Daddy's restaurant. usually I cook Sunday dinner, but Big Daddy's is closing for the rest of the year, so we thoguht we'd go see them...

Watched a little football: Titans and Steelers.

Took a nap.

Drank some coffee and read my Google Reader.

Got some boxes ready to mail.

Took the battery out of the riding lawnmower.

Lit the propane heater in the basement (it's supposed to be near zero tonight).

Spent a little more time in Facebook.

Cleaned up the kitchen.

And now... having a glass of Burgundy while I watch the second have of SNF.

Recent Blog Posts Elsewhere...

Some recent blog posts I've written...

• Are We Going to Start Paying the Crowd? at the Web 2.0 blog on December 08
  
  
• $8 Billion Evaporates from Harvard's Endowment at the Universities Weblog on December 10
  
  
• Using a Loan Calculator at the Personal Finance weblog on December 12
  
  
• Cleaning Up Amsterdam... at the Flyaway weblog on December 09
  
  
• Terrorism's Shadow on Venture Capital in India at TJ's weblog on December 09
  
  
• Jordan's Eco-Tourism at Hidden Travel Gems on December 10
  
  
• Zimbabwe: Immigration in the Time of Cholera at the Global Mobility Report on December 12, 2008
  
  
• Are You Successful...? at Boot Strap Me on December 12
  
  
• How to Keep Your Job: Personal Branding at Biz Informer on December 12
  
  
• Is "Incremental Change" an Oxymoron? at Biz Plan Hacks on December 12

Blogging: the Year so Far...

This is my 300th post here at this blog. I thought that made it a good time to reflect on my blogging habits.

In the 327 days since January 1st I have written 644 blog posts:

• 174 at this site
• 170 at China Venture News
• 130 at Universities Weblog
• 117 at Constructivist Leanings and my Edublogs site, The Green Cup
• And 53 at other CW sites I now watch for them.

That's just shy of two blog posts per day as an average.

And I almost forgot my 200 updates on Twitter...

New Blogging Portfolio

For almost 18 months now I've been blogging for Creative Weblogging. CW has about 150 blogs on professional niche topics in English, Chinese, German, and French. But the economic crisis (can I say "recession") has hit ad revenues pretty hard and CW recently restructured it's arrangements with bloggers. For me the result has be a broader portfolio of blogs that I contribute to...

When I started with CW in May of 2007 I was writing about China, specifically about venture capital and private equity investment in China. The site is China Venture News, and I still blog there - though only once or twice a week now. A little over a year ago I picked up a second blog at CW: the Universities Weblog. I still blog there, as well.

In the last couple of weeks I've picked up a handful of other blogs at CW and I contribute to them about once a week. Three of them are on CW's Ecommerce and internet channel:

• The Search Engine Weblog
• Social Networking
• Web 2.0

Four more are on CW's Travel & Culture channel:

• The Flyaway Weblog (Budget Travel)
• Hidden Travel Gems (Offbeat Destinations)
• Wandalust
• Latina Viva (Latin American travel and culture)

Of course I also still have this blog - my personal blog. I have Twitter (a microblog - kind of a cross between blogging and instant messaging). And I have my education blog, The Green Cup (which I have neglected woefully in the last few weeks in favor of graduate classes and politics. And there's always my Facebook and MySpace pages...

My Own Keyboard...

After five days on the road, it's nice to have my on keyboard back. Cheryl and I spend much of the last week in Maryland. I focused on finishing my school law class (online). We made fresh applesauce - picked the apples off the tree and turned then into sauce within the day. We had some for dinner today, with pork loin. We also picked huckleberries at the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area in West Virginia. We got about seven quarts of berries on Tuesday. Today was our first full day home. It rain. I spent the day catching up...

Education Blog

While I talk some about education here, I should point out that my education blog (my other blog) has a new home and a new name - at edublogs.org.

Constructivist Leanings (which is mirrored here because the original host looks like it will eventually disappear) has become The Green Cup.

Dangerously Irrelevant

I'm the guest blogger this week over at Dangerously Irrelevant. Dangerously Irrelevant is a popular website on educational leadership. If you have a chance, take a look at that site.

Why Teach About Blogs and Blogging?

Note: Visit my education blog, The Green Cup.

Blogging is a literary form. It has become very much a genre in its own right. It’s a growing genre, an influential genre, and it is genre that we need to acquaint students with at an early age.

The word “blog” is a shortened for of the word weblog. The “we” gets amputated from the front of the word. That word formation process is just one example of the new level of creativity that online writing brings to our language.

Blogging has become for literature today something like what keeping a diary was in the 18th and 19th centuries. But not exactly. On the one hand, a blog can be private and personal. On the other hand, it can be designed to promote an opinion, a perspective, or to give advice – to the point of being commercial. It can be closed, accessible only to people you allow to see it. Or it can be very public, easily accessible.

Because blogs have become so numerous and influential, it’s important that students be aware of them and have some understanding of how to evaluate a blog. The skill of discerning fact from opinion is more important now than it has ever been. It’s important that students have some idea of how to find a blog if they want to look at one. Google, for example, has a special search engine that only searches websites it classifies as blogs. And, finally, it is important that students know how to create a blog for themselves if they want to – and that they understand the privacy issues and the liabilities that come with setting themselves up with a blog at a site like MySpace or FaceBook.

I personally think that digital self-expression is a wave of the future that could revive and regenerate the skill of composition in our language. Blogs have a profound impact on literacy in America and we need to be sure our kids are positively impacted by that…

Blogging for Money: Step II

When you look at blogging for money, there are a variety of income models.

Suite101 was where I started. I eventually stopped editing a site for them because the work load wasn't worth it to me at the time. They wanted a blog post a week and a short feature each week. The Suite pays based on ad revenue - a profit sharing model. It's entrepreneurial: the potential is there to make some money if you can attract traffic. It's also a fairly low bar in terms of getting in to start with.

They have a new model since I left that allows contributors to simply write content instead of carrying the responsibility for maintaining a topic. I will probably start doing that soon, without taking on a site for them...

I blog for Creative Webblogging now.
I have two sites with them: China Venture News and The Universities Weblog. I write 20 blogs a month for each. If I do that, I get $112.50 a month for each. They want me to go out once each week to another blog on each topic and comment there in a way that leaves a link back to my blog. That's not hard. If I meet some traffic minimums, there's the potential for bonuses. If my traffic does well, there's the potential to go to 40 blog posts a month for $250 a month.

I've mentioned Smorty before. Smorty will pay you to blog about products and companies. It's $6 and up for 400 words or less. You have to have a personal blog that's 90 days old and has a minimum of two posts per week.

The top end of the spectrum is About Dot Com. There was a service that used to do something like Neilson ratings for web sites. About Dot Com always ranked in the top ten. When I worked for them they had about 500 writers ("guides," they called them). My site was about the middle of the pack and I had between 100,000 and 200,000 visitors a week. About Dot Com is demanding. I probably spent 20 hours or more a week on their stuff. Their tools kept changing. When I left they'd started wanting me to look at making video content. They wanted a blog post a minimum of three times a week and they wanted original content articles at least twice a month and they wanted a catalog of links on my topic. They had a lengthy application process that judged you on something like a portfolio. If they liked you, your portfolio became the start of your site. There were people on the travel channel making a couple of thousand a month for them.

There are other places to make money by blogging, but those are some good starting points...

Blogging for Money: Step One

A friend of mine asked me recently how to get started in blogging for money.

You can think of blogging for money a couple of ways. On the one hand, I've never made a living at blogging. Over the last decade, some years I've made pocket change. Most years I've made about what I would have if I'd worked 25 hours a week flipping burgers for six or seven bucks an hour. One year I made about $20 thousand; that's a pretty good second job in my part of rural Appalachia. In fact, it's more than the median household income in some of the counties around here.

If you don't want to think about it in terms of yearly income, think of it like this. In the last ten years I've made between $75,000 and $80,000 off of a hobby - something I can do in my spare time at home. It's money I wouldn't have seen otherwise. And time is really the only expense I incurred...

Step one on the road to blogging for money is to start a personal blog. It shows potential employers that you CAN in fact blog. Creative Weblogging, for example, prefers 30 to 60 days blogging experience. Smorty pays bloggers to do adverts on their personal blog; but they require that your blog be up for 90 days before they'll consider you.

To start an free personal blog, go to Blogger Dot Com and apply for a blog. It's run by Google.

What do you blog about?

Blogging is like any kind of writing. You can sit and wait for enlightenment, for the same apple that hit Newton or Buddha to fall on your head. You won't write much. Or you can see writing in the same light as any task. Then you decide to do it, prepare to do it, and then (you guessed it) do it.

I keep a list of idea, start drafts, and eventually finish them. Screw inspiration: I make myself write.

I've blogged about places I've been:
Pipestem
Pigeon Forge
My In-laws

I've blogged about my daily routine:
9/18/07


I've blogged about professional issues:
Why Labels Matter

I've blogged about places to eat:
Carino's or Olive Garden

I've blogged about politics:
Could I vote for Hillary?
Naïve and Irresponsible...
The Reincarnation of Bobby Kennedy

I've blogged about phonemes:
I love Phonemes

I've blogged about blogging:
Why Blog?
Writing Online

I've blogged about my dog:
The New Dog

I've blogged about my culture and environment:
Chickory

I've blogged about philosophy (and about what I've reading):
Pathagoras, Ben Franklin, and America
I've blogged about what I enjoy:

That's just a sample.

So, you start a blog. You keep a list of things you haven't written about yet. You write about them. Someday I'll write about how Hemingway treats women in his novels. And I'll compare Hemingway to Steinbeck on their use of time: For Whom the Bells Toll covers 3 days in 400 pages while East of Eden covers 40 years or so in 700 pages. In November I'll write about being an election worker.

Be Walt Whitman and write about experiences (I'm waiting for the first snowfall).

You get the idea...

Understanding the Blogosphere

“Blogosphere” is a term used to describe a subsection of the Internet where individual authors publish their thoughts, views, opinions, etc.

In a sense the blogosphere is a social network because blogging is social. I read blogs. I comment on blogs, use the little “comment” widget at their site to respond to what they said. The blogger often responds to my comment. Sometimes other readers respond to my comment. I may even respond to their responses. In addition to the comment process, I may come back to my blog and write about what they said on their blog. I may even create a link to their blog so that you can look at what they said yourself, in its entirety. If I like what a blogger says about something, chances are good that I’ll look at his site again in a week to see what he’s talking about now (and whether I like it). I don’t even have to like it; I may read and comment on his blog because I hate it. And, of course, he may delete my comments…

Why don’t we just call it the Internet and leave it at that? Blogging has developed into a genre of sorts. So there are a couple of reasons.

First is that the blogosphere has a different level of reliability than the Internet in general. If, for example, you want to know about Quiznos (my favorite place to get sandwiches on the run), you can Google them and you’ll find a link to their company website. It’s informational – an online copy of their menu, a company history, job opportunities, etc. You’ll also find Wikipedia’s page on them (Wikipedia has a page on everything), and it contains similar types of information. You’ll find a nutrition page from Calorie Count (that shows things like that their large Philly cheese steak sub has 721 calories and 16 grams of fat) and a similar page from Dottie’s Weight Loss Zone. And you’ll find a link to an article in the Denver Business Journal about how Quiznos get high marks in customer service. You get the idea…

If, on the other hand, you use the Google Blog Search function and search just blogs for Quiznos, you get a link to the Break Dot Com where they have a video of a Quiznos manager punching out “a bum,” according to that website. You also get a blog about food in Oregon that has a story about the problem Quiznos was having in New Jersey (why, I don't know); in New Jersey (if you believe this blog) Quiznos will evidently sell someone a franchise license and then the license holder can’t find a spot to open the restaurant. Antidotes: fun stories, probably true and maybe useful to you (or not). My favorite is the blog by a vegetarian marketing law person about how Subway is suing Quiznos over its commercials...

The second difference is tone. Blogs are generally much more personal in tone than most websites. And, hand in hand with that, blogs generally represent the voice of one individual person while most websites represent the voice of an organization or some sort.

A final difference is that bloggers (the people who write blogs) tend to develop relationships with each other. Web pages may link to other web pages, but those links tend to be more static and the process is informational, not personal. Reading a blog (and the associated comments on a busy blog) can be like listening in on a conversation. Looking at non-blog web pages is more impersonal and detached – like reading books or magazines on a computer screen.

The blogosphere really is a place unto itself, its own little corner of the Internet...

Why Blog?

Jodi Dean is a political science professor at a college in New York state. I like her answer (at least I like parts of it):

• She started blogging because she felt responsible to try and articulate some of her ideas and views in cyberspace where they could be accessed by other people (that's what it sounds like she's saying, to me).
  
  
• She kept on blogging because she "enjoyed the intellectual and political company that grew out of a community of blogs."
  
  
• She's going to keep blogging because "Blogging has become an integral part of my practice of thinking and self-reflection."

If I didn't have to work for a living and if time was more elastic I'd probably read more of her blog. But political theory (her blog topic) isn't all that close to my heart at the moment. I'm more interested in the politics of education, educational pedagogy, the experience of teaching, and in Appalachian culture.

What is a blog? The term itself is a shortened form of the word "weblog." Originally it was an online journal. Today it has become any online running commentary that speaks at least occasionally in the first person ("I think..."), no matter how impersonal. You can find blogs about teachers and teaching, blogs about games, blogs in Chinese, blogs about what some guy feeds his dog, blogs in Portuguese, blogs about being 29 in Malaysia, blogs about mobile phones, blogs about cats, blogs about mental illness, and, well, I could go on...

They all write for their own reasons. And the genre has become commercial. Three different companies in the last few years have paid me money (sometimes pretty good money) to blog about something. (No one pays me to do this one at the moment.)

Why do I blog? I mentioned hypergraphia in a previous post more as a joke than a real reason. Like Jodi (mentioned above), I blog because it makes me think, helps me think. It's reflective (an approach to professional thought that has gained some credibility in the last few years). It serves as stress relief for me.

Oh yes, and I blog because I'm arrogant enough to think that my opinion (and the way I express it) might change minds.

A.J. Liebling (1904–1963), a journalist with the The New Yorker for almost 30 years, once said something to the effect that freedom of the press belonged to those who owned one (a printing press). The Internet has changed that. Blogging is one of the results...

Writing Online

I write. I have for as long as I can remember.

I understand there's a correlation between hypergraphia and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE). I have TLE, but it is controlled (I haven't had a seizure in 15 or 16 years); and I think I love to write before I had my first seizure at 14. Fyodor Dostoevsky is supposed to have had hypergraphia, so that's not bad company to be in. But I don't think my own drive to write can be described as "an overwhelming urge." I just like to write...

The Internet provides a lot of opportunities to write. Some of them pay money. Years ago I wrote for Suite 101 about Appalachia. I think they paid me something like $15 a month for a minimum of two articles each month. I later wrote for the Suite about special education issues on a couple of occasions and every once in a while I get a few dollars from them in my paypal account for stuff that's still online.

In 1999 I went to work for About Dot Com. About was more intensive. They paid a minimum that changed from time to time. But the goal was to attract enough traffic to be paid "by the hit," or visitor. I spent eight years with About - first as the "guide for Southeast Asia for Visitors (part of their Travel Channel) and later covering the continent of Asia as a whole - Turkey to Indonesia, Tokyo to Tel Aviv. About had a payment model that included growth incentives after the New York Times Company bought them in 2004 (I think, maybe 2005). I made $7,000 or $8,000 as a minimum per year writing from my living room in my spare time for them. There were years when I made closer to $12K and a particular year when I made $20K.



The trouble About Dot Com was keeping up. In 1999 the goal was to present other people's content, to point readers to things we'd found online and "pre-surfed" for them. Over time the emphasis changed to creating our own content. Then links away from our sites began to be discouraged. In 1999 we had to FTP our files after we'd written the HTML (the computer language that makes pages look the way they do on the Internet) ourselves. Over the years About developed tools (kind of like forms) that we used instead. Then the tools would change and some content would have to be reworked, reformatted. A great deal of time got spent changing stuff we'd already written just to keep in looking right - oh, and learning to use new tools. Then came the image gallery tool and the emphasis on pictures. This year the focus began to shift to video formats. The New York Times Company doesn't want you to have to read as much, so maybe video will take over in the future. (What's a hypergraphic to do?) My relationship with About came to an end a few weeks ago after eight year (which is, like, 56 years in Internet time). I outlived a huge number of people there. It's been something of a relief...

At the moment I write for Creative Weblogging. Their page on venture capital investment in China is a fun gig and pays okay - about $6 a blog post for me. The potential is there to make a couple of thousand a year. China Venture News is the site...

Not so profitable is Helium. I have seven articles online at Helium. All of them are technical articles about education. I've made seven cents at Helium in the eight days they've had my stuff. When you've earned $25 they pay out to your Paypal account. So at the current rate I'll get my first check in 2014. One downside: they ask for all rights forever to anything you submit. That might be okay for technical articles (I can always right something else about 504 Plans or Down syndrome); but for creative work it sucks.

Of course, if you just want to see your name on the Internet, there are plenty of sites on politics and the like where you can post comments. Raising Kaine is an example of one here I've posted recently.

I'll probably fid other opportunities to write online. And this isn't an exhaustive list of stuff I've done. But you get the idea...