A Blog That Made It Big
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NEW YORK -- In the high-ceilinged SoHo offices that once housed an art gallery, Rachel Sklar is juggling a slew of stories destined for the virtual pages of the Huffington Post.
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There&#8217;s an old golden rule in terms of choosing a career or venture which still applies today, even to blogging; love your work. Being passionate about our jobs, entrepreneurial endeavours, or daily routine can make the difference between success or failure. From a personal standpoint, I&#8217;m passionate about growing this blog and covering the search engine [...]
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It was a matter of minutes before news of Microsoftâs bid jumped from front pages to the vibrant world of technology blogs. Hereâs some of the more interesting thoughts so far.
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By Everybody's Business AUTUMN GRAY Of the Journal  Blogging isn't just for people who can't wait to share with the world the size of their cat's latest fur ball.
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Microsoft&#39;s entry into the blogging realm with MSN Spaces will cause an exponential growth in popularity for the Web-based communications technology.
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A US dictionary publisher declares "blog" as one of the words of the year.
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I just figured something out, and it's the kind of thing that's best said publicly, even though it's likely to: 1. Be misunderstood and 2. Upset some people. But since it's all about this blog it really is best to air it here. First what triggered the epiphany. I was over at Loic Le Meur's house in San Francisco yesterday having lunch with his family and friends. We were all drinking wine (very good wine of course), enjoying the view, and talking about this and that, when the subject turned to Mike Arrington. Loic said that Mike told him that we used to be best friends. I couldn't figure out what that meant, because our friendship was the business kind of friendship not the personal kind. What does it mean to best friends in that way? And how does that relate to having a blog? It never occurred to me that friendship meant that (here's the epiphany) that I would only say positive things about Mike's business. It didn't occur to me until I heard Loic's side of a blog-fight that I saw happen from a distance, with Sam Sethi, Mike and Loic.  Complicated? You bet. Too complicated. An unspoken deal that I never agreed to. When Mike was starting TechCrunch, I pointed to his blog all the time, with glowing phrases. Because I was truly impressed with what he was doing and because I wanted to encourage other people to do it too. I wanted people to write about technology products based on how they used them, not based on alliances, investment, posturing of execs, the crappy stuff that means almost nothing to users, and imho is just a substitute for actually understanding the technology. Mike was approaching products the way I felt they should be approached. Hence the praise. Fact is, my opinion of Mike, as a person, hasn't changed much in the last couple of years. He has a personal charm and charisma that not everyone finds appealing, but I do. I like hanging out with the guy. However, that doesn't mean that if my opinion of TechCrunch, his business, isn't uniformly positive (and of course these days it is actually fairly negative) that I will withhold it. But it's also part of Mike's way of dealing with people that he sees criticism as betrayal. I just don't see it that way. I've had the shit kicked out of me so many times, and as a programmer I understand that criticism is necessary to perfect a user interface, even to get the damned thing working, that even when it hurts, I have to push the hurt aside and listen to what people are saying, and try to respond to it. Professionalism demands it.  Anyway, one of the reasons I want to write this now is that I've written about Loic's business here a couple of times in very positive terms. I don't want anyone, esp Loic, to assume that this will always be so. If they get in the way of other creative people, or otherwise act as a poor example of entrepreneurship in technology, of course I will write about it, and will say what I think. I would expect Loic and people at his company to take what I write to heart, and consider it. My feelings won't be hurt if they don't do what I say.  Same as when I said Facebook sucks. Or when I criticize Techmeme. This isn't in any way meant to reflect on the quality of the people at Facebook (some of whom I know to be outstanding people of high principle) or Gabe Rivera who I know to be a very smart and competent and honorable person. It's possible to critcize someone's work and still admire the person. My epiphany is that a lot of people who thought were my friends, didn't understand this very basic thing about me.
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Shortly after the election, Atrios posted a short piece on how to build the popularity of a blog. In it, his number one recommendation was to update frequently &mdash; at least once per day. People do not bother reading sites that only update once every several days. This, in case there is still confusion amongst those who run this fair website, is why the diary section overtook the regular article sections in terms of hits.  In order to avoid stagnation, history tells us, we need a constant influx of new users. At present, however, the only good reason to register a new account is when your old one gets banned. There is simply not enough front page content to attract the interest of potential new users. Additionally, without the life line provided by freshmeat.net's syndication of kuro5hin (ended some time last year), we need substantially more provocative and note-worthy content if we are to bring in fresh blood.  There are two simple administrative actions that could quickly allieviate the current front page content situation.
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Jeff Jarvis, whose mind occupies the intersection of mainstream media and the blogging world, perhaps more than any other person, is having a conference in mid-October in NYC to bring together people from both worlds to present constructive ideas for working with each other. Me, my feet are firmly planted in the blogging world, but I've spent a lifetime reading and watching MSM, starting with the NY Times at the kitchen table with my parents and brother, when growing up. Some of my fondest memories as a child were our discussions of the days events, and the Times was our common structure. Everyone in our family read the newspaper, often from cover to cover.  As Jarvis councils us, never mind the mistakes, what can we do to make things work better? And I have a couple of proposals in that direction that I will try to present at the October 11 conference. In all cases, they involve the MSM opening up more to include not only the ideas of blogging, but also the bodies of the bloggers.  1. I've said it many times before, it's worth raising again. Any newspaper or radio or TV station with a good reputation in its community could embrace the fresh ideas of the bloggers in their community by offering free blogs to members of the community, who may be new to blogging. I suggested this to the Times in 2001 -- when a person is quoted in a Times article, a few days after the piece runs, contact them, and ask if they'd like to have a NY Times hosted blog. There would be no control over what appeared on the blog. It would have a nytimes.com domain (something like bullmancuso.nytimes.com). Build an aggregator, something very much like Twitter (which is after all, a river of news, not exactly a new idea, heh) that shows all the new posts from members of the community. Encourage (but don't require) your editorial people to read the blog posts. Let whatever happens happen.  2. Here's a new idea that I haven't proposed before. Open your newsroom to bloggers. Set aside a half-dozen desks for people who blog in your community, people you've gotten to know, and provide them with wifi, a water cooler, your coffee (no matter how bad it is) and chance to work alongside your editorial people and (very important) with each other. It's an incredible thing when bloggers get together in a physical space, the sparks can really fly. Now imagine what could happen if those sparks got flying between the remaining editorial people in a professional news organization and the bloggers. I believe the secret of scaling the news is right there, you just have to open the door and see what comes in.
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A new design and a number of under-the-hood improvements move the site away from the niche blog market and into the wider world of online searching.
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AOL presents its own take on blogging the news.
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Corporate blogging guidelines come down to respect and responsibility.
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To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the word "blog," one of the original bloggers, Jorn Barger of Robot Wisdom, offers his top 10 tips for new bloggers.
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MyBlogLog has been expanding rapidly in terms of use and popularity ever since Yahoo acquired it in January and is now looking for someone to fill quite an interesting position of MyBlogLog Community Manager. We&#8217;re hiring our first community manager to become a core member of team and a key public face of the service.  [...]
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Plus: Bloggers battled by viral storm. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Blog: New blog site, started by political veterans and bloggers, is trying something new--allowing Net roots activists to help write legislation.
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With the recent acquisition Sun has made (you heard about that, right?), there's tons of resources in the open source community that are talking about it, lots of them are more PHP-specific. Cal Evans has put together a list of some of the PHP bloggers/community memembers that have posted some of their thoughts on the purchase.   With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.   Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.