Bloggasm

About a week ago, the Wall Street Journal’s Mark Penn reported that there may be as many as 450,000 “professional” bloggers out there who are pulling in at least some modicum of income, a figure that was met with a fair amount of skepticism.

But while we’re busy arguing over pro blogging numbers, perhaps we should be asking ourselves an even more specific question: How many people out there have 40-hour-a-week jobs that simply require them to Twitter?

Well, we know there’s at least one. I found this paragraph buried in a NY Times article on the quirky flight magazine Sky Mall

In 2007, SkyMall embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign that drove up its Web sales. In January, SkyMall ventured into social networking territory, hiring an official corporate Twitterer

I remember hearing a web marketer argue that just as the New York Times has a Baghdad bureau and a DC bureau, companies will need to start establishing “Twitter bureaus” and “Facebook bureaus.” Congrats corporate Sky Mall Twitterer, you’re pioneering new territory. I cannot fathom what this person will be doing to fill a 40-hour work week.

FunAdvice President Jeremy Goodrich’s palm may be in a steady trajectory toward his face right about now. Or perhaps not. Curiously, he decided to Bcc TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington when he responded to an acquisition offer from myYearbook CEO Geoff Cook.

Cook said, he’d be prepared to offer $125,000 cash up front, $25,000 in consulting fees and $125,000 in MyYearBook stock.

Goodrich emailed Cook back and bcc’d us with his response: no deal. I asked Goodrich, who I don’t know, why he copied us on the email string. His response: “I won’t do that again, I thought techcrunch would find it interesting.”

Interesting indeed. I wish all startup founders did this. The email string is below, with some contact information removed. I’m sure Cook is thrilled.

Goodrich’s reply isn’t a resounding “no,” in fact he leaves the door open for some bargaining, but if I were Cook I’d certainly be hesitant in passing along any more information or offers when it’s being filtered through the biggest mouth in tech blogging.

I keep seeing this Twitter account pop up on my follower feed:

But as you can see here, I’m not actually following this account:

Why is this? Is it just a glitch? And this brings up the question as to whether it would be right for Twitter to inject feeds into our stream we’re not subscribing to as a means for monetization.

From A-list blogger Jason Kottke

This is one of those dirty little secrets of the blogosphere…the big blogs that extensively summarize/excerpt don’t drive that much traffic.

This all stems back to the art of linking. Many of the A-list blogs know that they can strategically include a link and provide a block-quote well within the realms of “fair use” and yet still provide little benefit to the content creator. There have been several times I have been linked on Technorati Top 100 blogs only to receive a handful of actual visitors.

I just caught this tweet from Digg founder Kevin Rose:

Not only is Kevin using a Tinyurl link, but he’s using it to link to a Digg submission.

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