Bloggasm

The unfortunate thing about Bloggasm is that whenever my life gets the slightest bit hectic the website is the first to suffer. For instance, I’ll get some momentum going with quality posts that pull in quite a good bit of traffic, only to then go weeks or months without posting when my life suddenly becomes busy. Bloggasm was on hiatus the entire month of January before it finally got going again, and then it took a nose dive again in August when I started looking for a new job. Once I did find a new job, I was then bogged down with trying to finish up my old one while getting ready to move to a new city. All together, there was virtually no posting for about four months of this year.

2007 wasn’t a complete failure, however. If you’ll remember, most of my content used to be Q and A interviews with other bloggers. And though some of them were interesting, most of them weren’t. They were too all over the place. They lacked depth and research. This year marked the first time I started doing some original, in-depth feature articles, and they’ve gone incredibly well. I pick a topic and a thesis and then begin interviewing experts — and after a few weeks of research I churn out a polished piece. Most of these articles have accumulated a ton of links and traffic, and I loved doing them a lot more than the Q and As.

So, that being said, here are some resolutions for 2008. I plan on posting a minimum of five times a week. This isn’t to say that they will all be lengthy posts — I have a full-time day job as a newspaper journalist and I refuse to work on Bloggasm while I’m at work, which only leaves me with my nights to work on the site. So at least some of those posts will just be quick links to other websites. I also plan on doing at least one in-depth feature article a month, so there will be a minimum of 12.

I also plan on bringing back Q and A interviews, only not as they were before. Instead, I’ll have two separate interview series on very specific subjects. I’ll go into more detail about this in the new year.

I’m hoping that if I can get on a regular posting schedule and continue to turn out quality content, then one day bloggasm will be a go-to place for media and journalism industry news.

Anyway, to conclude this year in review, I’ll post links to the six feature articles I wrote this year, starting with the earliest. Enjoy, and have a happy New Year.

1. The Creative Commons Confound: Whether releasing your book for free will help boost your sales: In this article I try to determine whether releasing your book for free online will help boost your print sales.

2. When “webscabs” unite: Celebrating International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day: The vice president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America accused writers who released their work for free online of being “web scabs.” I decided to write an article about the controversy.

3. The Sideways offensive: Will Merlot sales ever recover?: Who knew that one movie could hurt the Merlot industry so badly?

4. The Million Writers Award: raising the profile of online literary journals: A profile on an award geared toward giving recognition to fiction published in online magazines.

5. Harriet Klausner: the publishing industry’s secret weapon?: A write-around profile of Harriet Klausner, Amazon’s number one customer reviewer. There’s lots of speculation as to whether she actually reads the books she reviews.

6. The Dawkins Effect: How The God Delusion mainstreamed atheism: Easily my best article of the year. In it, I argue that The God Delusion has thrust non-belief out of the closet and into mainstream debate.