Bloggasm

For my latest article on The Next Web, I interviewed science fiction and fantasy author Jay Lake about the online following he has amassed while battling cancer.

If you happen to click into any of the various comment threads of his blog posts, it quickly becomes apparent that Lake has amassed a devoted following within the cancer community, one that extends far outside his fiction fanbase. “Excellent!,” wrote one commenter on a post-surgery entry revealing the false diagnosis of a liver tumor. “My father just received similar news this past week about his bladder. It’s gone, but it contained nothing cancerous-looking.” Others are not so upbeat. “I don’t know how oncology doctors do it either,” one person commented on a post about Lake’s doctor visit. “Russy’s showed up for his birthday party in hospice, which was the last full day he had on earth. He ate cake with us and played guitar and looked – for one brief moment – like he might cry. It’s a higher calling for sure.”

You can follow me on Twitter or go ahead and hire me.

Deputy Editor for Yahoo News Blogs

Looking for an experienced, agile, details-oriented blog editor to manage a team of professional bloggers. Working with the Editor, this person will oversee story selection and creation of original reporting and curation for the largest news audience on the web.

The ideal candidate has extensive online media experience (blog experience preferred), experience managing reporters and the ability to create media that appeals to both expert and popular audiences.

This person must have knowledge of and interaction with outside entities, especially those in the news blogosphere, and comfort interfacing with other parts of Yahoo’s organization, especially Yahoo’s homepage.

Responsibilities:
* Providing oversight to ensure that blogs are following style, meeting standards and serving our audience
* Generating, developing and executing content ideas and strategies
* Monitoring Yahoo! and the Web at-large for story and source material
* Fielding and attracting quality tips and inquiries from editors, PR types and outside entities
* Providing photo assistance and guidance with regard to gathering, editing and crediting
* Tracking, analyzing and driving results

Requirements:
* Five-plus years experience in online media, experience in blogging specifically is a plus
* Exceptional copyediting skills and attention to detail
* Strong grammar and communication skills and command of language
* Familiarity with SEO, RSS, Twitter, Facebook and other social media
* Basic HTML and Photoshop skills, experience with blog publishing and content management systems

So far, over 9,000 blogs have signed up:

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Fans of the New Yorker still won’t ever forgive her for that Roseanne Barr guest-edited issue.

Daily Beast Turns One

Beyond our wildest hopes when we started last October. We closed September at 3.9 million monthly unique readers and 35 million page views, which is up 70 percent and 220 percent, respectively, since our first month. It took me eight years to build Vanity Fair to less than half that number. And the readers are loyal: 60 percent of them come back again within 24 hours. Of course, keeping ‘em satisfied is a 24/7 task. I know what the tireless blogger Andrew Sullivan means when he told me last summer that he sometimes feels like Fay Wray dancing in front of King Kong.

And the foray into the offline world:

It’s been nothing but new developments round here. Last week we announced our foray into book publishing, a new imprint called Beast Books that we are launching with Perseus Books Group. It gives our writers the chance to develop ideas that have already exploded on the site for a fast, short book that will be published first electronically and then as an elegant paperback. I’ve always wanted to do it. Books are the new magazines.

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The Atlantic released its Atlantic 50 recently, described as “the most influential commentators in the nation, the columnists and bloggers and broadcast pundits who shape the national debates.”

What I find interesting about the list is how many bloggers made it. Though some of them were well known before they launched their blogs, there are a few on here that are known almost exclusively for their work within the medium.

1. Paul Krugman

9. Andrew Sullivan

15. Arianna Huffington

22. Glenn Greenwald

29. Josh Marshall

34. Jonah Goldberg

38. Joe Klein

41. Matthew Yglesias

49. Ezra Klein

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Time Out Chicago has a piece on a 16-year-old autistic resident who obsessively live blogs next to a police scanner in his house.

For the past nine months, residents of Avondale and Logan Square have been reading about crime in their ’hoods as it happens: a gang disturbance on Drake Avenue at 12:33am, a person with a gun at 2400 North Monticello Avenue at 4:37pm. There’s even some news of the weird, like a report at 4:53pm of a drunk stumbling down Milwaukee Avenue asking passersby to pay $5 to see him eat a live goldfish.

It’s all thanks to a dauntless 16-year-old from Avondale known only as Timmy to the 300 or so devotees of his blog, Avondale and Logan Square Crime Blotter. Seven days a week, Timmy sits by a store-bought police scanner and live-blogs emergency calls—all from the confines of his bedroom in the house where he has lived all his life with his mother and 18-year-old sister.

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PZ Myers, blogger for the popular atheist and biology blog, Phayrngula, rounded up over 300 scientists, students and secularists and brought the group to a creation museum in Kentucky.

Myers’ clashes with those he disagrees with have gathered major headlines before, like when he publicly desecrated a Catholic communion wafer on his blog, or when he was expelled from an intelligent design documentary screening.

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