Bloggasm

Rather than posting here I should be working on my state taxes (I finished federal taxes last night) but I just don’t have the energy for it tonight. Speaking of taxes, the IRS website is incredibly shitty — I know that government websites are known to be terrible but you’d think they’d take extra care with that one, considering it’s the nation’s money-maker.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement.

1. May 1 is RSS Awareness Day, which is certainly something I can support. I knew what an RSS feed was long before I actually started using them. There’s just this odd inertia that keeps you from actually getting on the bandwagon, but once you do you immediately realize it’s worth it. Signing up for RSS feeds relieves some pressure on bloggers to post around the clock because an RSS worldview doesn’t involve you having to check a website over and over again to see if it has been updated. There are some sites I subscribe to that barely ever update, and without the RSS feed I would probably never know when something new has been posted. Rather than explaining what an RSS feed is on my own terms, here’s a handy dandy link to the Wikipedia entry.

2. “Porn for the Blind is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing audio descriptions of sample movie clips from adult web sites. This service is provided free of charge.” The description says it all.

3. Jeff Jarvis explores the true value of his blog. Rather than focusing solely on what the blog brings in through direct advertising revenue, he also adds in the money that comes in indirectly — speaking fees, book deals, other gigs — and determines that the blog is worth over a million dollars. Not bad for a site that averages only a few thousand hits a day.

4. This is pretty huge. Gawker Media has sold off three of its blogs, including Wonkette. Gawker founder Nick Denton references the coming online advertising decline, saying he’s dumping his less profitable sites in order to ride out the storm. I still find it weird, though, that they would get rid of Wonkette, which has become some sort of symbol for the rise of the blogosphere as a powerful media outlet — it was often cited in mainstream media stories about the power of blogs. It’s especially a weird move given that it’s a contentious presidential season that has resulted in rising traffic for most major political blogs.

5. It looks like we’re seeing a new use for POD: computer generated books. That New York Times article doesn’t do a great job of explaining how the guy’s company works, but I wouldn’t be able to point to more representative example of the long-tail benefits of Print On Demand.

6. It looks like AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who was jailed for two years without charges, is definitely going to be released. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who led the smear campaign against Bilal, has remained mostly silent on this issue.

I’ve been on a much-needed mini vacation for the last four days and this is my first time on the internet since Wednesday. If you’ve commented on one of my posts in that time period and the comment got eaten, I apologize. I moderate all comments and whenever I’m gone for an extended period of time I’m unable to gather the motivation to read through 800 spam comments to pick out a few legitimate ones.

Anyway, here are some media-related links

1. This is pretty scary. Someone placed a hoax craigslist ad announcing an everything-must-go giveaway at a house. The only problem? It wasn’t placed by the owner — and he returned to his house to find people literally looting it. And when he tried to stop them from taking his possessions, the people showed him print-outs from the craiglist ad and refused to give anything back. I smell a pending sociological experiment that could come out of this; something based on the effects of advertising and a level of entitlement that accompanies any sort of ad.

2. We’ve seen a number of incidents recently in which some brutal crime or tragedy occurred that involved a social networking site in some way. The most recent example is a teen male who killed his father because his Myspace account had been deleted.

3. The New Yorker has a long feature article about the demise of the print newspaper industry and what its online future may entail. Scarily enough, the reporter picked The Huffington Post as the example of the future of newspapers. Why is this scary? Because The Huffington Post doesn’t pay many of its star writers. I’m not talking about user-generated content, I’m talking about professional writers who write for the site for free while it soaks of millions in advertising dollars.

4. Ever wonder what bloggers who write for Gawker websites pull in for salaries? We’ve known for some time that they’re paid in part based on the number of page views they attract. Now we have some sense of the actual figures in their pay checks.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. This blog offers 10 tips to keep your journalism job while your daily paper is being hit with tons of layoffs.

2. Porn star Ron Jeremy says that he would allow his daughter to act in porn as long as she would be a porn star like Jenna Jameson. This revelation is slightly less shocking when you realize he’s talking about his hypothetical daughter, since he doesn’t actually have one.

3. The Columbia Journalism Review on the media’s reaction to the Obama/Wright controversy

4. Michael Arrington, the blogger for the popular site Tech Crunch, argues that blogs should team up to take on big media. I think it’s plausible in some niches, but nearly impossible for stories that significantly drain resources, like war reporting.

5. An interview with a long-time writer for the satirical The Onion.

6. First there were nerdy pick-up lines. Now there are Penguin pick-up lines.

Some assorted links for your perusal:

1. Gawker Media’s founder decides he doesn’t need no stinkin’ bloggers, he’ll edit and manage the Gawker blog himself.

2. If you’re reading this, this is what your facebook news feed will look like in 30 years.

3. Yet another article about newspapers trying to adapt to the online world. Like just about every other article of its kind, it fails to acknowledge that though news rooms are shrinking, the number of full-time bloggers is growing. At an equal rate? Who knows? But it certainly would paint a better picture of the journalism industry if we’d at least give it some cursory thought.

Business Week interviewed some of the most popular bloggers to find out how much money they make a month and their main sources of revenue. BoingBoing, arguably the most popular blog, brings in over $1 million a year.

What’s worth noting is that most these blogs, though they make good money, don’t make nearly as much as newspapers and magazines with similar readerships. For instance, a magazine with 2 million readers, the average readership of Boingboing, makes a lot more than $1 million annually. I noticed that Techcrunch, which gets maybe 1/10th the readership of Boingboing, makes more than twice as much. It proves how important the niche of a blog is in determining revenue.

via fishbowlny

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Related posts:
1. The Million Writers Award: raising the profile of online literary journals
2. Interview with Laurence Simon from This Blog is Full of Crap
3. Google markets anti-Sicko ads to HMOs?

Have I been sleeping under a rock for the last few days? I just found out that Mediabistro, the huge blog network that focuses on the media, has sold for $23 million to Jupitermedia Corporation. To my knowledge, this is the second largest blog sale in history, second only to the $25 million acquisition of Weblogs, Inc by AOL.

Suddenly, running a media blog doesn’t seem so hopeless.

via nyobserver

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Related posts:
1. The New Yorker profiles Rupert Murdoch
2. Interview with Laurence Simon from This Blog is Full of Crap

Laurence Simon is a blogger who lives and works in Houston, Texas. Aside from running his sarcastically funny This Blog is Full of Crap, he also has several catcams, and hosts a daily podcast where he reads extremely short flash fiction.

He’s one of the many bloggers who have joined Pajamas Media, which is quickly becoming one of the largest blog networks on the web.

Simon Owens: In our last interview, you spoke about some of your frustrations with Pajamas Media. Have things improved at all since then? Has the network grown at all?

Laurence Simon: No, they haven’t improved. Pajamas Media has pretty much established a core of bloggers they will link for stories, and that’s pretty much it.

At least they fired the blogger relations person, who was about as useless as tits on a bull.

The network hasn’t grown, but they’ve added a few bloggers to their main site. I tend to just follow Claudia Rosett and her United Nations beat, and that’s it.

Simon Owens: I’ve noticed what seems like a decline in cat-blogging. As someone who operates cat-cams, is this a real trend? Have other cute-animals blogs spun off from the idea of cat blogs? I think noticed a puppy blog not all that long ago.

Laurence Simon: I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I think it’s growing steadily.

Carnival of the Cats remains strong in participation.

There’s cute animal blogs of all types out there, and that’s a good thing. Something for everyone.

Simon Owens: The topics on your blog are wide-ranging, much more eclectic than the bloggers I usually interview. Do you think that bloggers that don’t focus on a specific niche have a harder time gaining readerships?

Laurence Simon: Yes, they have a hard time with attracting readers because you’re not known as the go-to guy for a particular issue.

Also, people who come for one thing will leave because of another.

The people coming for cat stuff don’t want to read about the work stuff and vice versa.

Simon Owens: How many people participate in your 100-word challenge? I noticed several of the stories in the challenge don’t rely on the twist ending that a lot of flash fiction encounters. What does this form of fiction have to offer to make it inviting?

Laurence Simon: Usually between ten and fifteen participate.

I think people want to have a little fun, it’s quick and easy to do. And it’s also neat to see how other people play with a particular theme while there’s some things writers have in common.