Archive for the 'Inside Bloggasm' Category

Simon gets a new job

So I just accepted a job as an online analyst for New Media Strategies, an online consulting and marketing company. I got the offer almost entirely because of Bloggasm — the people there were really impressed with the feature articles and studies I do focusing on the blogosphere and new media.

The job is in the DC area and starts Sept. 10. My last day in dead tree media (newspapers) is Sept. 5.

So how will this move affect Bloggasm? Hopefully only in good ways. I’ve been told that I’ll be encouraged to continue blogging, in fact the company has several popular bloggers on its team. I’ll know more once the job starts.

Anyway, I just wanted to thank Bloggasm readers for stopping by every week. Regular programming to resume here shortly.

Articles for this week

Sorry for the lack of feature-length pieces so far this week — I’ve been working on a freelance article for another news outlet. I’ll link to it once it’s published.

I should be able to resume work on my regular features for this site tomorrow.

They really like me!

Though this is pretty much meaningless in the grand scheme of things, I like to keep a running tally of how many of Technorati’s Top 100 most popular blogs have linked to me at least once. Because there’s so much competition, blogs are continually shifting on and off the list, which means my tally usually fluctuates.

Today, Wired’s Danger Room linked to me, and because of this there are now 20 blogs on the current list that have linked to me at least once — my highest number yet.

Here’s a listing with rough estimations of how many times each has linked to me. I’ll also list where each of these blogs ranks on the list. And no, I’m not going to start posting my tally regularly. It was just that 20 is such a round number and I thought it worth mentioning:

#5: Boing Boing — 4 times
#10: Mashable — 3 times
#11: Smashing Magazine — 1 time
#14: Gawker — 2 times
#22: ProBlogger — 1 time
#26: Daily Blog tips — 1 time
#28: Think Progress — 1 time
#30: Consumerist: 1 time
#34: Valleywag: 1 time
#38: New York Times Bits Blog: 1 time
#45: Daily Dish: Andrew Sullivan: 1 time (though sort of twice because he linked once to a person writing about me)
#46: Crooks and Liars: 5+ times
#53: Ben Smith’s Politico blog: 1 time
#67: News Busters: 1 time
#71: Glenn Greenwald: 1 time
#73: Hot Air: 3 times
#74: Wired’s Underwire: 1 time
#75: Pajamas Media: 2 times (I think?)
#84: Pharyngula: 4 or 5 times
#87: Wired’s Danger Room: 1 time

Internet explorer problems?

Ok, so I’ve heard from multiple sources today that my site is causing error messages in internet explorer. Please tell me this has just started today and hasn’t been going on for awhile. My brother said he’s definitely accessed my site on internet explorer within the last few days, so that makes me feel a little better. Anyone else have any success stories with IE and my site?

I emailed my friend Stephen, hopefully he’ll be able to figure something out.

UPDATE: Stephen fixed it. Subscribe to his blog already. He definitely knows what he’s doing.

Back in the saddle

So I took some time off from work and headed to the beach this weekend. I had zero internet access so I’m completely out of the loop. I’m about to fire up my RSS feed and start catching up, so expect blogging to resume shortly.

I should have a pretty good feature article coming out soon.

I ought to link to that

In case you didn’t notice, I published four feature articles for Bloggasm last week, a personal record. It used to be that I felt lucky if I could post one feature article — and in this instance I’m using the word “feature” loosely to describe any post where I have to do original research, whether it’s conducting phone interviews with sources or analyzing data — a month. Lately I’ve been averaging two articles a week.

It has certainly taken its toll. If I want to write and publish an article it usually means staying up until two in the morning. And that’s not counting the time that it actually takes to conduct phone interviews and transcribe them (I use a digital voice recorder). I usually don’t get home from work until 6 p.m. and I typically set aside an hour or so to work out and eat dinner. After writing, editing and posting an article I then crawl into bed at two or three in the morning only to have to get up again four hours later.

Given that I can only work on the site during my nights and weekends I only really have time to write one post a day. Because of this I get the desire to make that one post count. But this odd thing has happened lately. On my days where I don’t plan on writing a feature article, when I just want to maybe throw up a quickie post with a small link or video, I find it harder to do so. For instance I came across a good post today written by another blogger, and while I probably should have just linked to the post I instead emailed him and asked him if I could interview him about it. My journalist brain took his post and created a whole theme around it. I started thinking of what other people I could interview for this article. Before you know it, a simple link has evolved into a 2,000+ word narrative journalism piece.

I’ve definitely been enjoying myself for the past two months with this increased feature article production. I just don’t know how much longer I can keep up the pace. How many times can I stay up until three in the morning before I burn out?

Bloggasm has a shiny new design!

Finally, after more than two years, Bloggasm has a new design. It got to the point where I absolutely hated the theme I had but every time I tried to change things I ended up breaking something.

Once again, my friend Stephen saved the day by not only upgrading my account but also switching me to a much-easier-to-read theme. The font is bigger. The color scheme is black on white. The entire page is much simpler. I really like it.

So if you’re reading this in a feed reader, click on over and check it out.