DISQUS

It's just more transparent here, isn't it? Magazines like Time and Newsweek have always included sponsored content. Most of the Internet and Tech magazines have been doing it for years. It's not that it's new, and it's not that it's evil - it just is.

You hit the nail on the head with disclose, disclose, disclose, but even that seems unnecessary to me. Anyone who believes that the ads and content in print media aren't directly tied to one another at nearly every publication in existence (particularly those with big circulation) doesn't understand publishing finances or dynamics.

I am all for paid content, and as Chris says, if you don't want to read that paid content, read one of the other billion blogs that are written on other subjects...if you enjoy the blogger, and his / her content, read....the value in paid content is when it is presented by someone people are drawn to.

Like Chris ... I'll be reading.

DNW

Yes, and if you happen to build a web application that turns into a social thing...well, you're golden.

Sounds like interesting times indeed. For myself, I wish I'd continued my education earlier on - I came back to it, but would have missed fewer opportunities along the way had I presented folks with that not-so-meaningful piece of paper to accompany my experience.

Luckily, in the IT field, experience eventually wins the day. I spent 20 years in the US Navy - while there, I started a semi-successful writing career. I also learned about computers. After that I went from project to project in IT - but now? Now I'm Director of IT Services for an exciting, multi-million dollar logistics firm - we were on the Inc. 500 list last year of fastest growing privately owned companies and in the top five on Government services.

It's important to focus, is my point, on what you want to be the final outcome and then follow the straightest and most productive path to that goal. I would recommend (for light reading (lol)) The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

Dave

I think this is the front end of what is possible with social networking. As an author, I have struggled for years - been on the net since it was all text - trying to figure out how to network my words to a larger audience. Traditional advertising is - in the creative arts - limited to who the suits push hardest. The only way to break through to that level is to make a visible wave in the world's ocean - I think careful networking can do it.

One of the things I find crucial is that people do as you have begun to do - comment on the sites of others, spread the links and use the grand domino effect of networking to its fullest.

The other key, of course, is content that - when you finally draw readers in range of - holds their interest.

DNW

Cool is such a relative term (lol)

We have a main developer at work. I'm the IT Director. On our walls we have various code charts and web app cheat sheets. Every time Roger puts one up he stands back, stares at it, and says "Chicks will dig me."

The truth is, only other programmers will really dig it - even my dual monitors aren't that cool, or the server rack I built in the corner.

I have much better luck telling people I wrote one of the Star Trek books (I did) And soon hope to be cool again when the wife and I write one for Stargate Atlantis...

D

I'm there...not perhaps to your extent - but Google Trends is the centerpiece of my home page, Twitter is live in Tweetdeck - Gmail is up, and there are a number of writing related sites I frequent.

I've shifted writing styles. When I write, there are always points where I quit and think before going on. I now fill those and empty the dreck by flicking through the various "connections" in my life...then go right back to it. But I can disconnect for long periods to make things happen.

It requires discipline to remain on the proper side of the threshold between too much connectivity and useful connectivity. Another good post.

D

If anything leads back to the title of this original post, it's pro-blogging for nothing but money and search engine hits.

There is a critical mass to all things - and eventually the people willing to shell out money for clicks and hits that are meaningless will dry up. Blogs without something actually interesting enough to draw readership might make some money, but over time, they become yesterday's news.

"Seeding" posts with Google Trends and Technorati top search terms is a great way to draw in readers, but how about if once they get there they don't have to go...Oh man...AGAIN?...as they read s scraped post from some other source, or a single headline with a link, surrounded by ads.

I'd propose that such a "blog" isn't really a blog at all, but more of a "Roblog". If there's no personal touch - no draw beyond a bunch of hot words on Google, there's no future.

On a side note, Ad Sense and all that can go horribly wrong. When Indymac failed, and the articles started proliferating, I hit one link that was just a copy of someone's actual news story. The headline said something like LIST OF BANKS IN JEAPORADY and before the blog post even started, there was a link-list of Google Adsense buyers - including Wachovia - banks that came up in a search they paid for as the opening lines of an article claiming to be a list of failing banks.

There is a certain very questionable morality to all of it.

D

Something you just said...

Clever marketing Spam...

There is no way that I can see of implementing this in Twitter with any success. Spam Twitter Accounts are easy to spot, and block...and there is no way they can force themselves on you. Twitter is only interesting if there is a real person actually contributing at the other end, so I think - in the end - Twitter will overcome it's recent bout of spam problems.

Sadly, once spammers get an idea in their head, they don't seem to be able to follow it through to see if - logically - it will work for them. I cannot imagine anyone following a spam account on Twitter and actually following the link...

In other words, I think it would have to be VERY clever...and so far I've seen no clever spam...

There is also a group on Twitter that just re-tweets the same few blog posts over and over - usually about Word Press, Self-marketing, etc...the circular content I mentioned above that really provides no content at all. Not what Twitter is designed for, and not likely to work, as most people are smart enough to remove a Twitter account that repeats itself daily.

D

I agree absolutely. For instance, I've been choosing keywords to search on Twitter to try and build a group of followers that might:

a) Be interested in my writing
b) Might be of use in promoting my writing (and interested in doing so)
c) Might increase my awareness of other useful technology.

I'm an IT Director, and I've been on the net since the days of 300 baud modems and text-only bulletin board networking - I've seen a wide variety of things come and go.

Your commentary seems slanted toward the useful side of discussion about social networking, while MOST content seems to be things like someone setting themselves up to tell others how to create more traffic - by writing blogs about creating more traffic. Very circular, irritating, and useless in the long run...because why create traffic if there's no destination.

I've linked to your blog from my own...yours is categorized under "Worthy of Time".

D

I can't think of a more pointless exercise than blogging with the sole intent of raising numbers. I started a blog for three reasons.

1) I'm an author, and I needed a way to reach out with my work to a larger band of readers.

2) The WordpPress format of my blog is easier to maintain than a more complex personal web page.

3) I like to write, and blogging is an outlet for opinions, observances, and connections to like-minded individuals.

I try to keep content varied. I try to provide more than just a snapshot of my life, or an advertising billboard for my books.

I LOATHE blogging about blogging (lol) Sorry Eiso - not a personal shot at this post of yours, but seriously...if blogging itself is the topic, I get bored very quickly. People have something to say, or they don't...repeating the Reuters news, discussing ad naseum the latest Social Media, or Twitter clone, or photo-blog, or micro-blog is not real content. It's blather. Maybe there should be a social media call Blatherskite - and all that stuff could be written about there...

DNW

Um...

“a bona fide medical, psychiatric, judicial, legislative, or law enforcement purpose.”

I'd be interested in seeing some of the case studies they consider to have met this criteria. In particular, I'd like to know about how dildos can be used in law enforcement.

-DNW

I have to say that there are some surprising placements on that list...and maybe a larger spread of data is necessary to really capture it...

For instance, just to read "A Clockwork Orange" takes extra effort - you have to be willing to use the glossary in the back of the book to figure out what they are saying...that excludes a number of lazy readers. I'm happy to say I've read nearly everything on the high end of the list...and a lot of the middle, and very little on the left....weird.

DNW

Sort of a very odd memory involving clowns. I have a friend, author Wayne Allen Sallee, who actually corresponded with John Wayne Gacy while he was in prison. He also attended the execution, trying to come to some understanding of how a man could be what Gacy was ... anyway, I wrote a story titled "Wayne's World," where another man - dressed as a clown, like Gacy used to do for the Jaycees, waiting outside...also insane...believing that if he tried hard enough, right at the moment of Gacy's death, he could step in and take over Gacy's world.

Years later, Wayne told me why my story creeped him out so much...and I had no idea of this when I wrote it. Apparently there was a guy dressed as a clown at that execution, and he seemed very much as if he might be stalking Wayne...very creepy guy. Sometimes it is just a little TOO real...

DNW

Yes, critics are bad, but this was worse. I meant the fear of the reaction of other high school students to anyone actually trying hard to do well in a class...because it makes them look like they are NOT trying...writing poetry wasn't exactly high on the cool meter, even in the 1970s...

D

My best teacher was a lady named Nell Wiseman - Charleston High School, Charleston Illinois. I started my creative writing journey there, I think, even though I already knew I wanted to be a writer She taught Creative Writing, and was involved in state-wide literary organizations. She managed to create a classroom environment where it was okay to be creative without fearing the reaction of others around you - very important in a high school classroom - and nearly impossible. It was in her classroom that I won both first and second place in a poetry competition, and I believe I won second with my own entry because she knew I'd written my best friend Randy's entry as well - she gave it first to teach me a lesson - HE got ten dollars...

Hey there Delilah - Plain White T's
Family of Man - The Farm
Peach - Beborn Beton
Legion - VNV Nation
Grow, Grow, Grow - P. J. Harvey

(From my Pandora station - last five played)

I've never known anyone personally that was murdered. All through my life, I've been affected personally by murder, but I tend to avoid the "personalization" of such things, because - frankly - I find it a bit selfish. I could go on about John Lennon being shot, but I don't know how his friends, or his family felt - I didn't know the man, except through music I wasn't particularly taken by (I leaned toward Deep Purple and The Stones) - so other than a million people asking me where I was at the time he was shot, as if they could make that moment about them, or me, instead of about a talented man being shot - I don't know what to say.

JFK was murdered, and I lost a full morning of Saturday cartoons - but I wasn't old enough to really "feel" what the country felt - and again, it would not have really been the murder itself that affected me, but the situation caused by everyone trying to make it about them.

Did Courtney kill Kurt? Life did, I think...but again, not my "circle" of life.

So really no one that I have known personally, or that had a stake in my life, has been murdered, leaving me for once without the sort of answer I usually give here. I am thankful not to have a better answer, and maybe that - in and of itself - is enough.

DNW