TheWayoftheWeb

If you’ve been reading for the last couple of months, you might be aware that I recently joined Absolute Radio as the Digital Marketing Manager.

The good news is that I’m loving my job, as it’s really refreshing change to be working with a team dedicated to one brand again, having worked across so many brands and projects at Bauer Media.

Even better, I’ve not so much been given a running start, as been thrown out of a moving van, and straight into a number of projects launching over the next few days and weeks. Which is great, as it means I’ve been involved and contributing from day one.

The downside is that getting up to speed on projects in process, contributing to the longer term planning, and becoming accustomed to the joy of commuting on a daily basis has meant that my blog posting has slipped, and my plans to update some of the design and functionality have been on hold.

It’s not a permanent thing, as I’m investigating the most efficient and effective ways to update, including creating this post via Windows Live Writer to accommodate the variable effectiveness of GNER’s onboard wifi, and also looking at various other apps for mobile and PC to try to keep the quality and consistency up here, and at 140Char.

Combining work and blogging really can be a Catch-22 situation. When I’ve got time to blog, it’s generally about the work others are doing. When I’ve got work in progress that is worth blogging about, generally I’m too busy to write anything, and I can’t say much until it launches!

The good thing is that unlike a painter’s house that stays unpainted, working all day in digital marketing hasn’t dampened my drive and enthusiasm for blogging. It just needs to be more integrated into my life…

The real power of parenting and mommy bloggers isn’t their scale, the fact they’ve self-organised, or the speed with which they react.

It’s the fact that anyone looking after children at home has the motivation and energy to write entertaining content at all – it’s the perfect example of how strong the desire for connection, self-expression, self-employment and identity can be.

(If you can’t guess, I’ve spent the first day in while looking after my son while his mother went to work. He was a complete angel despite the fact he’s suffering with conjunctivitis, but I’m still exhuasted despite the fact our crowning achivement was getting dressed and out of the house early enough to get some shopping!)

Even after all this time, I’m still discovering new blogs by people in circumstances which make you amazed they find the time and energy to get in front of the computer, whether it’s looking after a child, or coping in an amazingly comedic way with Hodgkins Lymphoma (a type of cancer).

It’s why any attack which lumps together bloggers as one generic collection of amateurs is idiotic and insulting (such as this brilliant rebuttal by Danny Sullivan to a collection of newspaper idiocy, include the Editor-in-Chief of the Wall Street Journal on media bloggers). Especially when organisations such as Associated Press are sending cease-and-desist letters to their own affiliates for posting videos from their official Youtube channel.

Yours,

An exhuasted blogging dad. Who still has to tidy the house and clean the dishes to match up to what his wonderful partner achieves every day when she’s at home…

Back in April, when I moved to Wordpress from my old Blogger home, I also started up a new blog, 140Char, to focus on microblogging, and Twitter in particular.

When I started it, it was partly due to the fact I seemed to be writing more about microblogging than marketing, and I hoped to enlist a few contributors to focus on the topic in one place.

Now nine months later it’s grown to a reasonable size, and is about equalling this blog in terms of traffic, but it’s essentially an additional solo project – and running two blogs in addition to my day job and my family has made me start to wonder whether it’s the most efficient way to work.

So I’d like to know whether as a reader here, you also visit/subscribe to 140Char, and whether you’d rather see microblogging covered here, rather than in a seperate location?

Or do you, in fact, prefer what I’m doing over there? If given the choice, which would you rather see me concentrate on?

(I’m not suggesting I’m about to drop either blog – I really enjoy doing both, but I really want to get an idea of what you think. Incidentally, if you’d be interested in guest posting, or collaborating on either blog, let me know!)

I’ve been having a lot of conversations about advertising recently, whether the subject is relevancy, media publishers, or bloggers.

Another Crap Advert by Zohar Manor-Abel on Flickr (CC Licence)

It’s something that the current economic climate has definitely driven to the front of the minds of a lot of people, as they look to the future.

One of the things that struck me is how a downturn in advertising might affect my blogging here and on 140char.com, and then I happened to come across an interesting post by Steve Hodson about Paid Blogging.

I’m lucky enough to have a job I really enjoy, and didn’t start blogging as a way to earn an extra income – for me the intangible benefits are the ones I enjoy, whether it’s sharing ideas, meeting new people, or possibly being able to be involved in new opportunities etc.

But at the same time, I do run Google Adsense advertising on both blogs, along with Amazon Affiliate links in the hope that I can cover my hosting costs, and then spend anything extra on books and gadgets. Plus, it means I have some understanding of how they work if I ever want to consider using them for other projects.

Steve’s post outlines his frustration at being told the advertising model is broken, particularly for an up-and-coming blogger, and yet the alternative revenues that are suggested don’t seem to provide an alternative.

The trouble is that none of the popular internet movements or theories points to a redistribution of wealth necessarily.

Open Source means free as in ‘free speech’, not ‘free beer’.

The Long Tail doesn’t say you can be rich existing in the long tail of content. The success stories are the aggregators, or those that can make it far enough up the tail to make the living they require or aspire to.

Web 2.0 allows you to communicate, collaborate and connect, but some people will gain more from this financially than others.

And too often we miss the fact that many successful people within paid blogging have several projects and revenue streams going on at once, if not hundreds in some cases.

There’s a feeling that by putting hard work into something we’re entitled to get fair payment for our efforts and get the payoff at the end – something that often isn’t true.

Which is why it’s about focusing on making the most of the journey.

And I do disagree with him that bloggers can’t make money from revenue streams aside from advertising. But again, not everyone who self-publishes a book, releases an E-Book, or produces blog-related merchandise will be successful – and we’re still at an evolutionary time for online content and revenue, and for advertiser adoption. But by offering the best possible value proposition for anything you try to monetise, you stand the best possible chance of making it.

And I think 2009 will be a tipping point for new mechanisms of advertising/revenue. Whether it’s from people looking to improve the result for content creators and publishers ( for instance, tools to create your own revenue share and blog network), or improving things for the recipients of revenue efforts.

But I really don’t have the answers here. If I did, I’d have retired to my own island by now! But what I’m really interested is in your opinions, questions and ideas. So how can blogging content creators thrive, and how would/do you monetise it?