It’s true.  This blog has been in operation for over a year.  What have I achieved in this time?  Several things:

1. Grown from a readership of zero until I broke the psychological “65″ barrier.  Thanks to all my feedreaders!

2. I have managed to keep the same template for 12 months.

3. Written over 170,000 words

4. Nailed 250 posts!

5. Received 182 comments (by some standards that’s lame… not by mine though… I have LOW standards).

Have these five things made my blog what it is today.  Of course not.  What has made it worth while… the odd flame?  The comments?  No.  The fact that I have spent a year talking about what I love to talk about and I am still going.  I worked fairly hard to get 65 feed readers, and I am not finished yet.  Mind you I wish I had more time to plug into this… because it’s been fun.

Some Highlights…

Believe it or not my post on failing has proven to be the most popular by a long shot.  I would say that it has more to do with my selection of picture that the actual article itself.  You have to recognise that failing is what you do most of the time.  Success is the one time you tried and it worked out for you.   Writing this post on failing was a highlight but not my personal favourite.  I don’t have a personal favourite.  I tend to like the one’s on the heart.  You don’t really get to teach that stuff.

Low points…

Too many to mention.  The forum.  That sucked.  Getting flamed out by some random on stumbleupon.  I was labelled a spammer!  Me… yes that’s right… gratitious self-promotion has it’s downside.  The lowest point I think that made me question whether or not I could continue believe it or not was not whether when my forum concept didn’t take off.   You get over things like some weak coward calling you names on the internet.  What makes up for it is the lovely people who leave meaningful comments.  People like this one and this one. These make it worth while.

Blog earnings…

I am happy to say that my blog earnings thus far less than what I would like.  As matter of fact I thing I have cleared $30!  Mind you I have made no real effort to commericalise this… well I have.  Every time I try I seem to get so far and then time and other matters take over my life.  I know that if I had more time and drive I could make a go of this.  But in truth… I think I am just too comfortable where it is at the moment. The forum concept was appealing… but I had no idea what I was doing.  Mind you, I haven’t given up on that yet… I am still interested.  I am just not sure where I can take it from here.  Hey, if anyone is reading this give me a shout with any ideas… I would love to hear them.

Meeting new people…

At the moment I am not really firing on all cyclinders.  So, I had considered last week… closing the blog for ever and just going back to the drawing board.   The main reason for this motivation was to try and find a way forward that didn’t involved copious amounts of time and energy in my already fairly full life.  What dawned on me was that I had met some interesting people through this blog.  Namely, Alan, Jamie, Fazrul, Tristan, Lorraine, Gamy, Lola, John, Dr Purple, Ellese, Corey Smith, Sir Jorge, Lawrence, Peter, Erica, Chris, Jonathan, Alex Blackwell, Al, Robert,  and heaps more just through having this blog. And of course all the people who have read my stuff, stumbled, dugg or delicioused me… I am forever grateful.

If you are a reader please stay with me.  I intend to keep writing for at least another year!  Jokes aside… I enjoy my little space on the web and remember… the best is yet to come!

Recently I have noticed a growing trend on my wife’s blog. The last group of posts have been about me and my misadventures.  The last one was about comments I made when I was marking recently.  Before that was how some old lady confused me for a dog thus giving the impression that I was cute… of course they were talking about my dog.  Before that I was buying bargain bread and destroying a possum with my awesome flatulence.

I like the one where I ended up working a long week and worked out that I was making $10.50 an hour. The other one is where I am eating snacks and leaving my rubbish in the car… priceless.   I could go on for hours… and I will.  No, I won’t.  Suffice to say that reading several posts (probably in the order of 100) of the dumb things I do.   Given that this is the problem solving blog and not my life story there is a lesson.  It’s this: it’s good to be reminded of how human you are.  You often don’t realise the silly things you do and how other people think about them. Having someone else write about you is also very surreal.

On the other hand some of those posts have left me shaking my head.  Still, it’s been interesting to read about my life from my wife’s point of view.  I am still waiting for the next suprise. Off the top of my head I can name five things that I have done that are what we call “blog worthy”!

Hi there and thanks for reading. I have been on holidays for a while so I thought I’d do a tidy up of the blog as I mentioned earlier in my changes afoot post. If you have been here for a while you can see the changes. One of the things I have learned from reading Yaro Starak’s blog is having pillar content. When I thought about it I realised I had tons of it… it was just buried deep with my category structures. You live and you learn but that’s life isn’t it?

So I updated my articles page to include what I think is my pillar content. I can recommend this as a practice because it focused me on thinking about the strategic vantages I have as a blogger. I noticed that some of pillar content is underdeveloped … I need to write more series and less off-the-cuff posts. Anyway the lesson for me was: make the most of your content. I had the pillar content without realising it because I was blogging without a plan. Don’t make this mistake.

I have removed the forum for now because I was really busy when I started it and was attacked by spammers. It will return when I finally get the time to focus on it. I believe forums offer a lot of value to a blog. But, keeping up with the spam kings just about killed me.

The fiction page is gone until I work out what I am going to do with it. I am probably going to launch a seperate domain but I don’t know. That’s been a long haul and quite frankly and I am not sure it’s worth it yet.

So, thanks for reading and I hope you continue enjoy your time on my blog.

My wife is also a blogger. She decided she wanted to branch out into the blogosphere last moth and she is doing quite well. After reading a Problogger post about his wifes keenness for new pillows, I realised that I had learned something from wife about blogging too over the past month.

Always write from the heart and be the real you

My wife has a great way of just saying what she thinks. She puts it out there. I realised after reading her blog for a while that I had been writing academically. After all this is what I am trained for isn’t it? I wasn’t used to the more open journalistic (there I go again) style of writing that pervades the blogosphere. I guess when I started I thought you know what this is going to be fun. After a while a few people came and I was like woah! As a blogger I think you should be you without telling us what you had for lunch… unless you are John Chow. Ok, so it works. Lesson learned … write from heart and be the real you.

Make each blog post about one thing

It’s late and I’m tired but I can’t remember the word that explains what I just wrote. Oh well… in short make each post about a single topic. One of my favourite books is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Not because of the excess drug taking or anything like that. It’s the fact the whole book is about a trip to and from Las Vegas and all the misadventures of the protagonist. It’s about a single person and what happened to them. Some of my posts what I would call TOE (theory-of-everything) slanted and I try to say too much at once. My wife has a fantastic way of saying something in a short concise paragraph length that I just can’t! Me… with all my bits of paper!

Write about stuff that people care about

I should have known this. But alas I did not. I used my Christmas money (yay) to buy Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. The eye opening thing for me is that he states continually (ok so I have read 170 pages so far and yes it’s been worth it for me… haven’t finished yet it might go downhill from page 170) throughout the book that you need to have content that people want to read and would be willing to talk about. He outlines how search engines are going this way too. Reading my wife’s blog I noticed how each post was a short readable length and was something people find funny. Hence, they would want to share it. Hmm tough lesson.

Right so now that I have learned something from reading my wife’s blog I have to end this post by saying I convinced her to do it. I feel like a man again!

I subscribe to problogger, like I imagine most bloggers do, and I came across this article this morning about full time blogging being a process.  In the article it referenced (I am academic what can I say) the article from Get Rich Slowly about finding the guts to follow your dreams.  Now, I am reading the E-Myth Revisted by Michael Gerber at the moment and I think he would have something to say about becoming a ‘full time blogger’.  Gerber identifies three roles of the business person:  The Entrepreneur (visionary), The Manager and The technician.  The manager runs the business whilst the Entrepreneur focuses on it’s creative growth when the technician is performing the duties required to get the work done.   A friend of mine says it this way.  There is the pioneer who blazes the trail and then there’s other people who support that work by being ‘administrators’ and keeping the work going.

One of the great revelations for me in reading the E-Myth was the realisation that it’s okay to be an entrepreneur.   I am totally the person who see’s the vision and knows what needs to be done and so forth.  I am a very bad manager however and an even worse technician.  If you are like that, then you will find management work to be boring, heart wrenching and difficult to do.    Judging by experience so far and what I read in the blogosphere, full time blogging really is not an entrepreneurial pursuit.  It’s another job.   So what’s the difference?

Work versus Entrepreneurship

Work is routine ‘technican’ work.  Blogging, even though it’s a creative pursuit is largely work.  Why?  There is a creative marketing element for sure.  You have to write articles that attract visitors, put advertising in sidebars and in posts and so on.   Blogging is a ‘technical’ skill that you become good at like most forms of writing over time.  Say my dream is to be a fireman and my friends dream is to be a blogger.  As a blogger he is self-employed and most people would say ‘entrepreneur’.  I would say my blogger friend is just using his skill to make money the same way as a fireman does.  There is no difference.  Two technicians in different application fields.

Entrepreneurship is based on creativity and growth work isn’t

Now you will use your creative abilities in your job as a fireman, for example but this does not mean you are reinventing the practice of fire fighting.  The fire fighter who reinvents and continually improves firefighting is the entrepreneurial fire fighter.  The blogger who reinvents the job of blogging continually to find new streams of income is an entrepreneurial blogger.   Why?  Entrepreneurship is not simply going out on your own and making a new business.  There is a pioneering element to entrepreneurship where a vision for something is put together.   I meet people who I would consider to be entrepreneurial academics.  These are people reinventing things and using creativity and vision to bring forth pioneering change into their lives.  Clearly, blogging can be entrepreneurial but in most cases this isn’t so.

What makes me realise this is just how hard it appears to be to make a living as a blogger.   Some people I have read about find it very difficult and metaphors are drawn between blogging and hand to hand combat.   A case in point is the Problogger versus Shoemoney interview.  Have a look at the amount of time Darren Rowse puts into blogging!  That’s a full time job.  Two hours of writing versus how many hours of routine, technican like work?  I rest my case.   Work is hard, routine and after all BORING to the entrepreneur.  I therefore submit that whilst blogging can be entrepreneurial, it most cases it’s just another type of job.

Technorati Tags: problogger

In daily meanderings on the web I came across this article by John Cow the internet marketing guy (no not John Chow though they are very similar… funny that).  This publicity stunt had people believing the John Cow website was shutdown because it was hacked.  Some people thought the stunt was funny and clever whilst some thought it was evil or poor marketing.  This guy said it undermined his whole brand and I think that is an apt description.   Other people were asking questions about advertising and whether it was fair to the people who pay money that they missed out on 24 hours worth of advertising.  Isn’t that a breach of contract?

Using controversy to get attention is nothing new.   Richard Branson does it masterfully well and so have others.  I am reminded of Peter Spann‘s use of the concept of leverage in his book.  He uses the concept to explain that you can have positive and negative leverage.  Negative leverage is like having a virus you can’t cure.  It keeps bringing you bad publicity.  Positive leverage gives you something that keeps flowing positivity in your direction.  I think John Cow’s stunt may actually be a ploy that could ultimately back fire.  Why?  Because it lacks integrity.

In an earlier post I pointed out how some people value money more than relationships and people and you can tell this by the it’s not personal it’s business line that they use.  There is nothing wrong with making money (I would be a hypocrite to say otherwise) but you can by still be entrepreneurial and have integrity.  That is, you can make money and do so in a way where people are not deceived.   Check out this latest problogger post on how to get noticed on popular blogs.  I noticed a comment from Missy that I thought was relevant.   She argues that a lot of the comments on blogs (generally speaking) are congratulatory rather than critical and I would have to agree.  Ryan also wrote in the comments:

    What about shamelessly saying I’ve got next to no readers at all, and everyone should visit my boring blog right now? It’s not even a joke… I really do have next to no     readers, and I’m quite sure if I was someone else, I’d find my blog boring as hell. So everyone… if you want to see some boring stuff, you know where to look eh?

Man do I know how he feels! So my question is this:  is there any integrity left in the world of blogging?  Ok, so I have framed the debate somewhat by using a yes/no box … sorry about that.   Let me climb out.  Ahh, that’s better. The point I got out of Ryan’s comment relates in a different way to John Cow’s stunt.   Ryan, I think, is speaking out of sarcasm and making fun of people who write comments in blog posts that are designed to drive traffic.   Not promote debate or discussions.  Maybe I am idealist… but I think a blog should be a space to build communities and share ideas.   When we use words like ‘traffic’ we should also use words like ‘value adding to human lives’ for without one how can the other exist?  We have this silly attitude about being in business that says, ‘well I am in this to make money… not make friends.’   Yes but people engage with you because of the essence of what you are doing and the relationship you are building with them.

I learned this through teaching evaluations.  In one semester I was complete Nazi to my students and I scored low.  When I freed up I realised that I scored a whole point higher!  I can’t say this enough times… what people believe is a perspective or a point of view.  Now, what did I change to provoke that result.  Lots of things.  In particular I changed how I related to students.  Most importantly, I did would I could do to change how they perceived me. I began to talk with them and treat them like human beings and not cattle (or traffic).   If you are conning people or deceiving them after a while you will have this as your reputation and people will really believe you are like this. Don’t believe me?  What about people like Bill Clinton?  What do you remember him for?

Take a look at the top five blogs at technorati.  Heres a list I got this morning:

1. Boing Boing

2. Problogger

3. TechCrunch

4. LifeHacker

5. Engadget

What do they have in common?  Let me see:

1. They provide valuable information to a community 

Each one of these popular provide information that groups of people (i.e. communities of practice) find interesting.  Did they just get lucky… I think so.  Most of them appeal to cultures, groups and ideas.  Blogging, at least to me, appeals to communities.  It’s a way to engage with similar minded people for very little cost and it represents a way to add value (see my later point).

2. They provide most of their advice free

This goes without saying but I need to add something here which I think is important.  The internet is a part of free culture.  People want stuff for free.  I know, why should I work my butt off writing stuff that I may never make money out of?  Think about that while I work out a reasonable answer.

3. They add value firstly and secondly focus on how that value can be used to make money 

Value is added to people’s life by these sites.   They make money because of this perceived value adding.  They don’t make money through controversy, smart or dumb tactics or anything else.  People see the value and spread it for them.  Read this if you want to see what I mean here.

4. They grew a reputation through people

People make things popular because they see the value and share it with others.  As a blog grows in popularity it’s because of the ‘integrity’ of that blog in the eyes of the readers.  Integrity means the value and personal character of the blog itself.   It also means the authority that blog has in the eyes of the community.  Authority is the toughest thing to build because it requires a validation process.  I wonder, how do we validate things?  How do we determine authority?

So is there any integrity left?  Of course there is but this is a business model we are talking about.  Whenever money comes into the picture there are bound to be stunts like John Cow‘s that provoke people to write stuff like this.  My question is: is this really the right thing to do?  There are several answers we need to consider here:  First, will it help the blogger in the long term?  There are those that think this kind of stunt will have a negative effect on John Cow.  I think it will further polarise his audience and weed out those that aren’t of the same value set as he is.

Secondly, the use of controversy is a sure-fire tactic to get attention for a limited amount of time.  However, it will pass on and I think in a month or two we won’t be talking about it anymore.  It’s simply a stunt.   Thirdly, the thing about blogging is that there is an implied trust in the readership that I think is exploited by a great many of us.  We do not realise that people believe first then analyse later.  There is tremendous power in this concept and it’s worth writing down!  Because of this I think more care needs to be taken about the authority and quality of information provided.  These communities are self-regulating which is both a problem and a curse.  Those that hunger after the dollar will group together.   That information is based on a set of values that override others and so on.   Lastly, if there is any integrity in our blogging it should be evident in what we post.  What’s our motivation?  Money or people?  If it’s money the readers should be able to see that and then make a value judgement for themselves.  If they can’t then I think a subtle form of manipulation is going on.   That, is not good for bloggers and it’s not good for our readers.

In closing I would like to say that the John Cow stunt is something which I thought was clever but I wouldn’t do something like that myself.   Why not?  Personally, I don’t think it was very clear to the readers of his blog that he was joking.  This got me thinking that perhaps we need more integrity in our blogging.  I think this is the case because even though this was just a marketing ploy… people really believed he was hacked!  It did however get me talking about it (which isn’t saying that much!) and thinking why do we fall for things like this?  On the one hand I admire the clever ploy yet on the other I am thinking well isn’t that deceptive? Either way, I still think we need to have more integrity in our blogs and be more upfront about what we are setting out to achieve.

Technorati Tags: integrity, blogging, debate, value, blog, integrity, controversy