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Oh, sorry, it’s just me sneaking back in through that window I left open. Now, where was I…

My good friend Sonny Chan from Sokablog has just responded to my claims that he ripped off my design over at the Wordpress MU forums. What did he have to say? It’s a classic. Just try not to laugh too hard, OK. (more…)

I know it’s not a straight rip as such, but I know they’ve lifted my code because most of the links point straight back to wurk.

Check it out. The first image here is a screengrab from the wurk hub site. The second is a screengrab from a WordpressMU install called Sokablog. Spot any similarities? Have you ever been ripped off? And if so, what did you do about it?

Check out this list of Google’s top paying keywords. If you can’t be bothered, here are the top 15 or so keywords - and the price they’re attacting. (more…)

The Guardian today tells us that media coverage of blogging in the UK has led to increased awareness of it among internet users, however, it hasn’t led to more people writing or reading blogs. They say:

The findings of the British Market Research Bureau’s quarterly survey led senior associate director Trevor Vagg to conclude that blogging has received disproportionate media coverage and the whole idea of citizen journalism is overhyped.

Awareness of blogs dramatically increased in the three months to the end of February, with the proportion of internet users in Britain who have never heard of a blog, or blogging, falling from 45% in the previous quarter three to 30%, according to the BMRB survey.

But despite this there has been no significant change in the number of people who publish blogs, which remains at just 2% of UK internet users. Furthermore, only 10% - around 2.8 million people - of internet users view a weblog once a month or more.

“There has been disproportionate coverage of blogging, still only a minority ever read blogs and a tiny proportion publish them,” said Mr Vagg. “This suggests there is an over-hyping about how big the idea of people’s journalism is through using technology like camera phones and weblogs.”

But Mr Vagg recognised that the relatively small number of bloggers potentially wielded a hugely disproportionate influence in setting trends and opinion-leading.

“It may well be that those who do publish weblogs are more likely to be opinion formers and therefore have a larger influence than their numbers would suggest,” he said.

Y’know, I think I have a pretty good handle on what the real issue is - at least here in the UK.

Maybe if blogs had never been called ‘blogs’ in the first place (and were actually called something like ‘online magazines’, for example) then there would probably be much more of an uptake in terms of readership and writing.

To most people, the word ‘blog’ is just a bit too geeky and not really cool enough, and that’s what turns many people off. Plus, I’m guessing that most of the people who have heard of the term ‘blog’ still think of them as being nothing but personal online diaries or journals that are - let’s be honest here - full of noting but self-indulgent crap about cats.

But anyway, being geeky is OK if your audience is mainly other bloggers and geeks (which is part of the reason why gadget blogs are often more successful than other topics). But if you’re trying to tap into a more mainstream audience (such as the average person in the street where I live) and you’re also trying to cover ‘offline’ topics like crafts or sports, then I think you’re going to run into problems with building an audience - simply because a blog is called a blog.

I’ll tell you what, though, that damn article doesn’t help matters much.

Damn, I’m linking to Chartreuse again, but there was a good discussion over there about WeblogsInc’s plan to build a network of state-specific blogs.

Me, I’d like to build a network of city-specific video blogs. I couln’t be arsed to write the whole thing out again, so I’ve copied and pasted my comments here.

Any thoughts? Good idea? Load of rubbish? What do you think?

I’ll tell you what I’d look at often: a city-based blog network that uses video footage and video interviews with real people as much as it uses written words.

And I’d watch it whether I lived in that city or not.

…for my citylogs, I’d be more thinking along the lines of having a small team of videobloggers per city (in a similar model to metroblogging but with people shooting video as well as writing, however, keeping the main focus as video).

Each of the video bloggers would be briefed to have a wander around the place, shooting interesting stuff, maybe show up at events, talk to lots of interesting looking people, etc. They’d edit and upload at home in the same way that thousands of people already do with youtube, etc. You could even save on bandwidth by hosting them at youtube.

What i think you’d find is that people would get excited if they appear in a video, and they’d tell their friends/family to go watch it, too. If it works out well enough, I can imagine having a fleet of fully branded up vans (one per city) driving round shooting footage with people following ‘em round trying to get in the videos. Maybe a little optimistic, eh? ;o)

Oh, and as for “duplicating every hodunk TV station”, I wouldn’t interested in covering ‘news’. There’s plenty of people already doing that. I’m more thinking of covering people and maybe some of the more low key, funny/offbeat stuff that news stations generally wouldn’t touch.

I also can’t see the production costs being that high with everything being decentralised like that. Thousands of people are shooting and uploading video every day. Initial costs would be equipment and maybe some decent editing software - but after that, just your average hosting costs.

Oh, and those vans, too.

;o)

So says Jason Calacanis in an email debate with Alan Meckler over at the WSJ piece, Can Bloggers Make Money?

Alan Meckler writes…

“Blogs are really diaries or microcosms of what is happening in millions of ways in daily life — ranging from special interests to business specialties to whatever. Obviously there is money to be made with blogs, but very, very few will bring in more than a few hundred dollars per year.”

I still say it’s similar to playing sports professionally. Millions do it for enjoyment, and don’t expect (or particularly want) to get anything more from it than a sense of achievement, while only a relative few take it far enough to make it their career.

As a pro blogger, you probably class yourself as a freelance writer in the broad sense of the term, right?

Oh, and you probably also work from home, too, right?

With that in mind, you should also be regularly checking out Alicia’s excellent freelance blog at http://freelance.wurk.net, and S.P. Bragg’s fantastic blog for peeps who work at home, at http://home.wurk.net.

Ummm…, like, now. 

How many times have you read the old “you need to find a brand new niche to write in, or you’ll bomb” advice?

A bunch, huh?

Well here’s another little nugget of advice for you that might upset a few people. Want to know what it is? Let me elaborate…   (more…)