chuggnutt.com

This is cross-posted from Hack Bend (I was there in a "Hack Bend" capacity) because it's cool and I'm just narcissistic enough to post multiple times:

Last month I had been invited to be on media panel at the Deschutes County offices, as the resident blogging expert representing how blogging and "new media" are becoming more prevalent in news and reporting and such. (The "expert" notion is up for debate, of course. I just do what I do.) The panel was to supplement media communications training for County employees and was held today—and I have to say, it was interesting and enlightening, and definitely something I'd do again if asked.

With me on the panel were Barney Lerten, of KTVZ; Heather Roberts, of KOHD; Heidi Hagemeier, of the Bulletin; and R.L. Garrigus from the Bend Radio Group. I've known Barney from back when he was still Bend.com, and had known of the others but not met them before. All very nice folks, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out they were already familiar with Hack Bend(!).

For the most part, it was as much a learning experience for me as for the County employees, I suspect; I talked a bit about the blogging aspect of things as it pertains to media and reporting and communication, but to a large extent I just listened to the others, all of whom come from more established channels with much more background than I.

And a big thanks to Anna Johnson, the Public Communications Coordinator with the County, for inviting me and arranging it all. Thanks!

I cross-posted this over on Hack Bend, as well: that blogger bash I wrote about? Yeah, it's on for sure.

This Wednesday, April 30th, at The Summit Saloon and Stage in downtown Bend at 125 NW Oregon Avenue. Starts about 5:30ish and goes til whenever. Here's the "official" description:

The first blogger meetup was a big success! Since then there's been a lot of growth and new folks have popped up in our local "blogosphere". Meetups like this are a nice chance for all of us to gather, unwind, and put some faces together with the blogs.

This event is primarily intended for bloggers who wish to meet other bloggers. If you don't have a blog, then this may not be the get-together for you. So, if you just can't stand not being there and don't already have a blog... what are you waiting for?!

I'll be there for sure. Will you?

Today I've been officially blogging for six years. Ironically, yesterday marked Chris' five-year blogiversary. It's going around!

Not much more to it than noting the date, except to bring up the imminent next blogger meetup.

Which will be this month, on the 30th—next Wednesday.

Shannon, Jen, BOR, and I are in talks to figure out where. (Stay tuned for further announcements.) So obviously the four of us at least are in. Who else is in?

Since I'm celebrating six years of blogging this month, I thought it'd be interesting to go back through the past six Aprils and link to some highlights.

April 2002 - Really not much to see here... I was just starting blogging, playing with the software I was developing, and it's really just mundane stuff. I think Pong was a highlight.

April 2003 - Even less than in 2002. We saw Bon Jovi for the first time and there was more work on the software.

April 2004 - I was blogging up a storm. Pretty geeky stuff, an equal mixture of technical posts and non-technical-but-still-geeky posts and some random things. My musings for an A-Team movie first appeared, and—strangely enough—I first noted the use of the word "blog" on Law & Order.

April 2005 - I feel like I was hitting my stride in blogging style. A lot less of the technical posts and more... I don't know, "general" posts? Fun posts? More of a mix of links, ideas, commentary, irony... Not sure if that's the best way to describe them, but here's a sample to judge for yourself:

• Superman is a dick
• Globe
• Sesame Street top 25
• Scrapple
• $40 a day
• Cougar! (and Cougar! The Return and Cougar! Reloaded)
• The Burger King creeps me out (with 673 comments!)
• Things about Bend that I miss

April 2006 - More of the same. I really think it was around 2005 and into 2006 that I found my "voice" and I don't really cringe when I read those and later posts. You can see the seeds of Hack Bend being sown with this post (and I started Hack Bend the following month, in May '06), and this post and this post still make me laugh. A lot.

April 2007 - I blogged a lot less—no kidding, right—but I prefer to think of it as "quality over quantity" in this case. My favorite for that month has to be this post, showcasing just how wonderfully twisted San Diego-area activities can be.

It's been at the back of my mind recently that this month marks six years of blogging for me. I am of course talking about "official" blogging, with the software and reverse-chronology posts and comments and such—naturally I had web pages before 2002 but none of those were blogs.

Six years of blogging. April 22nd, 2002, to be exact, and since then I've spun out two other blogs (which lately have been getting far more attention from me) and written a crazy amount of words—exactly how many will have to be a topic for another post. But I keep thinking that this is some sort of milestone (since I missed the five-year anniversary) and that it should be celebrated somehow.

Shannon's organizing another blogger meetup this month, I believe, so maybe something in conjunction with that.

Thoughts?

On Thursday I was interviewed by Peter Sachs from our local paper the Bulletin for an article on the local blogging community, and today the article showed up—on the front page, no less! Here's the link to the online version.

I didn't get my picture in it this time (unlike the last time, a few years ago, that we bloggers were profiled), but—allow me to gloat a little—I did get the first quote. Which was a total surprise to me; I actually figured I was more incidental this time around, since there were a bunch of other people that were talked to before me.

On a similar note, I was invited by Anna Johnson, Public Communications Coordinator for Deschutes County, to serve on a media panel on blogging and the media late in April. I accepted, and as that approaches, I'll probably have more to say on it.

Fun! Maybe there is something to this blogging thing after all...

Jen posted something along the lines of what I was thinking; first there was National Novel Writing Month, now there's also a National Blog Posting Month, what's next?

Any why are they both for November? Did the NaBloPoMo guys just follow the model too closely?

Okay, enough rhetorical questions. (The answers, by the way, are National [insert meme here] Month, they aped NaNoWriMo, and yes.) For what it's worth, I'm half-seriously considering trying NaNoWriMo (that's the one where you try to write a 50,000-word novel in a month)—I know, I know, I've said this before—but by now everyone should know I'm full of grandiose schemes and ideas, right? Right?

At any rate, blogging every day isn't really that much of a stretch, since I'm more or less doing that already (not here recently, but certainly between my other two blogs). But the novel... you'd have to average 1667 words per day just to meet the 50,000 mark.

(For reference, my longest piece (I think it's my longest) here on chuggnutt.com is this, at about 3500 words, just over twice what that daily average should be.)

Something to chew on. At least the idea's out there in the ether now. And it looks as though Jen will be participating in both—though I like her idea of National Cookbook Writing Month (NaCoWriMo?) in an ironic sort of way...

Jake beat me to the punch on blogging this, but I couldn't resist anyway. I got this comment on my clothesline post the other day:

The rules are the rules. Anyone who doesn't want to live by the rules can go live in the ugly lowlands.

It was signed "Sally Heatherton" and points to the blog "Marvelous Bend!". Intrigued (I mean, would someone really say such a thing?), I checked out the blog and was utterly incredulous for a minute, and then realized that it's a fake. Satire. And it's brilliant! It's freakin' brilliant!

Well, maybe not that brilliant, but it's damn funny. (And sad to say, plausible enough—I actually know someone very much like this.)

Like Jake, I went through searching the web and DIAL and Dex and found nothing.

Almost nothing, that is. It's not an identity or anything like that, but (up until today) the only result I could get for "Sally Heatherton" on Google (quotes included) was a hit on a character in a book: The Barrow Murder by James Huston. Via Google's Book Search (that's good stuff):

I went to the window of a teller I knew at the bank, Sally Heatherton. We had even dated for a short time, until she called our relationship off. "I don't want to get involved with someone who's broke all the time," she announced. "A loser. I want to get married to someone who's a success, who can support me, so I can get the hell out of this teller cage."

I guess the new game around here is "Guess Who Sally Heatherton Really Is."

One more day and I'm off to the Oregon Brewers Festival; like last year, I'm going again with the intent of blogging the experience. (You can read all of my OBF-related stuff on The Brew Site here.)

What's different this year, though, is that I, as a blogger, am also recognized as a media/press person; I contacted the OBF press guy and as a result, I get the full treatment: press kit, program, and all. Now I know most media/press folks (and a few pro bloggers) would be entirely blasé about it, but I have to say—I'm incredibly excited about this! Maybe the shine will wear off at some point, but for now, I just think it's too cool.

I'm also hoping to meet other bloggers and writers, and brewers, and, well, anybody interesting. So I'm trying something new; I'll have my cellphone with me but I don't necessarily want to publish my phone number for the world to see and abuse, so I registered a free phone number and voicemail with PrivatePhone—a service from NetZero that seems promising.

How it works is I get a free private phone number, and all calls to it go directly to voicemail. I can check this voicemail via phone or computer.

So here's the deal; if anyone wants to get a hold of me this weekend, call and leave a message on this number: 360-362-1627. I'll check for messages every hour or so, and call you back.

(Yeah, I couldn't get an Oregon area code. What's up with that?)

I'll also try to be checking email, but that won't be happening til evenings, if I get the chance. So don't rely on that if you want to reach me sooner rather that later.

Off to drink beer and blog about it!

A few link-worthy items that caught my eye but that I can't squeeze a full post out of (yet)...

The Real Oregon: a new(ish) blog subtitled "Oregon for the eccentric traveler." Looks promising, with travel tidbits about Oregon that seem pretty interesting to me.

How a $2 bottle transformed the wine industry: Charles Shaw wine (AKA Two (or Three) Buck Chuck) turns five. Who'd'a thunk it? And for the record, I rather like the wines.

Burst Culture: A bit of brilliance from Warren Ellis that's been making the rounds online. Pretty much ties in with ideas I've been having about the web and blogging, and giving me stuff to think about.

I'm adding up the numbers from my three blogs, and it turns out that between them I wrote approximately 101,192 words among 511 blog entries for 2006. Wow... the previous year the numbers were 78,181 and 466. Another way to look at it: that's roughly the equivalent of a novel a year.

Go and check out today's Pearls Before Swine comic strip. It's the good stuff.

When I said "the first part of my day" in my earlier post today, I really had no idea that actually meant "the entire day." Somehow I always undershoot these estimates with the misplaced optimism... like also thinking I'd only need one load of compost...

In order to topdress the lawn with compost, I had to borrow my dad's truck so I could haul it in bulk (ever tried to cover several thousand square feet of lawn with only bags of fertilizer? Me neither, and I wasn't about to try). My mom had suggested steer manure compost, and most places in town that offer it (always in a mix with "yard debris") were outrageously expensive, so we settled on getting it from Hershey Cattle Company over in Redmond for only $15 per yard. This is actually a 40/60 mix of manure with topsoil or something, but it was still half as costly as the next place.

The catch, of course, to borrowing Dad's truck was that I had to drive out to his place (in Alfalfa) and help him load a couch into the back of the truck, which he'd promised to a co-worker. So out I went at 8:30 in the morning. We loaded up the couch, tied it up, and I followed him back into town.

I helped him deliver the couch, to an apartment complex behind COCC, which of course was on the second floor, up a narrow, cracked concrete staircase. Once that was done, we were back to my place, where Dad took my car back home and left me with the truck. By now it was about 10:30.

Let me digress for a bit about Earth Day, since I did mention it in the title to this post. Today being both the anniversary of this blog and Earth Day, it was of course the perfect day to do Earth-friendly yardwork with (ahem) organic eco-friendly fertilizer. My wife transplanted flowers. I worked out in the sun all day. So it doesn't get any more "Earth Day" than that, despite the goofy guy in a "Cat in the Hat" hat on Z21 yapping about how cool it was that there was some parade downtown to celebrate... how cool the Earth is, or something (hey, his words, not mine). Okay, digression over.

I left around 10:50 or so for Redmond. (I actually had to turn back after two blocks because I forgot my tarp. You didn't think I was going to drive all the way back from Redmond with a truckload of manure and not have it tarped, did you?) Let me just say this about my dad's truck: I know it's been awhile since I had my S-10, but holy crap the clutch on his truck is way looser than mine was and that truck's seen some miles (and it was only a year older than mine). I was about halfway to Redmond before I got used to driving it.

Got to the Hershey place, paid for a yard (which pretty much fills up an S-10 truckbed), and panicked a bit when the guy dumped the load of manure into the truck with the backhoe and I thought for a moment the shocks were going to go. All of a sudden I was driving a rear-wheel low-rider—really low. I wasn't looking forward to the drive home (on busy Highway 97 nearly the whole way). So I tarped up the load, tied it, and was pulling out when I realized another nasty little surprise had crept up on me.

You ever drive a pickup truck when it's fully loaded in back? And by "fully loaded" I mean overloaded? Yeah, besides the obvious (it takes a lot longer to speed up and slow down), the entire front end seems to float around, like you're suddenly piloting a wobbly boat. I hadn't really remembered that little phenomenon since living at home and hauling over-burdened loads of hay. I was less than thrilled.

The drive home was uneventful, though (if a little tense). By the time I got back it was nearly 11:30.

Now, this compost was really good, really soil-like in composition. It still stank like steer manure, but it might as well be topsoil in appearance. I figured it would be easy to spread, because we have this little Turf Builder® spreader with adjustable spray opening, and I could just walk around the yard, pushing the spreader and blithely spraying manure all over the place. So I load it up, and the thing won't work worth a damn. It's just too small for what we're dealing with.

So that meant back to the tried-and-true method for cursing gardeners everywhere: wheelbarrow and shovel, and spreading it by hand.

And of course today was a windy day. Not just breezy, but big wind gusts that would come in and handily blow steer manure dust from the shovel all over the place—in your shoes, on your clothes, in your face and eyes. Very lovely. I think I can still sense the stuff in my nasal cavity. But I got a rhythm going finally, and went back for a second load at about 2:30.

Same routine as before, only I think this load was heavier: piloting a jerky boat down the gusty highway. This load went quicker, thanks to my wife helping, and we even had a couple of wheelbarrow loads left over (now in a pile out by the shed). By the time I'd showered and was sitting down to relax, it was 5:20! Where'd the day go? Oh yeah, I got a bunch of shit done... (rim shot).

Now I don't want to get off on a rant here, but I'm really getting tired of owning a lawn. I think I'm beginning to hate it, actually. The stupid thing is full of dry and dead patches, there's not enough topsoil underneath the front half (thus necessitating the topdressing), watering is a joke during the summer months (we're on the edge of the High Desert, remember?), and general maintenance of what amounts to a crop of an invasive plant species is wearing very, very thin with me.

And what are lawns good for, anyway? Let's see, sitting on (watch out for bugs)... avoiding dog poo... playing croquet on (if you're British)... lawn darts (try not to kill the opponent)... hmmm. Jeez, when I was growing up, we had very little lawn, and we kids always ran off to play in the dirt and rocks and trees anyway. Go figure.

(Okay, not entirely true; the lawn made a good wrestling ring when we were trying out WWF wrestling moves. But they say kids shouldn't do that nowadays, so...)

Me, I'd be perfectly happy with a little more natural Central Oregon wilderness. But that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.

The rest of my day involved drinking some beer and reading my favorite new book. Now that's the right way to end a day.

And oh yeah, I even sunburned my neck a bit. Now I'm just a red neck hauling manure around in an old truck.

Go figure.

Yes, it was exactly four years ago today that I started this blog. I don't have much to say right now, I just wanted to mark the occasion.

Though I should probably do something special for it. The first part of my day will be hauling manure around, topdressing the yard, so I guess I'll have to come up with something better for later. ;)

I've just gotta give Shannon props for writing up the quote of the year: "i thought it was cool in a blog stalker sort of way." Love it! I am totally going to steal it. :)

Okay, maybe not for the entire year... but I'll give it to her for April, at least.

So, yeah. Go check it out. It's funny.

I see today that the new WordPress.com free blog service went live. It's a hosted setup, just like Blogger. Interesting, so I decided, what the hell, I've got a few minutes before I leave for lunch, so I just set up free blogs on both WordPress and Blogger.

Why? Well, to test out the various services, and see how they work. I've always done the blogging thing from the ground up, writing and maintaining my own software, so I'm curious as to how well the free services work. And it makes me more of an expert in blogging.

Actually, I've used WordPress before, in setting up my mom's blog, so I'm already a bit familiar with it. So far the online service is very similar.

First impressions—WordPress's service is easier to use than Blogger's. Especially for non-techie types; to add links in the sidebar, Blogger requires that you edit the HTML of the site template itself, whereas WordPress gives you their easy link management interface to do so.

Barely has the smoke cleared from my last blogging for money post and there's already another new blog network launching: Instablogs (tagline: "A News Organization based on Blogging"). Apparently this one is based in India, and their aim is to launch 50(!) blogs on October 5th. Seems like a lofty goal. Of the first seven blog teasers they list, the astronomy blog sounds the most interesting.

Well, the "Blogging for Money" meme is rearing its head again. Wired just ran this story which is kind of an overview:

Whether you are Calacanis, Denton or Hauslaib, to create a profitable blog requires much more than a keyboard, an internet connection and too much caffeine. You need a talented writer entertaining enough to hold an audience, a consistent publishing schedule, content worth linking to by other bloggers and worthy of press coverage, marketing savvy to sell advertising or enlist third-party networks and, as a culmination of all of this, plenty of traffic.

Says Hauslaib: "If a blog debuted with virtually zero startup costs, then it takes little to earn a profit. One ad will do it. But at the bare minimum, a lone blogger will likely need to attract high four- to five-figure daily visitor figures to even attempt a blog-based livable wage."

And, there's a new blog network that just launched: b5 media, with 13 or so blogs in the network. Their blogs range from the predictable, well-worn ground of Microsoft, movies and sports, to some more promising, interesting ones, like Literally Blogging (about literature), Unplugged Living (how to live off the grid, which seems ironic to blog about), and She Knows Best (terrible name, IMHO, but "lifestyle tips for guys" which could work).

So, when am I launching my own blog network? Riiiight. :)

Today's hint that blogging is gradually getting mainstream comes from an article in this month's Realtor Magazine titled, "Blogging for profit". It was pointed out to me here at work (since I work for a builder, with real estate agents coming and going). There's nothing new here, it's just another introductory article, though there's an interesting statistic in the print version of the article that doesn't show up online: only 26% of Americans are familiar with blogs. Which means that 74% of Americans haven't heard of blogs (or are unfamiliar with them; I guess this depends on what your definition of "familiar" is). I'd guess that sounds about right.

Busy busy busy weekend, that's why I haven't been posting. And I'm getting hammered at work with things, but I needed to jump on to post this bit, lest I forget again:

There's finally another Bend blogger meetup this week! Wednesday (July 27) at the Farmer's Market downtown, at six o'clock. Basically we'll have a picnic in Drake Park. (Buy your own dinner at the Farmer's Market.) We'll be meeting near the booth selling fish, though Shannon said if anyone gets there late, look for her and an orange blanket. So if you see a group of people sitting by an orange blanket in the park near the Farmer's Market, odds are it's us.

Maybe we could get a roll call in the comments here, so we know who all can make it?

Jeremy Zawodny wonders When will blogging peak? I don't think it will, anytime soon or maybe even at all. Why? Because, like I wrote last month, it ain't even mainstream yet. Plus, it's too compelling. It will likely evolve, but it isn't even close to peaking, if it ever will.

Dave Winer mostly agrees with this assessment, but then writes this:

Blogs with ads, like their print counterparts, strive to be as broad as possible, to reach as many people, and in doing so, lose their value as an ad for the author.

No, I don't think that's true at all. Blogs with ads don't automatically lose their value. I do think blogs that try to be as broad as possible and make money with ads largely won't work; it's the niche blogging that works. Blogs that do this the right way are making money. Otherwise Jason Calacanis' Weblogs, Inc. wouldn't have just made over $2,000 in a single day with AdSense.

You'll note that I have AdSense on both of my blogs (this and The Brew Site). This blog is broad in scope, and has wildly varying ads; if I was relying on it to make money (rather than just running the ads as a nice extra), well, I'd have to keep my day job. The Brew Site, being much more focused/niched, doesn't make as much as this site but does have a higher quality of ads and click rates. If I were to get the kind of traffic there that I get here, I'd see some nice figures, I think.

Finally, in other blog news, Scoble today tries to downplay being a A-list blogger. Get this: "Forget the A-listers. They don't matter anymore. Well, they don't matter as much." Yeah, right. Sorry, but being an A-list blogger is better than ever, period. Doubt it? In the same post, Scoble mentions that he "was talking to Chris Pirillo [another A-list blogger] the other day about the 'long tail' metaphor and while we were flying over mountains in the Boeing plane...." This refers to the fact that himself and several other prominent (A-list) bloggers were invited on an exclusive test flight featuring Boeing's new in-flight WiFi service... they all got flown to Walla Walla for wine. And buzzed some mountains.

Man, don't try to tell me that the A-listers don't matter anymore. Jeez.

Hmm. Anyone else notice the irony of this post? I'm pointing to the A-listers. Must be sour grapes or something.

monkeyinabox: "Are blogs really as mainstream, as some of us thought?"

No. No they're not. That's easy to forget for those of us "on the inside," but blogs really are still a fringe phenomenon.

They're getting there, though. The Journal of Accountancy just ran an article called "Would You, Could You, Should You Blog?" which is a decent introduction to blogs for accountants. Now that's getting mainstream.

But I'm really not. If I'm burning out on anything, it's work and the daily routine of it. As a consequence, blogging takes a backseat and even though I have things I want to write about, when I'm finally at the computer at a point where I can, I just don't have the energy or ambition to do it. Which is ironic, since what I'd really rather be doing is blogging/writing full time instead. But alas, I haven't yet (figured out how to) (gotten to the point where I can) make enough money doing that...

There's a new Bend blog in town: Bend Reality Check, but I don't know how long it will last. I say this because the tagline is, "Mission: to maintain some sort of reality for those who think they are the most important people in Bend, Oregon" and it appears to have been launched primarily to get back at Shannon and Simone for blogging their bad experience at Kanpai. As such it's full of snarky comments about the two of them.

That's too bad, because this sounds like it could be a good insider's blog about the restaurants in Bend:

I am an culinary hermit that lives in the shadows of Bend, Oregon. In a former life I was a culinary mercinary in this town, with 14 years of food slinging under my belt. Titles were bestowed upon me, such as: restaurant manager, production chef, lead saute chef, kitchen manger, etc, but I renouced my titles to walk the earth, like Caine in Kung Fu, only unsheathing my food mojo for special people and occasions.

So I've helped my mom to set up and start a weblog, to be found at DianeAbernathy.com. She's a real estate agent, herbalist, teacher and more, it should make for interesting reading. Go check it out, I'm making the case that a weblog is much better tool for building an online presence and influence than a typical real estate agent's website (for instance).

Incidentally, I set the blog up using WordPress, which I mostly find to be pretty good software. I'd recommend it for anyone who has their own server, it was about the quickest and easiest software to set up that I've ever seen. And so far it works pretty well, too.

This article from the Wall Street Journal online is actually rather remarkable. It compares and fits blogging with mainstream journalism, and is maybe the fairest take on it I've seen.

6. It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM [main stream media], and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. You lose status and respect if your take on a story that is patently stupid. You lose status and respect if you are unprofessional or deliberately misleading. And once you've lost a sufficient amount of status and respect, none of the other bloggers link to you anymore or raise your name in their arguments. And you're over. The great correcting mechanism for people on the Web is people on the Web. [emphasis mine]

There are blogs that carry political and ideological agendas. But everyone is on to them and it's mostly not obnoxious because their agendas are mostly declared.

7. I don't know if the blogosphere is rougher in the ferocity of its personal attacks than, say, Drew Pearson. Or the rough boys and girls of the great American editorial pages of the 1930s and '40s. Bloggers are certainly not as rough as the splenetic pamphleteers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who amused themselves accusing Thomas Jefferson of sexual perfidy and Andrew Jackson of having married a whore. I don't know how Walter Lippmann or Scotty Reston would have seen the blogosphere; it might have frightened them if they'd lived to see it. They might have been impressed by the sheer digging that goes on there. I have seen friends savaged by blogs and winced for them—but, well, too bad. I've been attacked. Too bad. If you can't take it, you shouldn't be thinking aloud for a living. The blogosphere is tough. But are personal attacks worth it if what we get in return is a whole new media form that can add to the true-information flow while correcting the biases and lapses of the mainstream media? Yes. Of course.

Maybe Mark Jen was the tipping point: even CNN has picked up on the "fired for blogging" meme. Read their article here. Kind of a puff piece, but does delve into some First Amendment issues.

But employee and non-employee bloggers don't have the same legal protections.

Workers who rant or rave about bosses online — whether it's done on the company clock or at home — generally don't have a strong defense.

In most states, employees who don't have a contract are considered "at-will," which means they can quit at any time and for any reason. Conversely, employers have the right to fire them at any time and for any reason, except for well-known exceptions like race, age or gender.

So whether a supervisor discovers an underling ridiculing his thinning hair at the company elevator bank, at a local bar after work, or on the worker's personal blog doesn't matter. In either instance, the boss can turn around and say, " 'We don't need you. Why don't you go work for someone else?' " said Margaret Edwards, a partner with Littler Mendelson, a national law firm that represents employers.

Cliff Palefsky, a San Francisco employment lawyer, says there's a false sense that employers can't punish their workers for voicing personal opinions — on their blogs or anywhere else. "People mistakenly believe that the First Amendment protects them in the workplace, which is generally not the case," he said.

Gee, it sure seems like the way to quickly get famous online these days is to get fired for blogging.

Fortune magazine has a big article about blogging out (here, via Joi Ito), it's pretty good. There's a few quotes I really liked that I pulled for everyone's enjoyment:

• "If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie" — quote from Steve Hayden of Ogilvy & Mather
• "Yes, for all its democratic trappings, there are hierarchies of influence in the blogging world."
• "E-mail is for old people, says Irving; kids prefer to communicate by phone and IM, and, now, by keeping blogs."
• "Our legal department loves the blogs, because it basically is a written-down, backed-up, permanent time-stamped version of the scientist's notebook. When you want to file a patent, you can now show in blogs where this idea happened." — quote from Marissa Mayer of Google

Email is for old people? What about if I use email to notify me when I get a blog comment? Hm.

The Google comment about timestamping ideas in blogs in especially interesting; I touched on similar issues and themes nearly a year ago in my RSS as Poor Man's Copyright post. (I don't know how patentable an idea from a blog might be, though.)

At least according to this Newsweek article on the subject:

In order to crack into the upper strata, you have to post frequently to stay on the fickle radar of this ADD-infested crowd. You have to link prodigiously to other blogs, increasing your profile and increasing the chances for inbound links. And you must hold strong opinions about what you're writing about—passion is required in a good blog.

Heh.

Interesting article, if a little odd-sided and basic. More interesting to me is that it's an honest acknowledgement of the dichotomy between the "haves" and the "have-nots" of the blogging world: all too often I've seen many of these same A-listers deny there is any such hierarchy. That's bullshit, of course. I hardly need to point that out. I've never been able to figure out why they do that, though.

And what's up with this?

"If you're into blogs to make money, you're into it for the wrong reasons," says Searls. "Do you ask your back porch what its business plan is?"

Not only does this notion seem quaintly naive, I have to wonder why Doc Searls—of all people, given his background as one of the original Clutrain authors—is dictating the reasons for people to be blogging. Jeez, get off the high horse. If someone's into blogs to make money, that's as legitimate as someone who's blogging their lives for a few family and friends.

(And speaking of Cluetrain, I've got to get this off my chest: I recently read The Cluetrain Manifesto, and while I generally found the core ideas and first couple of essays to be good, mostly it's overrated. Blasphemy! Yes, overrated; one of the things that really bugged me about the last half is that none of it seemed relevant to, well, the real world, and instead just came off as another business book where the rich guys are preaching their brand of success to that percentage of the upper middle class who are office workers for some big corporation.)

Anyway, the article was via Scoble. Let's see if I get some link love! :).

Since the beginning of the year, I set a personal goal for myself to write and publish something on my weblog here at least once a day, and I've actually stuck to it. (Yeah, there's some gaps on the calendar there, but if you look closely, it's because the post didn't get done until something like 12:07 a.m.—so while I didn't technically get it in on the calendar day, I still count it because it was still part of the day I had, before going to bed.) The trick, of course, is coming up with something to write everyday—or rather, as I've been finding, something to write that I have time to do.

(This is the point where other writers, upon hearing my complaint about not having the time to write, scoff and insist that if I truly was a writer, I would make the time. I know. Fair enough.)

I've got several ideas for longer articles that I want to (eventually) write and post, but by the time I'm at the point in my evening where I can sit down to write, it's late and I don't really want to stay up much past midnight most of the time, so what I'm stuck with is trying to come up with shorter items to blog about. And see, that's actually harder for me sometimes than in coming up with longer items to write about. What I could do is start longer articles in draft mode and work on them as time permits, and post them when ready—and I do, sometimes—but that doesn't really mesh with my goal of blogging something everyday.

Anyway, I'm rambling a bit, but it felt like something to get off my chest. I actually spent a good part of my time this evening working on a long article that I'll publish here soon, but since that's not ready for prime time I wanted to get this out of my system, too.

Any other bloggers out there with similar thoughts?