Friday, November 24, 2006

Blogging, fame and fortune

I single out two articles I've read recently about the new trend among bloggers and how blogging might evolve in an industry:

First an article from The Economist about "Blogging for a living"
An excerpt:

On her blog, called Dooce, Heather Armstrong chronicles her life as a disenchanted Mormon in Salt Lake City, her former career as a high-flying web designer in Los Angeles, her pregnancy and postpartum depression, and so on. A year ago, her blog started generating enough advertising revenue to become the main source of income for her family. She is not alone. There are now just enough people like Ms. Armtsrong to signify a new trend: blogging as a small business.


And a second one, from the Los Angeles Times, about a peculiar lot among the bloggers, the econbloggers:
Some fragments:


...blogging doesn't seem to be the kind of activity that an economics textbook would endorse. A cost-benefit analysis might conclude that the economist pours time into a blog and gets little or no financial reward. Few blogs, for example, have ads to generate revenue. It would follow, then, that the most prominent economists would lose the most from blogging. But not all economists concur that time spent blogging is a waste [...]

Becker, who writes a blog with federal appeals court judge Richard A. Posner, said more people had approached him on the street since the blog started two years ago. They sometimes take photos and ask for autographs. Econo-fans are responding, Becker figures, because the blogs put important pocketbook issues into understandable language. Whereas former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan had "Greenspeak" — the carefully convoluted jargon whose comprehensibility rivaled that of Klingon — the blogs connect economics to daily life.



So what are you waiting for: Go Pro!

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