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  How Has Blogging Changed You?

  Steve Spalding 2:51 pm on August 8, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: mashable, qa (10)

  10. How has blogging changed for you personally over the past half decade?

  In Internet time I’m old, so I’ve gone through almost everything a blogger can

  The pure joy of writing on the Internet. The periods of self-aggrandizement when you believe that the Internet owes you an audience. Blog drama and cyclical arguments about topics so esoteric that it makes academic banter seem practical. Finding myself and losing myself and finding yourself again. Trying to squeeze out as many pageviews as you can. Not caring about readership at all. I’ve seen and experienced just about all of it. Blogging, if you take it seriously, is psychodrama at its finest.

  These days, I just enjoy the ride. If I’ve learned anything it is that the only way you are going to survive as a blogger is to stop taking everything you do so seriously and stop worrying about what being a blogger means. If you like to write, write. If you want an audience, write a lot of good things. If you are thinking about fame and fortune, write a lot of great things and make sure you have a day job because it’s going to be rough going. If you find that you hate writing on your blog, be honest with yourself and realize you’re probably doing it for the wrong reasons and adjust accordingly.

   

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  Blogging Tools

  Steve Spalding 2:49 pm on August 7, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: mashable, qa (10)

  8. How has the set of blogging tools that you use changed in the past 5 years?

  They change every week. I’m a purist when it comes to writing, so I’ve been using Notepad++ for as long as I can remember but everything else changes with the times. I used to have Digg and Reddit buttons, these days I have Twitter and Facebook ones. I used to use MyBlogLog, these days I use Twitter. It used to be hard to find a video and harder still to insert it into a post, these days I can hop over to Youtube and do it in seconds. Blogging tools have made it easier for people to focus on content production rather than the often tedious process of content formatting, if anything is responsible for the popularity of blogging the steady improvement of the tools over the years has to be it.

   
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  Blogging Community Attitudes

  Steve Spalding 2:47 pm on August 7, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: mashable, qa (10)

  7. By the same token, have you noticed any changes in the attitude or makeup of the blogging community itself over the past 5 years?

  We have become less of a community. It used to be that saying that you were a “blogger” meant something, you were a part of a secret club with a decoder ring and meetings in your friend Sal’s tree house. These days almost everyone is a “blogger” and the delineation between someone who gets 5 visitors a year and 50,000 visitors an hour is a little blurry. I think that’s a good thing because, the faster we walk away from the label blogger, the faster we can get down to the real business of producing valuable content for the people who are looking to read it.

   
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  Attitudes Towards Bloggers

  Steve Spalding 2:45 pm on August 6, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: mashable, qa (10)

  6. Have you noticed any difference in attitudes toward bloggers by readers and by mainstream media? What sort of differences? Good or bad?

  People assume that “bloggers” are one thing, armchair journalists who are trying to take down the traditional press. That is not true. Some of us are armchair pundits, economists, sociologists, scientists or just plain writers who think that people should spend time paying attention to what we have to say. I think that while it has improved, the media still takes a defensive stance when it comes to bloggers and that is dangerous in a landscape where individuals with a little gumption and a whole lot of raw talent are so readily available and willing to do their part to improve the mass media we all consume.

  The best thing I’ve seen is that at least mainstream media is taking a crack at the blogging thing these days. They might only be shaky, baby steps right now fraught with the sort of accidents one would expect from an industry that is not used to the wild-west mentality that many bloggers hold but they are steps nonetheless and I honestly believe that if they keep at it they will reap the benefits of timeliness and dynamism that blogging allows.

   
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  Social Media And Blogging

  Steve Spalding 2:42 pm on August 6, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: mashable, qa (10)

  5. The rise of social media has clearly been one of the most important shifts to hit our culture in recent years, but for blogging especially it has proved to be revolutionary. How has social media affected your blogging?

  We used to call it “Web 2.0,” now we call it Social Media because Facebook has 500 Million users and Oprah is on Twitter. I think Social Media has revolutionized our ability to talk about what it is we do in a way that almost anyone can understand. It has given the digerati a nail to hang our hats on and an umbrella to put the marketing, collaboration and communication tools we’ve used for ages under so they seem less like toys and more like the revolutions we have spent years trying to convince the world that they are. I mean, it’s tough explaining how amazing something like Foursquare is without the using the word “social.” You should try it.

  How has it affected by blogging? Social Media tools have given me new channels to communicate across, has allowed me to meet a bunch of exciting folks I would never have met, has given me tons of fodder for posts and has generally made the whole blogging thing a lot more dynamic and life affirming than it was back in the PHPNuke days. It hasn’t changed my world but it has expanded it in ways that are difficult to talk about unless you’ve spent a lot of time in the trenches with it.

   
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  Blogger Credibility

  Steve Spalding 2:41 pm on August 5, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: mashable, qa (10)

  4. Blogging seems to have gained a lot more credibility in recent years. Do you agree? Do you feel that blogs are now an essential part of the news media landscape? Does that come with any added responsibility?

  To me, blogging is just writing on the Internet, it is no more or less special than that (by the way, I think writing on the Internet is pretty darn special). If you are a writer and people care about what you have to say, and you have the good fortune to get on the stage at a time when people are willing to hear it, then you will have all the credibility in the world. If the years have done anything at all, they have exposed a greater portion of the public to writing that they may have otherwise missed. Traditional publishing has a hard time tracking down talent, and even less space to corral that talent once it’s found. Good bloggers are just gaining the recognition they would have if traditional media was more efficient. If for no other reason, I think that makes incredibly powerful and absolutely necessary if media hopes to keep up with the world they purport to cover.

  As for responsibilities, I believe that blogging and journalism are two very different things that can often overlap. Bloggers are responsible to the degree that they wish to play at journalism. Otherwise, I think their responsibilities are a lot harder to define and generally those who have tried have failed miserably. Go figure.

   
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  How Have Blogs Become So Successful?

  Steve Spalding 2:39 pm on August 5, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: mashable, qa (10)

  3. It was about 5 or 6 years ago that blogging began to really reshape mainstream news media with the launch of some of the major blog brands today (like Gawker’s blogs, Huffington Post, the former Weblogs Inc, Mashable, etc.). What has changed over the past 5 years that has allowed the blog model to be so successful?

  Nothing any more complex than money and time. A long time ago before anyone really cared, advertising rep agencies like Federated Media (along with a few others) injected cash into many of the biggest blogs in the world, which gave these blogs the ability to hire more staff to generate huge volumes of high quality content. Eventually these blogs were about to court their own advertisers and cut their own deals which allowed them to hire more staff to generate high quality content and spin out the cottage industry of conferences, events, spin-off sites and co-sponsored products that stabilized their revenue streams.

  All the while, time was working in their favor. As they kept making more content they kept appearing in Google and kept getting linked to by bigger and better sites which lead to more traffic, more relevance, more links and most importantly more money. As people who work on the Interweb know, eventually you hit the tipping point where traffic, cash and relevancy make you skyrocket above the competition which is where many of the big blogs find themselves today.

   
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  Changes In The Blogging Landscape

  Steve Spalding 2:39 pm on August 4, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: mashable, qa (10)

  2. How has this profoundly altered the blogging landscape?

  Funny thing about rags to riches stories, someone always ends up with the riches and everyone else gets rags. I think the dawn of this new medium has had a profound effect on everyone who is now sitting at their desks thinking about spinning out a “web log.” Since so many people have found success, it has driven the number of blogs to mind boggling levels. Unfortunately, we just can’t read it all. That means that for most people, blogs that might have done incredibly well five years ago just aren’t good enough anymore.

  Either the idea has already been done to death (e.g. funny pictures with captions) or they can’t build it out to scale fast enough to make a dent in the audience of those who came before. The Internet, in a lot of ways, is a winner takes all sort of enterprise with the winners appearing quickly, growing quickly and gobbling down a ton of the market share in their wake. The downside is that these days, the odds of you ending up with a blockbuster blog are nearly nil but those who do are usually doing something pretty interesting.

   
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  Most Dramatic Change In Blogging

  Steve Spalding 2:35 pm on August 4, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: blogging (2), mashable, qa (10)

  1 – What is the one thing that has most dramatically changed in blogging over the past 5 years?

  I’ll start with “everything” and then just tell you a story. Blogging like every other system, at its heart, is generational. With blogging, the generations just move a heck of a lot faster. Those of us who were around when the heavy hitters like Mashable were just starting out got to see something that few individuals are privy to, the birth of a new medium. It’s hard to believe these days, but there was a time when it was sort of uncommon for blogging types to make appearances on CNN.

  It’s easy to convince yourself that the blogs we spend all of our time reading, with their fancy parties and fifty daily posts must have sprung into being out of whole cloth at some magical point in the Internet’s past. It never happened, trust me on this one. Even the biggest blogs started off as these adorably small, passionate little enterprises cobbled together out of fairy dust and WordPress plugins with no staff, tiny audiences and dreams that basically amounted to generating enough cash from Adsense to hire on a few more writers. It’s that transformation from obscurity to relevance that anyone who plays in technology needs to understand in order to make sense of this world. It’s that change that I am really lucky to have had the opportunity to see first hand.

   
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  The good people over at Mashable used so…

  Steve Spalding 9:41 pm on August 3, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: interview, mashable, qa (10)

  The good people over at Mashable used some of my ramblings for a retrospective on the last five years of blogging. I’ve decided to give all of you, my dear readers, the full story. Over the next few days I’ll share the question and answer session I had with Josh Catone.