Michigan Telephone, VoIP and Broadband blog

Okay, seriously, I’m not that shocked that some people get paid to blog, even though I’m not. Some of us write blog posts when we feel we have something to say, and don’t want to be pressured to output so many words per day or week. Also, in some cases, we have other things we need to do. We may have health issues that preclude writing something every single day. And some of us (I think I fall into this category) are “Winter bloggers” – we write during the times when we are trapped inside, with nothing else to do (more than one of my blog posts has originated on a rainy or snowy day).

But for people who want to make a career of it, there are opportunities available. The question is, should one be paid for writing blog posts, and if so, how much? There is an interesting post entitled
Blogging Jobs: How Much Are Bloggers Paid to Blog? in Blog Herald that suggests that many bloggers are seriously undervaluing their services.

I have mixed feelings about this article. On the one hand, I hate to see any attempts to further commercialize the web. The Internet got its start with people sharing information freely, first in Usenet newsgroups and then on early Web pages. Then the corporations moved in and suddenly everything turned business-oriented.

I sort of resent this because in the old days, if I wanted to post an article every now and then to the comp.dcom.telecom newsgroup or some other online forum, nobody had any expectations that I was then obligated to produce a certain amount of output, or else risk having my posts relegated to obscurity (there was always the risk that a post would be rejected by the group moderator, but that was another issue altogether). However, when you write a non-professional blog such as this one, it seems that if you don’t have at least a post every day (and maybe more like three or four a day) you get very little notice in the blogosphere. But, few individuals can continuously output more than one post per day (especially if you consider only quality posts that are worth reading) and maintain that output over months or years. It might be easy at first, but eventually you begin regurgitating things you’ve read elsewhere, because you realize you’ve run out of original ideas for posts. That’s when burnout begins to set in.

So that is where you have the other side of the coin – when you have a blogger (and I’m definitely not talking about myself here) that can output a quality post every day – the sort of post that people want to read, and that causes them to come back to your web site every day and/or subscribe to your RSS newsfeed – that blogger needs some incentive to keep up the good work. And since researching and writing a quality web post takes time – time that could be spent in other income-producimng pursuits – it’s not unreasonable that star bloggers get compensated for what they do.

I read somewhere (and I wish I had saved the source of this article) that you actually need a minimum of five writers to produce a successful blog. If you have fewer, you simply will not be able to produce the volume of quality articles that keep people coming back to your site. Sure, you can start a blog with only one person, or maybe even two or three, but in time they are going to get burned out. Then you start picking subjects for posts simply because you feel you need something to write about, not because it’s something your readers would actually be interested in. I have been guilty of that and I finally decided that it wasn’t worth it – if I didn’t feel the least bit passionate about a subject, why should my readers? Perhaps better to fade into obscurity than to churn out uninteresting posts.

What I sometimes think that we really need is for someone to start a blog that would be the equivalent of the old Usenet newsgroups – a way that many people could contribute posts on an occasional basis, as the mood hits them, but where there is no expectation of future output. Where the articles may at times appear more like a conversation between the various authors, but at the same time the articles should contain quality information (or at least opinion supported by facts). Unfortunately, instead of getting something like that we get things like Twitter, which only allows messages so short that you can’t really say much of anything meaningful.

Then again, maybe I’m just an olde pharte trying to relive the past. But I have to say, I really miss the days when we contributed to newsgroups and online forums with no expectation of pay, and where there was at least some sense of community (you got to know a bit about the other regular participants in the forums you participated in, even if they were semi-anonymous). We didn’t need “social networking” sites where we might pick up a whole bunch of “friends”, not one of which we know the first thing about – the better Usenet forums were a community unto themselves. Nowadays, there’s a separate web service for everything, but none of them are tied together in the way the old Usenet groups were.

And my point is, in the old days, when you posted something in a Usenet group you would often get nearly instant feedback from other group participants. Post a great idea, or a meaningful message, and people would let you know right away. That was your reward for posting. Now people post in blogs, and unless the blog is large enough and well promoted enough to have an active user base (certainly not the case with most individual blogs, although there are a few notable exceptions), you generally get nothing other than perhaps an occasional comment. But if you write for one of the large blogs, you not only get lots of feedback from readers, you also get paid. Therefore, I can certainly understand why, at this point in time, some bloggers are starting to feel like they want to be paid for every word they write.

I’m just not that way, in part because my well of ideas runs dry so often these days. But maybe there’s an opportunity here for someone who can figure out how to make it work – modernize the old Usenet news concept, and make it into something that people today would use. And remember that part of that was that people could be as anonymous as they wanted to be, or as well-known as they wished to be – it was up to the person writing the post to reveal (or not reveal) something about themselves. I am totally turned off by “social networking” sites that ask you to reveal everything but your most intimate information before you can participate (for example, it’s nobody’s damn business when I was born!). Give us the proper balance between blogging in isolation, and the community feeling of Usenet news, and you may just have a winner on your hands!