Lots of people have asked me that question and I read a post today at the Demystifying Digital Blog titled Blogging Comes of Age for Capitalists - Blog Trade Show. I don’t think this self proclaimed digitial grandmother meant any insult in her last two paragraphs but I felt compelled to address them.

I was almost thrown back to my hippy incarnation of the the ’70s (ok, the 60s), rallying and stomping and hooting in favor of something cool. Something hip. But, as with everything that makes money, and the blogosphere has made gazillions for a fortunate few, the big guys get their foot in the door, their fingers in the pie. If people have found ways to profit from 9/11, they can profit from anything. But that’s how it is with the people. We are capitalists. Entrepreneurs at heart. We like money.Therefore, as it was meant to happen, organizers and vendors exploit the blogosphere. In fact, in Las Vegas (!) this fall, there’s to be a Blogworld and New Media Expo. A tradeshow. The folks in who-knows-what outlandish leisure garb, dashing off blog entries from dining room tables across the American outback, are invited to gather in Vegas and learn what’s what in the ’sphere. If you hurry you still have time to start up your own blog and make it out to Vegas.

I found blogs just after September 11th 2001. Milblogs like Mudville Gazette, Blackfive, and Michael Yon were and still are regular reads for me. In fact after years of leaving lengthy comments and having great debates on many political blogs left right and center I finally got motivated enough to create my own blog therealuglyamerican.com and started posting.
One day I emailed one of those milbloggers and asked him for an interview via email. His name was Tim Boggs. Tim agreed to the interview. I have interviewed other soldiers and Iraqi journalists and bloggers 24 Steps to Liberty and Treasure of Baghdad. Later I put two of my friends 24 steps and Tim together to ask each other questions.

To make a long story short, I was dedicated to my blog and proud of what I had accomplished. I didn’t launch BlogWorld to get rich. I wanted to attend an event like this to meet with my blogger friends, peers and industry icons. I wanted to learn how to blog better, build my readership and yes maybe make some money from this hobby I was spending several hours a day on.  Yes we hope to make money on BlogWorld someday but we certainly wont this year.
Yes there are companies who make money from blogging, lots of them like Google (I started on blogspot), Yahoo (I use MyblogLog everyday), Six Apart (many of my favorite bloggers use Moveable Type), Podango (ever heard of Twit TV?) and Technorati (who hasn’t checked their ranking or used their search?) . Thank goodness for all of them and thousands of other like them. Without them we wouldn’t have the wonderful publishing and broadcasting tools we do today. There would be no blogging or podcasting without them.
I am proud to say Military.com is a sponsor of our event and they will host a track on milblogging at BlogWorld. Matt and Uncle Jimbo from Blackfive will be there. I am proud to say Tim Boggs and I have remained friends since he as returned home and he will be an honored guest at BlogWorld. I am proud to say Michael Yon will (technology and God willing) address BlogWorld attendees via live video feed from Iraq. I am proud to say the amazing ladies from Soldiers Angels will be there. I hope you all take the time to thank them for their service and what they do.

There will be lots of other communities represented, attractions and reasons to attend but this one is particularly special for me.  I hope the Digital Grandparent and her readers will join me and thousands of other bloggers to celebrate what we have created and achieved. I hope she realizes this is about far more important things than money.

Blog on!
Rick Calvert
CEO & Co-founder
BlogWorld & New Media Expo

Now I know why my daughter has been bugging me to join BarbieGirls.com:

It would be easy to dismiss an offering like Barbie Girls (feminists are probably going to roll their eyes at the whole concept) and yet 3 million registered users in 60 days does say one very, very clear thing: virtual worlds are going mainstream and the user base is dramatically shifting from being predominantly male to majority female. That shift isn?t quite as important now as it will be in the next 5-10 years as those playing Barbie Girls grow into adults; simply the next generation of online gaming and virtual world users will not be dominated by men. Source: Could Barbie Girls Become The Largest Virtual World?

She already uses a couple social networking sites for kids and while I don’t like the fact that she’s on the computer more than being outside playing, I can’t say that I’m a great role model for that either.

Regardless, Barbie Girls, Club Penguin, Web kinz,  and other kids’ social media sites show how the Internet, built to maintain communications nuclear war, has become a focal point for kids to connect and interact.  Not to mention the Internet is getting both younger and older at the edges.  These kids’ networks are active, immersive, colorful and rich.  Lots of rich media (games and videos specifically) in there.  Kids play games to get points or “dollars” to “buy” things within the network.  How much longer before will it be that a “game” is designed to solve a real-world problem?  How much longer for before that game earns you real dollars?

Not much longer if these kids have their way.  I bet the successors to Club Penguin are coming, and I bet we adults will want to join as much as our kids.  of course we’ll have to accept the fact that they will probably kick our butts in the games.  Such is life.

It looks like about 250 people a standing room only crowd has showed up here at the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics to see how blogs are impacting modern day politics. The bloggers back stage Jerome Armstrong of MYDD, Erick Ericson of Red State Patrick Hynes of Ankle Bitung Pundits and consultant to GOP Presidential candidate John McCain, Scott Johnson Co-Founder of Powerline Blog. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos and our host Professor David Perlmutter all seem very relaxed and are enjoying each others company.
*Update**

Some mild controlled chaos as last minute details of who is sitting where is worked out. The Institute’s Director Bill Lacy has made the introductions and the bloggers are taking the stage.

Just before the panel started we were all allowed to take a private tour of the archives and for all of us political junkies it was amazing.

*** update**

Joan McCarter:

“the most important lesson for presidential candidates to learn is this is not a static medium that they talk it. It is an interactive medium.

The first most important think is we are not an ATM. Politicians looked at all the money Howard Dean raised and thought of us as an ATM machine. We are more than that now and will demand more than that now.”

Scott Johnson:

“My partner John Hinderacker and I started writing about politics on their law practice site in 1992 for fun.”

**update**

Read the rest of this entry »

Stowe Boyd and Chris Heuer are having a little debate about the purity of social media press releases which I spouted off about earlier this evening. Chris was kind enough to come by and comment. I started to leave a 2nd reply to his comment and thought the point deserved its own post.

While discussing the proper term for the current media revolution Chris pointed out what he thought was new about new media:

For now, the new new part is that it is more social, it is about participating in the conversation digitally if you will, so this is where I have ended up on social media being the term personally.

While I agree the conversation is important to new media I don’t think that is what has caused this revolution. The really important new part is that anyone with a computer, or cell phone and an internet connection can through their own effort become an influential voice in their community, in their state, even all over the world with virtually no investment.

It used to take a whole lot of money to communicate on the massive scale that is now available.

That is the root of this revolution, not the chatting. Millions of people who used to yell at the television, or radio, or think to themselves when reading a story or an op ed piece in their local newspaper or favorite magazine, “I could write a better story than that” or  “why didn’t they ask that politician this question” can actually write their own story and have it read by people all over the world, even read  by those very same main stream journalists they yelled at through the TV, even interview that celebrity, or politician themselves; ask the questions they always wanted answered.

And you know what much of the time they are better stories, they are more provocative and well researched opinions, they ask better interview questions.

That is the revolution of new media.

Oficially Time’s 2006 person of the year is you and me, and everyone who in their words:

You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.

It continues:

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We’re ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn’t just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

In other words we created new media, social media, conversational media, call it what you will but when a traditional media giant like Time recognizes it, odds are it is here to stay.

The amazing thing is we have barely scraped the surface of this new medium. Most people I talk to, smart people, business people when I tell them about our show, or about blogs answer “what exactly is a blog”, let alone a podcast, or a wiki. People involved in the new media revolution tend to forget most of the world still has no clue what we are doing here.

Articles like is evidence that some members of the traditional media are starting to pay attention. Reality is that is where most of the world still gets its news and they are just starting to learn about new media.
Others blogging this story: Mashable: YouTube is the winner.

Bloggers Blog:
While it is nice to see Time magazine acknowledging the power of the Internet, Time’s “You” actually leaves a huge number of people out. As high as 99% of all the people are left out if you follow the 1% rule. Many people may read blogs and many people may look at the videos on video sharing websites but the majority do not contribute any content at all.

Paul Kedrosky:

Time just named “you” its Person of the Year for 2006. Yes, it’s an incredible cop-out in a year when wasted multitudes died in Iraq, in a year containing newsmakers like Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Korea’s Jim Jong-Il, and even Nancy Pelosi.

Micro Persuasion saw this coming two years ago:

Well, it looks like we were off by two years. Compare the two images below. The one on the right was created by Hypergene back in 2004. The one on the left came out today. Eerily similar eh? We needed the two years. This is a shift that’s bigger than blogging and citizen journalism.

Josh Hallett:

The question is, what about the people not taking part in creating/using any of this user-generated-content? Are they part of the ‘You’? Perhaps they should have a different cover of Time that says, ‘Them’.

Don Surber blogging journalist:

I like the choice. Technology can liberate people, which is why so many regimes are trying to keep the lid on the Internet as if it were Pandora’s box. Most of the technology is used for crap: baseball fantasy leagues, crotch shots of celebrities and spam, spam, spam.

FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog:

Indeed……..The blogosphere and internet is much more significant than Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong-Il.

In fact, the blogosphere and internet media may well be those dictators downfall.

Thanks Time Magazine! You finally got ONE RIGHT!

I predict there will be lots of people blogging about this. Yeah I know it’s an easy shot but if Time can do it so can I.

Dave Taylor put up a great post last Friday asking When is a blog too personal?Great question and often discussed. Just like any topic in the blogosphere there are thousands of differing opinions. The obvious answer to the question is whenever the author feels it is. If you are comfortable telling the whole world including current and potential future employers, voters, in-laws, spouses, enemies, or anyone who wants to know personal things about your life then by all means go ahead.

It doesn’t take Dave long to answer the real question:

First off, I think it’s useful to differentiate between a personal blog, which is probably serving as a diary or journal, and a professional blog: in the former case, there really isn’t much question because you can’t really have a personal journal if you’re not being personal and writing about your life, your experiences and your thoughts.

If you’re blogging for business, however, it’s a different story…

Business blogging is a different story because your goal is to convey a certain level of expertise, credibility and, yes, professionalism, and that can be counter to the idea of being too personal.

If you are blogging for any sort of professional purpose you should seriously consider any personal information you post on your blog. Will it cost you customers or vendors perhaps? Does it help or hurt your business?

It is a pretty good rule to not post about politics or controversial social issues on your business related blog.

Now if you blog about politics, or social issues then you real life experience means something, it helps your readers understand how you came to that point of view.  If you write a parenting blog (as Dave does), then again personal experience comes into play and you are going to better connect with your readers if you give them a peak into your personal life.  I believe this is one of the advantages new media has over traditional media by the way.

Dave closes his post with another question and a very personal and sober reminder of why you shouldn’t expose too much about yourself on a blog:

Let me end with a question: how do you balance your personal and professional life in the online world? In chat rooms, on blogs, and even perhaps on your own weblog, do you talk about fights you’ve had with your partner, your religious beliefs, your political views, etc., or do you keep all that offline as best you can?

Me? Well, let’s just say I write a parenting blog but don’t even use the names of my kids. No kidding.

That is what a responsible parent should do imo.

If you want to post personal stuff about yourself on your blog that is your business. In fact you will most likely connect with some of your readers on a greater level than you would if you left your personal life completely out of your blogging. However when doing so always remember the intraweb is a very public place. You may have made lots of friends through your blog (as I have) but there are lots of bad people surfing the net and most likely your blog every day. Far beyond the business aspect of balancing personal vs. business content on your site, always put your family’s personal security first.

Edelman who hasn’t always nailed the nuances of acceptable social media practices has just introduced an online Social media press release tool.

Steve Rubel had this to say:

My colleague Phil Gomes has been hard at work redefining what a press release should look like in a two-way world. We launched our first iteration yesterday. It basically breaks down a press release into its core parts, leaving it up to you - the journalist (citizen or pro) - to decide how it should be put together. Most importantly, every press release gets feeds, tags, del.icio.us/digg buttons, trackbacks and comments.

If you take a look at the comments on our first release, you’ll notice that some of our harshest critics are there commenting. This is what the two-way world is all about. Put ideas out there and then engage the community in a conversation.

More important than how are their clients going to react to this is how is the blogosphere going to react. So far It seems mixed but on the positive side.
Deep Jive interests:

Now this template seems like a great cheat sheet if you were a PR guy who doesn’t know a thing about social media. Having said that, I think that the template, like all cheet sheets, are dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. Quite frankly, it could be a disaster.

Webware:

The whole thing’s a good idea, but it doesn’t appear to be as well-executed as it could be: most noticeable for me was the fact that there’s a lot of whitespace and consequently a lot of scrolling involved. Nevertheless, there’s very little doubt that push-button, Web-based press release generators–whether StoryCrafter or some similar tool that’s yet to be created–certainly have a place in the world of rich media, social media, new media, or whatever you want to call it.

The Bivings Report:

Today Steve Rubel unveils Edelman’s take on the social news release, Storycrafter (note lots and lots of others are doing similar work). I like it. I’d rather get something like this than an old fashioned press release.

That’s the question of our first poll. Please take a moment of your time to answer it. The reason we put the question up there is we want to develop the education program to focus on the topics that our attendees will be most interested in. So please let us know why you put so much time and effort in to your blog, podcast, internet radio broadcast, or social networking efforts.

As for me I’m guessing my experience was similar to a lot of people. I started on a message board talking about a computer game I played far too much of, then another message board when I was travelling to Europe and looking for suggestions on places to see, then blogs came on my radar screen. It was just for fun, but I realized pretty quickly just powerful new media could be.

One link from a major blogger might earn you a big day or two but if you posting real content people are interested in, some of those one hit wonder readers are going to come back and you are going to start building your own loyal readers.

So why do you blog? Are you trying to advocate some social or political position and influence other peoples decision making or motivate them to take action? Or maybe trying to promote your company’s product or service? Maybe promoting your self as an authority in your field. Are you trying to generate income either directly or indirectly? (The Pew internet study completely missed indirect blogging sales imo) Maybe you want to improve your writing skills in general. I can’t think of a better way to practice where you are getting real feedback from real people who are interested in the same topic your discussing.

By the way something that is completely overlooked is how you learn to research a given subject that you blog on frequently. If your blog is dedicated to a particular topic in a relatively short amount of time you will become something of an expert on the subject.

So please take a moment and answer the poll and tell us why you spend as much time and effort as you do creating new media content. Or share your story about how you started, and progressed in the comments section below.