100,000

This blog crossed over the somewhat important 100,000 visits mark on my stats counter early in 2019. That is a nice solid number and I'm happy people have found the blog.

with a really small post about some of the Big Questions - How did the universe begin? How did life begin? Are we alone?

That 100k stat isn't all that impressive as blogs go. In fact, other blogs that I write on have bigger numbers. For example, I write on weekends on an aptly named Weekends in Paradelle, about big and small questions on a more personal level. That site is approaching the 400k mark now. My oldest blog, Serendipity35, which covers education + technology, crossed the 100 million mark a while ago.

But this site was a repurposed blog that I started just to experiment with the Blogger software. It had no theme or purpose and was just about things I noticed around the web. I repurposed it a few years ago with the idea of trying to post short entries that "educate" in some way in lots of different areas. The idea of a one-room schoolhouse came to mind.

One-room schools were once pretty commonplace throughout rural portions of various countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. In these rural and small town schools (some of which literally used someone's house), all of the students met in a single room. A single teacher taught academic basics to different aged children at different  levels of elementary-age boys and girls.

I imagine that younger kids were hearing some of the older kids' lessons and older kids could get remedial lessons when the younger kids were being taught. I think that could be an interesting model of learning. I also think it would be a challenging teaching assignment. It's a topic I delve into a bit deeper on my other blog.

Blogging Buck$

People are making money from blogging. Not me, but others.

The Huffington Post is now the HuffPost and it really changed blogging. Launched in 2005, by Arianna Huffington has turned personal publishing an international "news" platform. Its Monthly income: $18 million, funded mainly through advertising revenue and investment, it was bought by AOL for $315 million in 2011, and today is worth an estimated $1 billion.

Okay, that's a big company, but how about a husband-wife team home finance blog. That is ClubThrifty with a monthly income of $25K.

The Gothamist takes in more than $100K a month as a News York City news and lifestyle blog that has expanded to eight cities across the US, Canada, UK, and China. And like any big blog, it was bought, in this case by news media company DNAinfo.

A pro blogger, Darren Rowse, has done a number of profitable, blogs. Then he did his most successful one by writing about the secrets of how to blog like a pro with ProBlogger. He didn't get bought out (yet) but makes bucks with advertising banners, a jobs page for online writers, and the sale of ebooks.

Here are the ways to make the money.

• Display ads on a web page bring in the bulk of the ad money through networks like Google AdSense and Amazon.
• Private Ads are those bought without a middleman
• Pay-per-click (PPC) is when advertisers pay for the number of times an ad is clicked.
• Sponsored Content is commonly when brands and vendors pay for a post, such as when a bloggers gets paid to “unbox” a new product or review a book.
• Affiliate Marketing uses unique affiliate links that when someone clicks and makes a purchase, the blogger earns money as a referral commission. Want to test it out? Click on my my Amazon link and but something. Anything. Thank you.
• A blogger can make some big bucks with more work by offering Digital Product Sales which is when they sell premium digital content such as courses, ebooks, and tutorials. One reason why digital content is very profitable is that it  requires no storage space or shipping costs.

So, get into blogging and do all the things I'm NOT doing and earn some bucks.

We Want to Turn Your Blog Into a Book

"We want to turn your blog into a book and maybe even a movie." That is a dream of many bloggers. And it has happened. Rarely. I have been giving it some thought this month.

I wrote about it on one of my other blogs a few weeks ago and I'm recycling most of it here today.

In 2004, the New Yorker had said that books by bloggers would become a cultural phenomenon, but I never gave that a thought in those days. I started blogging in 2006 and since then have added 8 other blogs to my weekly writing. As a few friends like to remind me, "if you only channeled all that writing, you would have a few books by now."

When I started blogging, it was already becoming pretty common. I started blogging as something to use both in my teaching at NJIT and as a way to get my ideas out there. I had been doing workshops and presentations on the still-new blogs, wikis and podcasts for a while and I was trying to get faculty at the university to incorporate them into their courses.

Then I was asked to do a presentation for business people on those topics. Though I was doing podcasts and had created a few wikis, I was not a blogger. One of my colleagues at NJIT, Tim Kellers, was my tech guru and he created a blogging platform for us to use in our presentation using software called Serendipity. Thus, Serendipity35, my blog about learning and technology, was born. And it's still going.

Then came stories like that of Julie Powell and her blog about trying to cook the entire Julia Child cookbook in her New York apartment.

PostSecret and Stuff White People Like are other blogs that became multiple incarnations of books, but Julie was the star student.  Her original blog on Salon.com is gone, but is archived on the great Web.Archive.org site.

The blog began in 2002 as she cooked her way through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." In 2005, it became a book, Julie and Julia:365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.

In 2007, a film version was announced - the first major motion picture that started off as a blog.

Say what you will about the writing of Powell, she had an established readership and that is why a publisher knew that readership could mean book sales. This is not new to publishing, TV or film - choose things (comic books, hit plays etc.) that have a built-in following and are a surer bet.

The film adaptation, directed by Nora Ephron, also titled Julie & Julia, was released in 2009. The film was actually based on both Powell's book and Julia Child's autobiography My Life in France.

This was not a small, independent film. Amy Adams starred as Powell and Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Julia's husband Paul was played by Stanley Tucci.

But that is one blogger who got great deals out of many millions of bloggers. It is tough to find a number for how many blogs exist (active and archived) but just Tumblr.com's cumulative total blogs in July 2016 surpassed 305.9 million blog accounts. That makes the odds about the same as winning the Power ball lottery.

Yes, Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody got a book deal out of her blog (not the one that led to her best known screenplay for Juno though).

Another success story is Tim Ferriss.  His blog, the Four Hour Work Week, was listed at number one on the top 150 Management and Leadership Blogs.

In 2010, photographer Brandon Stanton started a project to create a photographic census of New York City and his blog version (and Facebook page) of Humans of New York became the book Humans of New York: Stories and was a bestseller.

That is why you can find lots of blog posts about turning your blog into a book. (For example, look at thebookdesigner.com/2015/06/making-the-leap-from-blogger-to-book-author/ and authorunlimited.com/turn-your-blog-into-a-book-effectively

I still haven't moved any of my blogs to the print (or film!) world. I could see my poetry project at Writing the Day as a poetry collection. I'd like to think that Weekends in Paradelle and One-Page Schoolhouse have enough posts to produce a collection of essays. The same might be true of the several thousands post on Serendipity35, but I realize that many of my posts are "dated" in the time they were written. Editing would be a major part of turning a blog into a book.

I believe that, despite tales of the death of print, an actual book still holds a special, higher place in our culture than a website. Publishers: contact me.

Blog Action Day 2013: Human Rights

On October 16th, thousands of bloggers from around the world will be participating in a global conversation about Human Rights. 

Are you a blogger? Make sure you are part of this exciting blogging event by registering your blog and planning your post.  Register your blog now in English,  Español or Português

You can do a Group Blog Post by working with other bloggers. You can cover a particular issue in more depth or from different angles, and post across all of your sites. 

Do a Blog Swap or invite Guest Bloggers: By doing your Blog Action Day post do as a blog swap or as a guest blogger on another site, you have the opportunity to interact with new audiences who you wouldn’t have reached otherwise. 

Need some background information to write your post?  Take a look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was developed by the United Nations in 1948 and has 30 different articles that each represent a particular Human Right. Go through the articles and find one that resonates with you, then spend a few minutes reflecting on why you relate to it and you will quickly find that you have the beginnings of your Blog Action Day post.

If you have any other ideas, please share them on thee website.

Below is a Blog Action Day promo video that you can use on your site or share via social networks to encourage others to participate in Blog Action Day. Watch it, but also register to take part in Blog Action Day.
 

Send questions or suggestions to the website or via social media channels: Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Tumblr 

Blogging Is Dead. Again.

I have been blogging since 2006. I started by posting my thoughts about learning and technology when I was working full time at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) on the blog Serendipity35. That blog is still going and still gets about a half million hits each month. 

I have heard the cry that blogging is dead for about the last five of those years. Other social media have supposedly eclipsed blogging - including mini- and micro-blogs like Tumblr which allow you to easily post photos and brief post and especially to reblog other people's posts. Social media is very incestuous. If you are on any social media, you know that reposts and retweets make up a large percentage of what is out there.

I don't think blogging is dead, but what is disappearing are the longer, original kinds of posts that were common in 2006.

I started writing longer posts that were not about learning and technology on another site I called Weekends in Paradelle. These are posts that I hope are thoughtful reads. I knew I didn't have the time to write every day, so I made this blog one I would strive to write on every weekend. It is my little writing escape.

I do notice that longer posts often do not get as many "hits" as shorter ones, so maybe there is more of an audience for mini-blog posts.

I have been a volunteer in New Jersey for the NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife. When my life and work got too busy to spend as many hours in the field volunteering, I decided to supplement my interest with a blog called Endangered New Jersey about the parts of New Jersey that are threatened or endangered. This is particularly about fish and wildlife, but also about natural spaces, historic preservation and the environment of our densely populated and wildly diverse state. 

I am also deeply involved in poetry and so it was a natural to start a website about writing poetry way back in the early Web days of 1998 called PoetsOnline.org.  When blogs came into their own, I added a companion blog about poetry at Poets Online that allowed me to post more often and on a wider palette of poetry topics than the poems and prompts of the main site that had become a popular -ezine.

I have always had a fascination with etymologies, so I also started a blog called Why Name It That? which looks at the origins of words and phrases, but also at the names of people, products, teams, and especially rock bands (which tend to be the most popular posts).

There are also a number of blogs I did that were abandoned, although a few are still online getting dusty. 

And I did start using Tumblr for those quick posts and reposts. It serves a purpose, but I don't really think of it as true blogging. But that's just me.

And all these blogs automatically push their posts to facebook and other places, so I am reposting myself.

I write tweets on Twitter for myself and for Poets Online which also has its own Facebook page and Pinterest site. Oh, it is a tangled Web we weave.

And this year I took on the job of doing social media posts for the National Council of Teachers of English. I have been an NCTE member since my college days, but could not have ever guessed that I could have a virtual job and be paid to post for them.

Blogs were a big part of "Web 2.0" and the idea that the web was not something to be consumed. The World Wide Web was for reading and WRITING. Consumers could be producers of content.

But most of the social web is not blogging, and real blogs seem less popular than it did eight years ago when I started. And that's too bad. Social media certainly allows people to be producers - videos and photos abound. But I'd love to see more people writing and posting online. It's a powerful practice and one that can really help you and others.

Is blogging dead? No.

Principles of Uncertainty

Maira Kalman wrote and illustrated "The Principles of Uncertainty," her column/blog, for The New York Times for a year (it ended in April 2007).


The blog became a book in 2007, also titled The Principles of Uncertainty What is it? Perhaps it is philosophy or art or memoir or sociology. The easy answer is that it is all those things, though that doesn't help classify it - if that's what you want done.

There's text, paintings, and photography. It is a year in a life. Maybe part of the uncertainty is what kind of book she wrote.

Kalman has also illustrated children's books, New Yorker covers for (including the famous map of “Newyorkistan” with Rick Meyerowitz).

She has 12 children’s books include Max Makes a Million, Swami on Rye and What Pete Ate. She also has designed fabric for Isaac Mizrahi, accessories for Kate Spade, sets for the Mark Morris Dance Company and, with her late husband Tibor Kalman, clocks, umbrellas and other accessories for the Museum of Modern Art. She lives in New York City and teaches graduate courses in design at the School of Visual Arts.

She also took on the task in 2005 of illustrating the venerable The Elements of Style and had a new way of looking at Strunk and White's reference classic with rather whimsical illustrations.

http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://www.mairakalman.com/

Blog Action

One month until Blog Action Day on October 15th.

Last year, they got more than 20,000 bloggers with an estimated combined audience of over 15 million viewers, to post about their slant on the environment for one day.

This year the topic will be poverty and bloggers who sign on will discuss that issue from the view of their own blog. Since this blog have a single view, perhaps I can consider the poverty of being a blogger.

They are hoping I will be nobler than that. Look at The Global Fund which combats AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria - 3 diseases that have a crippling effect on the fight against poverty. That's who the Blog Action Day folks chose to ask bloggers to donate their day's earnings to as their official Blog Action Day charity.That's why I thought, "Well, this blog makes no money, so why not write about that?"