JOMC 191.3 Blogging, We the Media and Virtual Communities

Today’s News and Observer carried a story entitled Big mother, or father, is watching teens’ blogs which would be very germain to this course. I could bring in the print copy, but it turns out that the News and Observer had syndicated the article from the Wall Street Journal. Instead of the article, you get:

Big mother, or father, is watching teens’ blogs
Kevin J. Delaney, The Wall Street Journal
We do not have permission to reproduce this story on our website.
All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be published, broadcast or redistributed in any manner.

http://www.unc.edu/~mchabib/43things/index.html

I will add a link on the sidebar as well.

I’m trying to write something, and I’d like some examples of people who make money with their blogs. I would count Romanesko in. I know he made blogging a job, but can anyone think of someone who makes money off blogging - enough to quit his/her day job?
- Robin

Two stories in one! In a story in the Business section of Friday’s News and Observer, Jack Hagel reports that blogs report that Google is looking for office space in the RTP area. Hagel with the help of Jonathan Cox and David Ranii reports on the rumor, the blogs and other circumstantial evidence that make you wonder if the story will ever rise above gossip. Is this good reporting or is it a sign of a newspaper dropping to the iffy reporting of bloggers?

Looks like AOL is going to face some difficult decisions.

With their user base falling due to cheaper, faster service providers, it seems that AOL has turned to advertising to boost revenue. This means ads on AOL hosted blogs and online journals.

Sounds like a good idea?

Problem is, AOL’s devoted base that remains doesn’t like these ads, saying it infringes on their desire for privacy and personalization of their home pages.

This leaves AOL in a sticky situation. They have to make money, but they don’t want to alienate their customers even more than they already have. But it seems like they don’t want to listen. Their response?

“The decision to implement banner advertising on AOL Journals is consistent with our business and advertising practices,” AOL spokeswoman Kathie Brockman said in an e-mail.

AOL better work to find a way to reach a common middle ground acceptable to both parties. Their business plan is failing as it is.

I think it’s a great idea that the Daily Tar Heel decided to profile blogs on the front page of Wednesdays paper. (Although it was quite possibly the least read paper of the year due to the break) Pointing out that UNC gives every student free webspace is a great idea since so few students I’ve talked to even know this existed. Best thing was, they even quoted our own Professor Jones:

“Blogs are their own steroids, they can be just as good or bad as anything.” — Journalism professor Paul Jones (I also direct ibiblio.org, a digital archive run jointly by UNC-CH and the Center for the Public Domain.)

However, it needs to be pointed out that they really didn’t go indepth on anything and the story was kind of a filler. But they tried. A for effort.

We’ve used Orange Politics as an example in class, and we’ve made reference to other government-related blogs, but now the CIA is involved. As a part of their efforts to prevent another Sept. 11-like attack, they’ve revamped and reopened a branch that is designed to sift through all the information available on the internet and look for clues. A similar group existed many years ago, but was drastically cut because the need was no longer clear. In addition to looking for information, they have a few blogs of their own available within a government network. If you want to read more about it, check out the Sunday edition of the News and Observer.

http://www.newsobserver.com/110/story/371519.html

After taking this class I realized how much I miss being on the internet and working with an online community. It really is a helluva lot of fun managing an online community and being in the midst of things as a moderator. I’ve been talking with my past business partners and I’m going to get back into it… but this time it’s going to be different, I might just put the things that i’ve learned in this class into use and see how far I can go with a site based on the readings and chats I’ve had with everyone… So who knows what might happen, but here’s to the inet!

If you have time/are interested, I’ve included a link in our blogroll to my blog for my online community/presentation for Tuesday–Corporate ClueTrain. It is 95% ready for Tuesday, so don’t be surprised if there is tweaking done between now and then.

Frank Thomas of France writes to the Association of Internet Researchers to let us know about the Best of Blogs Awards:

The official German short-wave radio Deutsche Welle recently ran an international blog contest which shows the large variety of blogs that is possible - although in fact, 4 out of 5 are still ego-centered. And besides seriously studying the issue it’s also quite amusing to surf the best entries:
http://www.thebobs.de/thebobs05/bob.php?site=winner