“How do you think the creation of the blogosphere and its later monetisation has effected the quality of journalism within both new and old media?”

The winner of the contest is Michael from Problogdesign with the below answer.
All of the answers were good and I thank everyone for participating. Surprisingly none of the answers took the side I would have chosen so expect to see my answer and my replies to those of you who did answer in a post this week.

Great question Jacob. I believe that the creation of the blogosphere has greatly increased the quality of journalism.

In old media, we were stuck in a fairly ridged gutter. You had a selection of 4 or 5 decent newspapers, and each newspaper had a slightly different slant, or of watching a quick news roundup on the TV/radio.

The blogosphere has changed everything because it has given everyone a voice. As a reader, you have a choice of not just a few sources, but of hundreds of different sources. Everyone can find a blog with a style that suits them. It makes news much more enjoyable to read.

The depth of information has also increased. Whilst in a newspaper, your topic of interest may have been limited to a 400 word column once a week, in the blogosphere, there is a probably a full blog dedicated to it. The amount of information available is far greater this way, and it is being written by someone with a passion for it.

The web has also changed how we get the news. The web is a much more flexible medium than newspapers, TV or radio ever where. What is the best way of digesting information daily? Long articles? Quick snippets and bulleted lists? Audio recordings? Videos? The web has made it all possible, and through continuous experimentation, we are slowly perfecting various approaches.

The greatest improvement however has been the very fundamental of how we receive the news. It is no longer a one sided affair. In old media, we heard the news and that was all. In new media, we hear, and then we can give our opinions. Instead of talking to us, journalists are talking with us. They are able to give their thoughts and listen to ours. The discussion that follows is often more valuable than the original article ever could be (A great example is the BBC’s The Editors’ Blog).

The monetization of the blogosphere is crucial because it has made the blogosphere sustainable. Blogging is no longer just a pass-time, or a collection of personal sites. It has become a valuable industry, and a respectable industry. The monetization has allowed the quality of blogs to greatly increase (Full-time writers, professional designs, marketing etc.), making blogs a reliable way of obtaining the news.

Whats the big deal?
Until about 6 months ago, a high pr would allow you to make some pretty good money by selling text links. But Google doesn’t like people selling text links because by buying enough text links for a certain keyword, you are able to skew the natural search results to make your site show up in the first position for a keyword. So, for the past 6 months on top of postponing the pr update, Google has been penalizing the search engine rankings of sites selling text links. So while previously I would have been been able to make some pretty good cash off of digitalorder’s pr4 selling links through TLA or TNX, now if I do that, I risk a search engine ranking penalty.

Is the risk worth it?
It all depends on your blogs priorities. For this blog the priority is to provide quality articles to help my readers and me learn. Though if the priority of your blog is to make money and you still want to sell links you probally should be a little more discreet about it. If you use a network to serve your links make sure the php is properly installed and you arent broadcasting for Google’s crawler the fact that you are selling links. If at all possible I would suggest handling your text sales privately.

Conclusion:
- If you depend on text links for money, be discreet.
- If you depend on google for traffic, dont sell links.

Not your normal blog contest
I am not a fan of the normal blog contest that requires you to post about the contest on your blog with a backlink just to enter. Other than one person winning a prize and the contest runner getting a bunch of backlinks its kinda pointless. Plus if you dont have a blog you are left out to dry. So I am going to do things a bit different here. I am going to ask a question and the person that answers this question the best gets a free book. Its that simple. Heres the question….

“How do you think the creation of the blogosphere and its later monetisation has effected the quality of journalism within both new and old media?”

All you have to do is write your reply to that question in order to be eligible. You dont have to have a blog, simply leave a comment with your answer. If you do decide to write your answer in a blog post maybe because its too long for a comment or because you’d like to share your answer with your readers, be sure to either leave a link to the post in this posts comments or email me the link at kingjacob [at] gmail.com, that way everyone can read and comment on your answer.

Contest Ends: November 9 at midnight(central time)

So What is the cost?

While the number in that AMD ad is an estimate and very biased it is accurate in showing just how much money is lost by simply having an inefficient computer. Don’t worry too much about your personal computer increasing your electric bill as long as you use the correct power saving features. For the majority of the cost dollar and kwh wise is with datacenters that have rooms full of server racks. In order to power all those computers and more so to keep them cool is a very expensive process. According to a study done by the EPA, the cost to run the US servers and data centers for the year 2006 was 61 billion kilowatt-hours(1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption) or 4.5 billion dollars. Based on current trends this number will only increase and is expected to double by 2011. Not to mention that this study doesn’t include datacenters and servers outside the US which are growing at a far greater rate especially with the modernisation of China.

What can I do?
Luckily the major players in the computer/internet industry have already taken the initiative to move towards greener not only cause it’s better for the environment but also cause its better for the bottom line. If you use a computer I would strongly recommend looking into the two main initiatives and following their requirements to become greener.

Climate Savers- This initiative is focused mainly on getting individuals to use the power saving settings and for companies and individuals to buy more power efficient computers.

The Green Grid- This organization is primarily if you own or operate a large server or datacenter. They have alot of information dealing with making datacenters more efficient and thus cheaper.

As a webmaster or server owner you can also help the initiative by only hosting or buying servers that have a good Energy Star rating.

Some Unrelated Green Information

• Fastest Green car
• The greenest blog
• A green Magazine

If you have any other ideas to go in this green list, please leave a comment.

I hate the environment why should I care?
One word, Money, you didn’t think it was called going green because of the trees did you. Re-read the part in the first paragraph about 4.5 billion dollars

If you run or know of a hosting company that meets the energy star rating, please leave a link to it in the comments.

Of course the theme has a huge learning curve on my part to use it properly and I still have quite a bit of tweaking to work out all the bugs, see the posted interview with kamil for one giant bug. But the new features will be well worth the work.

What are these new Features? You Ask.

• Almost the entire front page is above the fold,(hooray for less scrolling)
• Asides will let me report smaller updates without having to fill an entire post
• Featured Post ensures you wont miss very important stuff if you dont read for a day
• Wider means more pictures of higher detail
• Contact page to allow you to email me directly
• Ads moved from under each post to the sidebar.
• Feeds for all categories

If you see a bug or feel something is missing and should be added or changed please feel free to leave a comment or email me.

The ad spots have been reworked so that they are quite a bit more affordable, more to come later.
I hope everyone finds this theme alot easier to read than the old one.

• We were named Blog of the Month over at BlogSoc.com(Yah!).
• Nominated for Rookie Blogger of the Year(Vote for #60/DigitalORDER)
• Reached Tech Authority 69 ranking us at 81,219(hopefully it will go to 70 soon)
• Reached Alexa Rank 408,528
• 100 real comments and 2000 spam comments
• Money wise this blog earned me 330usd(try to guess how;)

What do you do when you find a good routine?

Id say September was a pretty succesful month, So succesful that Ive decided to change everything up and change the theme. If you were on DO last night you may have caught a sneek peak. I like the simplicity of the current theme but theres just way too much on your part to get to the content, Sadly the new styling jacks up alot of old posts so that will take some time but I am shooting to be fully launched with the theme by next monday.

Help fix some bugs

I will be editing the theme online at about 8-10pm central time so if you want to stop by at that time and leave your comments on the new theme, especially if you find a bug, that would be awesome.

BlogSoc.com is the creation of Kamil Kwiecien, I found out about BlogSoc.com when I stumbled across Kamil’s blog my-first-million-dollars.com back in early August. My first comment was “The only one going to make any money will be the people running the network.” Kamily quickly replied and I realized my quick judgement of it was completely wrong and decided to educate myself about it and signed up an account. Two months, 100 members and countless new features later, I decided now was a good time to interview Kamil.

The Interview

KingJacob:First for those who may never have heard of blogsoc could you give a 2-3 sentence elevator pitch of what blog soc is?

Kamil:BlogSoc.com is bloggers community site. It is place where bloggers can meet blog readers and exchange opinions, ideas. Where for socializing You can earn shares in community earnings.

KingJacob:What made you want to create blogsoc?

Kamil:I have created BlogSoc.com because other blogger communities don’t provide everything I want, and they earn money thanks to people socializing, when those people doesn’t.

KingJacob:With most blogs already using site like mybloglog, how do you plan to get blogs to change to blogsoc?

Kamil:I’m also using MyBlogLog ;). They have one good widget thats all. I offer BlogSoc.com members opportunity to earn money on socializing. The earn share is BlogSoc.com earnings end in this way also monetize their Blogs. BlogSoc.com have now very similar tool like other blogger communities, and we are developing new to make BlogSoc.com even more attractive and useful for our members.

KingJacob: Have you ever been involved in building a large site like this?

Kamil:Yes, but it was online game, so different market. I’m using now this experience to create better community page.

KingJacob:How old are you?

Kamil:I’m 23.

KingJacob:where are you from?

Kamil:I’m from Poland, Warsaw.

KingJacob:Is english Your first language?

Kamil:My first language is polish, I’m still learning english, having blog helps me with it.

KingJacob: What type of education, certifications do you have?

Kamil:I’m student on Polish Japanese Institute of Information Technology on 4′th year. I have Zertifikat Deutsch in German, and LCCI SEFIC Level 2 in English.

KingJacob:You also run a blog my-first-million-dollars.com, how has blogging been going for you?

Kamil:Blogging is my hobby, thanks to this I have met lots of great people around the world. I have this blog for 4 months now, and it’s subscribers number is growing.

KingJacob: What one tip would you give to those launching a blog, website or any product?

Kamil:Be patient. Really. If You don’t have 4 digit budget for advertisement, everything must take some time. I see this on my projects, they are developing slowly but after few months results are good visible.

KingJacob: When did blogsoc first launch?

Kamil:I have bought domain BlogSoc.com on 2007-07-14.

KingJacob: How many users does blogsoc now have?

Kamil:BlogSoc.com have now 119 users. Part of them have unactivated accounts, so it’s about 100 active members.

KingJacob: Do you have an eventual plan to monetize blogsoc?

Kamil:Yes. We want to monetize BlogSoc.com now because we need some money for advertising. There are 3 ad spots available for sale $25/month each. After our community will reach 300 members we will start monetizing BlogSoc for our members. They will earn money from shares in BlogSoc.com earnings.

KingJacob: About how many hours a day do you spend working on BlogSoc.com?

Kamil:Always between 3 to 6 hours.

KingJacob: Currently you have the blog popularity tool and recent viewers tool, Do you have any more tools you plan to launch in the near or distant future?

Kamil:Yes. I’m planning to launch tool to share rss news from our members sites.

Note: This tool has now launched and there are still a few bugs but I think its way better than BlogRush already.

KingJacob: Besides the prospect of possible earnings why do you think people will join blogsoc.com?

Kamil:Because of good tools and great members which number is growing every day.

KingJacob: Do you code in polish or english?

Kamil:I code in PHP ;), comments are in english.

KingJacob: Are you the only person working on it?

Kamil:No. I have hired graphics designer to make nice looking design which we have now. All coding I have done myself. Basic idea was mine, but now I’m co-working with other BlogSoc.com members, their opinion is very important for me.

KingJacob: How do you pronounce your last name?

Kamil: It should be like this: Kviecien.

I hope you like BlogSoc.com as much as I do, though please realize it is a work in progress and is a Blog Society. You may get a bit more traffic or a few buck from using BlogSoc but the main reason to use BlogSoc is to help create and be part of an online society for bloggers complete with all the necessary tools,widgets, communication bloggers need to truly network without being bombarded by spam and unrelated content. I think BlogSoc is a little edgy right now but with a bit more work and time I believe it will be the Facebook of Bloggers sites.

What are yalls impressions about BlogSoc.com?

P.S. KingJacob is my screen name I use everywhere if you didn’t know so if you see a kingjacob on a site or forum its probally me.

Features According to Matt of Wordpress

1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your post, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you what the latest and greatest is you can use.
3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location. More info here.
4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

You’ll notice that two of those features are straight out of the most-voted for ideas list. That’s just the user facing stuff, if you’re a developer you’ll be interested in:

1. Full and complete Atom 1.0 support, including the publishing protocol.
2. We’re using the new jQuery whis is “800% faster.”
3. Behind the user-facing tags system is a really kickass taxonomy system which, which adds a ton of flexibility. It’s probably the biggest schema upgrade since version 1.5.
4. The importers have been revamped to be more memory efficient, and you can now add an importer through a plugin.
5. Through hooks and filters you can now override the update system, the dashboard RSS feeds, the feed parser, and tons more than you could in 2.2.
6. The new $wpdb->prepare() way of doing SQL queries.
7. Finally there were over 351 tickets in Trac closed for this release, with over a hundred people contributing. This is the polish, the hundreds of tiny bug fixes and features that make WordPress what it is.

I am especially excited about the canonical urls cause I am horrible at keeping my titles the same, the pending review feature will be cool if I can set it to where a user can only set posts to pending review or draft, Ill have to check that out. Also the Advanced Wysywig just makes sense because before you needed a plugin to access those features.

Sadly they didnt fix my submitted bug with this release but its just a tabbing issue from the title to the post. What are your thought about the new release?

I haven’t found an official post on all the new features but from using the RC, Ive noticed….

• GoogleBlogSearch instead of technorati for the incoming links
• New tags features added
• “pending review” option added to post status
• Instead of having a ton of titles for Your Drafts it adds a more button after 3.
• Notifies you on the plugin management page if a new version’s available for your plugin

Will My Current Plugins Work?

A few of the plugins I used were incompatible but they have now released updates to fix the errors, You can check out the list of all known compatiblities and incompatiblities for Version 2.3 here.

I Spend More Time Upgrading then Actually Blogging

Hopefully the above statements not true, but sometimes it can feel like everytime you upgrade they come out with a new release. Its good that they are coming out with new releases but there has to be some way to make upgrading easier. What do you know there is? Its called Subversion.(BEWARE:If you dont understand what they are saying in that post, you are probally better off with the old method)

Host an Upgrade Party

If you live in the San Fransisco Bay Area, Matt is hosting a WP Upgrade party on wednesday so if you are worried about upgrading it probally would be a good idea to stop on by, If you dont live in San Fransisco you can always host our own or see if someone is hosting one in your area with upcoming.org.

I will post more about the new release as I find it so stay tuned and if your a coder lend a hand and download the Release Candidate.

IMPORTANT MESSAGE: Click- through rates are very low right now due to problems with some users cheating the system. We are a few days away from removing all abuse from the system and you will see your click-rates increase. We are also moving to a Manual Review Process for all member blogs which will also increase the traffic you receive. Thank you for your patience — we’re working hard to improve this beta version of our service.

I am not surprised by people abusing the system and its good to see they are fixing it. Also I think thats the first mention of BlogRush being a beta version. Anyway I hope they get the system fixed because Ive actually noticed more visitors from Blogrush than they are reporting.

Disclaimer: Those are referal links,meaning I get some more impressions if you sign up under me.

All you early adopters dont fret about the price drop, Steve Jobs is thinking of you. You can get 100 in apple store credit if you were one of the many that already own an iphone.

Also Im a little confused with the ipod touch, why would you buy the 8gb touch for 299 when you can get the iphone and full access to its features for 100 bucks more?

Heres the complete list of updates.

iPod nano. The worlds most popular music player now plays video. Check out it’s incredible new colors and design. Starting at $149.

Click Here to learn more.

The new iPod touch featuring Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch user interface and built-in wi-fi wireless networking. Starting at $299.
Click Here to learn more.

This Is Not An IPHONE

Introducing the new 160GB iPod classic. Now holds up to 40,000 songs or 200 hours of video for $349. 80GB model available for just $249.
Click Here to learn more.

iPod shuffle in 5 new colors, including iPod shuffle RED, exclusively at the Apple Store.

8GB iPhone is now available for just $399.4gb iPhone will be sold at $249 while supplies last.
Click Here to learn more

For pic see touch Ipod above, I know I said its not an iphone but they look exactly like them.

Im restraining myself from buying the iphone or the itouch only cause Im saving for a custom black macbook with the PA logo in place of the lightup apple,:)