Sometimes I read something online that is so mind numbingly stupid that I can’t even conceive how someone reached that conclusion. Yep… this is one of those times.

Over the weekend, Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wrote up a post about how Judge Richard Posner wrote up a blog about the death of newspapers, and he had one of the craziest ideas I’ve ever heard of for saving them from the worsening economy:

Imagine if the New York Times migrated entirely to the World Wide Web. Could it support, out of advertising and subscriber revenues, as large a news-gathering apparatus as it does today? This seems unlikely, because it is much easier to create a web site and free ride on other sites than to create a print newspaper and free ride on other print newspapers, in part because of the lag in print publication; what is staler than last week’s news. Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

For those of you unfamiliar with the theory of linking and how it works, it’s a fairly simple concept.  Take me linking the word “TechCrunch” above.  I chose to link to the actual story Ms. Schonfeld wrote, so now when this post is published he will receive a notice called a “trackback” that allows him to know that I referenced his article in my post.  This will also be used by search engines to see how relevant his post is and how much credence they should give it.  The more links a site or story receives, the more importance a search engine puts on it, and the more chance of people searching on the appropriate terms will see it.

Essentially, links are the life’s blood of blogging.

Now, what Judge Posner is suggesting that linking to copyrighted material, or using a portion of it as a quote (like I did with his blog post above), should be illegal under copyright law , you have to wonder how he thinks this will save the the newspaper industry.  I’m not sure where to even start with just how wrong he has gotten this, but lets give it a go anyway:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking…

Okay, lets say you want to link to NYTimes.com, that would probably be fine, but if you want to link to a specific story, say Karl Malden, Everyman Actor, Dies at 97, the link would look like this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/movies/02malden.html?_r=1&hp

This is known as “deep linking”, and I have a feeling this is what Judge Posner is talking about as this is actual copyrighted material.  The problem is that without deep linking you could never share a story with any one.  Are you going to link to the main page and then tell them “Okay, click here… and then here… and then do this…”, no, you aren’t.

Deep linking is also essential to how search engines index the importance of a specific page so that it knows how much priority to gie it when people search on a term.  The more links a page has to it, the more important it is, the higher up in search results it appears.  Deep linking is a very, very good thing in the Internet business.

…paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent

What he is talking about here is block quotes like I did above.  The problem with this is that it would make it impossible for anyone to write a rebuttal to anything as you would have to do a long, drawn out, explanation of what the original article said.  You would have to make sure the wording was different enough so as not to be accused of plagiarism, but then balance making sure you got the original tone of the article.  That is essentially impossible.

Quoting stories is as old as journalism and is essential to editorials as well as stories.  So long as you only quote a small portion of the story it falls under Fair Use, and I don’t really see that ever being written out of copyright law.

It all comes down to “consent”

Judge Posner does stipulate that people could get the copyright holder’s consent and do the linking and quoting, but due to time constraints, and the timeliness of stories, would any newspaper want a dedicated person sitting around 24/7 just to approve requests?  Of course they wouldn’t,  so the solution would be giving people carte blanche to link and quote.  Those papars that wouldn’t do it would quickly see themselves losing popularity due to a lack of links, and… in short, everyone would have to give blanket permission and we would be back to where we started.  Everyone would have permission, and those that didn’t grant it would get zero traffic because of how far behind they are.

So, basically I am saying that Judge Posner’s solution is flawed beyond belief and that he shows a total lack of understanding for how the Internet actually operates.  His ’solutions’ will do nothing but create grief for bloggers and newspapers alike  It would take no time for workarounds to be found, and in the meantime it would end up costing those papers money as they try to handle all of the increased number of requests for permission.

Try to save old media if you want, but at least have a working knowledge of your “solution” before you suggest it.

CobWEBs episode 7 is in the can!

This week Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself took on, as usual, a lot of subjects.

- Jerimiah Owyang took his being called a “dickwad” last week really well… seriously, he did!  So, in his honor, please vote for the new weekly “Dickwad of the Week“.

- Michael Arrington and Leo Laporte had a small dust up last weekend and we spend a great deal of tiem weighing in on it.

- Gamers are really, really angry with Valve, but do they have all the facts?

- Web 2.0 becomes a word… ick.

- People write a LOT about Twitter… please stop.

- Is the real-time Web going places we don’t want it to?  Is it causing flash mobs?  Where is the filter in people’s heads?

It was a lengthy episode, but good.

StumbleUpon has to be one of the oddest sources of Web traffic ever invented.

For those unfamiliar with StumbleUpon (SU), it is a social bookmarking site that allows you to recommend pages to other users by giving them a “thumbs up”.  Other users can then discover pages you favorited by “stumbling” through pages people have saved.  While it can be a powerful tool for generating traffic, I find “the StumbleUpon effect” far more powerful than “the Digg effect”.

Ever since Digg took off, people have gone nuts trying to get on the front page of the site for the crush of traffic it will bring you for the time you are on the page.  The problem is that once you scroll off the front page, you get next to no residual traffic over the following months.  With StumbleUpon, you may or may not get the initial traffic rush, but you do definitely get a long simmering source of traffic.

Back on May 8th of this year I posted an article of Who Is The Best Star Trek Captain.  While the post did get some traffic during the initial few days, it quickly died off to a trickle of as few as single-digit readers some days.  Now, on Monday, June 8th, I have no clue what happened, but you can see the traffic report from during the evening below.  (click for a larger view)

I don’t normally share my traffic numbers, but this is so odd that I just had to.  What caused this explosive upswing in traffic is beyond me, but I know for sure it all came from StumbleUpon.  This isn’t the first time I have seen this happen, but it was one of the best examples of it, and with the best graphical representation of the situation.

While I have heard other bloggers talk about this bizarre jump in traffic from SU before, no one seems to completely understand what causes it, but we all enjoy it.  This is also why I have given up even caring about Digg.  Sure it’s nice to get that big bump on the first day, butI would rather continue getting traffic long after that first day, and it also tends to be traffic that will explore your site more than the typical Digg user will.

Of course this doesn’t happen to every post that gets on to StumbleUpon, but more often than not it does.  Why the bump happens in a mystery, but not one I plan on arguing with anytime soon.

CobWebs episode 1 is in the can!

In addition to the blog network, Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself are going to do a weekly podcast where we talk about whatever is on our minds that week.  It could be mainly tech related news, or it might go in to other fields, who knows.  This first episode is dominated by tech news, and with three of us involved it ran well over an hour.  Overall I think for a first episode it went well, but then again, we are all experienced podcasters at this point.

- FriendFeed changed over to what had been their Beta look, and none of us are overly impressed with the color scheme or the functionality of the site.  Honestly it was almost like launching an entirely new service.  If anything, we think it will make this site go even more niche than it already was.

- Should employers use social media to look into potential employees?  Steven brought this one to the table from a post he did, and it brings up some really interesting questions for employers and employees alike.

- Why does the United States get all the cool stuff, and other countries get shafted?  Again, this is a Steven rant, but he brings up excellent points, especially since he lives in Canada and he can’t get even some of the same features on an iPhone that we get here.

- A general discussion about advertising and Twitter, with some focus on what works and what doesn’t.

Great first episode, and well worth a listen, although I will warn readers of my blog who are used to my “no cursing” rule on Scattercast does not apply to CobWebs!  Foul language is contained… send the kids to bed.

Oh… and some Canadians may be offended as we mock Steven.

If you want to listen in live, we will be recording these episodes on Wednesdays at 9 PM EST/8 PM CST.  You can find us on TalkShoe.

Do not adjust your monitors… The Cynical Bastards control the vertical… and the horizontal.

You may notice a few changes around SeanPAune.com, but not to fret, they aren’t major changes.  Starting today, this blog is part of The Cynical Bastards blog network.

Before I get to what this means to you, the reader, a little background on what The CBS is.  Steven Hodson and Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins met some time back, and bonded over their cynicism towards most of the Web 2.0 and social media scene.  While they weren’t critical of every new service to come down the pipeline, they were far more willing to question new services than the majority of bloggers who “oh” and “aww” over every shiny new service.

Later on, when both were working at Mashable, they met me and my own special brand of cynicism.  Due to my work on hundreds of lists for the site, I saw even more services than most people, and most of them I thought were utter garbage.  Mark became the linchpin between the three of us shaking our heads and questioning the status quo of the social media landscape.

However, we also discovered our general negative outlook on things wasn’t restricted to just the Web, but also to the world around us.  That led Mark and I to have a late night discussion over instant message where one of us made the joke about “we’re just cynical bastards”… I bought the domain name TheCynicalBastards shortly thereafter.

As all three of us left Mashable at different times, we decided we wanted to do something that would allow the three of us to continue to work together, and we finally decided a blog network was the perfect avenue for us.  We grabbed my domain name, Mark spent a weekend putting together an aggregator site for us (with much hair pulling), and, there you have it.

Now, what does being part of the network mean to the content of our sites?  Nothing.  Not one thing will change.  None of us have any say in what the other writes, and we may even disagree on certain subjects, but that will be half the fun of it.  In short, our sites and content will not change one iota from what made people come to read us in the first place.  Heck, I’m not even sure all of us are putting the badge on our sites, but I will be in the sidebar.

This is merely a way for the three of us to stay connected with one another, share resources, help promote one another and so on.  Depending on how things go, we may add other bloggers down the road, but for now it will just be the three of us.  If we do ever decide to bring more people on board it will be via invitation, so, please, don’t contact us asking to join… because we will mock you.

In addition to the aggregating site, we will also be launching a new podcast, CobWebs (Cranky Old Bastards take on the interWEBs).  We will be recording the first episode tonight on TalkShoe at 9 PM EST/8 PM CST, watch our Twitter streams at @StevenHodson, @Rizzn and @SeanPAune for a link to where you can come listen in.  We plan on making this a weekly show, and if you can’t make it to the live record, we’ll be posting it afterwards for download.

I’ll leave you with the quotes from our press release as to what makes each of us cynical.

“Read a couple hundred blog feeds about tech and social media each day, and that will be enough to turn Saint Teresa cynical.” – Steven Hodson

“There’s obviously a lot of hot air that gets passed around the press and the blogosphere in the tech business. We believe in being honest and critical without being constantly negative. We walk that line, and we call it being cynical.” – Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins

“Why are we cynical? Because each of us has been around the block a couple of times and that leads us to believe that if you’re breathing, we pretty much instantly distrust your intentions. That’s why we’re cynical.” – Sean P. Aune

Isn’t it amazing what a year, and an economic crisis, can do to change the perception of an industry?

It was just last April that I wrote up a post about how some news sources were talking about how professional bloggers work under harsh conditions, and now I get to tell you how we’re America’s newest profession, and some of us are rolling in money!  Well, that is at least what one reporter at the Wall Street Journal is telling the world.

According to Mark Penn, there are now over 20 million people in the United States who are blogging, of those numbers, 1.7 million are profiting from it, and another 452.000 are using it as their primary source of income.  He got those numbers from a poll on Technorati, and he’s sticking to them.

He then went to a post on ReadWriteWeb where they talked about 20 of the top-tier bloggers who shared that they are earning between $45,000 to $90,000 a year.  This is also his source of information that sites that generate around 100,000 unique visitors a month can expect to earn around $75,000 a year.

While I certainly don’t know every blogger out there, I have been in the professional tech blogging field now for close to 22-months, and I can assure you I am not earning $45,000 a year.  I can also say, with a fair degree of certainty, that I only know of one of my fellow bloggers in that pay range, and right now there are rumblings of him receiving a pay cut.

Sure it is nice to a see more positive piece about one my current professions, but I also think that Mr. Penn is painting a far rosier picture about the industry than it deserves.  Revenue from blogging is almost 100% dependent on advertising, and companies are currently cutting their advertising budgets to the bone.  I have already seen bloggers receiving tremendous pay cuts due to the downturn in ad dollars, and I have seen others completely lose their jobs.  Right now is not the time for anyone with even an inkling of how this business works to be saying, “wow, look at how much bloggers are making!”, because, quite frankly, we’re not.

My biggest concern out of a piece like this is that it is going to give false hope to people who have recently lost their jobs that they may be able to replace some of that income with trying their hand in the field, or even launching their own blogs.  Mr. Penn writes in fairly cheery tones how the barrier to entry is so low to start your own blog, saying that it is around $80, which is actually high, and how you can work your way up to earning a few hundred dollars a month.  Again, speaking as someone who has run this blog for 49 months, I can assure you it is not making a few hundred dollars a month.  If I manage to cover my hosting fees each month, I call it a good month.

So, how far off is Mr. Penn from reality?

Professional Blogging

He waxes on poetically about how much the top bloggers earn, and how you can expect some single pieces to pay you $200 a pop and so on.  Course he doesn’t tell you about how to find these jobs, how long those people have been in the field, how some blogs find sneaky ways to not pay you and so on, but hey, you can say in theory you were supposed to earn $200!

The field is currently choked with seasoned writers, and it is a buyer’s market out there.  We, the writers, are all scrambling to find work to make up for jobs we’ve lost, or ones where we have had our pay cut.  We are all competing for the same handful of positions, and we don’t need a publication like the Wall Street Journal working off of pre-economic crisis blog posts to tell a whole new group of people, “Hey, come over here, there’s ‘easy money’ over here!”

Running Your Own Blog

I speak to this from the perspective of running several blogs.  While my mother and I started StarterTech.com over a year ago, its numbers are still low.  As for ad revenue, it doesn’t even cover its portion of the hosting fees, but we’re fine with that, we see it as a long term project, and we’re dedicated to it, but it is also not expected to be our primary source of income like some of the neophytes reading that original article might look upon any blog they start.

As for this blog, it has taken me years to get it up to decent traffic.  2008 was my best year ever, doubling the traffic of 2007.  This year is shaping up even better with me having surpassed the traffic for all 12 months of 2008 on April 19th.  It has taken a lot of time and effort this year to get my numbers up like that, and I am still not near those magical numbers Mr. Penn mentions.

He really makes it sound so easy to do, but he doesn’t go into things like how these bloggers would have to learn about SEO (search engine optimization), meta tags, setting up site maps for search engine crawls, submitting to the engines and on and on and on.  Nope, just throw $80 at someone and you have a blog that will be making you money!  Running a site is as hard as any other desk job, and in some ways even harder if you have no clue some of the technical aspects even exist.  There are millions of blogs out there, and you have to jump through hoops to make sure you even get noticed.

Is This The Next eBay Gold Rush?

This article reminds me so much of the ones you saw around the time everyone was discovering eBay for the first time.  “Did you know there’s money to be made out there?!?”, and people who had no clue what they were doing, all ran out to their garages, took pictures of their junk, and tried selling it via auctions.  Sure, some good sellers came out of that, and I am sure we could gain some good bloggers, but it’s the initial onslaught of everyone with a keyboard trying to be a blogger that worries me.  More people fighting for the limited jobs, more blogs to help muddy up the search engines and just more drivel in general making it onto the Interwebs.

I don’t think this will happen unless more articles like this begin to appear, and seeing as how journalists are already fearing they may lose their jobs to bloggers, something Mr. Penn oddly does address, we won’t see an onslaught of new people in the blogosphere.  I do think his article does point out, one again, that unless you understand all the facets of a subject, perhaps you shouldn’t be writing an opinion piece on it.

I’m always up for a good laugh, and thanks to a crack “legal team”, I got one last night.

Back in August 2007, I wrote a post about Armando Montelongo, one of the people on the series Flip This House that goes around buying cheap houses and “flips” them quickly to resell them at a higher price after he’s fixed them up.  The post focused on a particular episode known as “The Cathouse” that led to Armando’s brother, David, calling his partnership with his brother over as he walked away from the house in disgust over the cheapness Armando was trying to get away with.

This post, approaching its 20-month anniversary of when I wrote it, has been a constant performer for me in terms of visitors and pageviews.  I can always tell when an episode of the show with Armando airs because I see a spike in visitors to the post.  Beyond that, I no longer watch the show, and I don’t give the Montelongos a second thought.

Well, last night that all changed when I received the following email from legal@armandomontelongo.com:

Mr. Aune:

Re: Your web page at     http://www.seanpaune.com/2007/08/26/armando-montelongo/

Armando Montelongo’s  image is copyrighted. Please remove the photo you have on the above web page immediately.

Thank you,

Legal Team
Armando Montelongo Worldwide, Inc.

This email came in at 1:00 AM CST, and I replied to them at 1:10 AM CST that the image had been removed, and they replied at 1:19 AM with a simple “Thank you.”  No biggie, right?  Well, I have questions about this whole thing, so lets analyze it, shall we?

- Have you ever seen an email from a lawyer that didn’t include their name, let alone the name of their law firm?  The law firm name I could almost excuse because it is quite possible Mr. Montelongo has a full-time lawyer on staff, but no name?  Doubtful.

- It came in at 1 AM… on a Sunday night/Monday morning… of Easter weekend… what lawyer is cruising web sites looking for pictures of their clients at a time like that?

- There is an actual process to officially request the removal of copyrighted materials from a web site.  I’m not going to name it here as I’m not doing the work for his “legal team”, but you would be hard pressed to find a lawyer that doesn’t know how to do it, but apparently this “legal team” is not aware of it.

In short, I feel the email I got from legal@armandomontelongo.com was actually from Armando himself.  Do I have proof?  No, but considering the things I mentioned above, who else would be looking around for pictures of him at 1:00 AM.  I would say “Googling himself”, but my site records show the person coming in via a Yahoo search for “Armando Montelongo”.

So, why do I bring this all up?  No matter who it was behind the address, was the image really causing that much harm?  It had been there for 20-months, but it doesn’t change the post which is not friendly to him at all.  They also didn’t take into consideration this may lead to another post talking about Mr. Montelongo in a negative light.  Or that I may contact another blogger who is considering writing about this in a future post of his own.

Reputation management is an amazing thing, and annoying bloggers is not a way to do it.  Instead of getting a picture removed, they got a picture removed and yet another post on the Internet that doesn’t cast them in a favorable light.  Good thinking.

There is every chance that this was an actual lawyer, actually doing his job, but there is a point where it is better to just let one slide.  I obviously don’t like the guy if I took the time to write a rant about him, so what did they think I would do when they reached out to me and told me to remove an image?  Yes, they got their way, mainly because I didn’t feel it was worth the headache of arguing with them, and, hey, I had to give them some sort “thank you” for giving me an excuse to write about the guy again.

My gut tells me this wasn’t really a lawyer, but I just also don’t really care.  So, thank you, Armando for giving me fodder for another post!

I have to admit that I am a bit of a coffee snob, but I think I may have found the cure for it with Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

Since the age of 13 or 14 I’ve been drinking coffee on a daily basis.  Even though I have cut back on my consumption, I still drink at least a pot a day.  Since I was 16 or so, I’ve been grinding my own whole beans at home for my pots, and it’s just the way I prefer it.  I’ve never been big on pre-ground coffees, but would drink them in a pinch.

Then I met Dunkin’ Donuts Original Blend.

Friends had been raving to me about the wonders of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee for a while now, but I had kept thinking, “Oh, it can’t be that good, but maybe I’ll try it some time on those rare occasions I am near one of their stores.”  Well, they ended up releasing it to grocery stores, and feeling a bit adventerous one day, I picked up a bag of it at Walmart, and I am totally hooked.  It’s smooth, strong without being over powering and tastes like coffee.  You know what I mean, no nuts, no syrups, this is just plain old, coffee tasting coffee, and I love it.

All that being said, they do offer other flavors, but I’m sticking to original blend.

If you want to give it a try, just click the image up there and go to their site have them send you a free sample of it.  No, I get nothing from this, I just like spreading the addiction the coffee love.

It would seem that the Associated Press (AP) is insanely short sighted.

At a meeting of the AP, which encompasses approximately 1500 member publications, AP Chairman Dean Singleton talked to the audience about the increasing evils of the Internet, and how their content was being abused by blogs and news aggregation sites.

We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more. AP and its member newspapers must be paid fully and fairly.

While they certainly have every right to protect their intellectual properties, but they are talking about even going after sites like Google News that aggregate multiple news sources into one centralized location.    They are saying that even these types of sites are profiteering off of their copyrighted works, and if they are to continue, they must pay for the use of AP content just as any other news source that reprints their content with permission.

The problem with this whole theory is that sites like Google News simply provide the headline, maybe an image, and usually around one sentence of the story to give you and idea of what it is about.  If you choose to read more of the story, you then click on the link are taking to the original page that presents the story.  Due to the limited amount of the story that ir reprinted, this falls well within the terms of “fair use“, or, as the AP calls it, “misguided legal theories.”

Essentially fair use is the concept that you can reprint things in an article so long as you limit how much of it you copy, and you site the source of the information.  Copying an entire piece, even with a link to the original source would fall outside of the fair use guidelines.  As anyone familiar with Google News knows, they show you a headline, maybe an image and one to two introductory lines from the article. Then, if you are interested in it, you click on it and go to the original piece. Well, it seems the AP no longer wants this to happen unless sites like Google pay them a fee for running those brief intros.

Here’s the back-asswards part of this whole thing. Someone like me has no time to read news unless they go through an aggregator. I don’t have time to go to multiple sources, and by using a service by Google News I do visit a lot of local television sites, smaller town newspapers and so on. In other words, these sites are getting traffic they never would have if it wasn’t for Google doing what they do.  In the AP’s amazing lack of wisdom, they see this as a horrible thing that Google is slapping some ads on those results pages, and that is where their problem is.  It’s a chick and the egg type scenario… I wouldn’t be seeing those ads on Google if I wasn’t coming to their site to look for the news stories that I can then go and read, and, in turn, see the ads of those original sites.

Old media, which the AP is a glowing example of, is in desperate need of money, and they are trying to get it from anywhere they can, even if it means cutting off their nose to spite their face.  Charge Google… Google may drop you… you just lost thousands, if not millions, of potential readers.  Is there not a time where you have to skip making money from a venue to make other money because of that same venue?  Yes, there is, and this is one of those times.

The even sadder part is that it isn’t just Google they want to go after, but also bloggers for quoting their articles.  Well, quoting articles is an age old tradition in journalism, which blogging is an off shoot of.  Sure some bloggers take it too far, but the vast majority don’t.  So why not leave us alone and les us spread your work for even more people to see?  I have no desire to quote entire articles, that would be pointless for someone like me.  I actually already stopped using AP stories due to their plan a few months ago to start charging something like a $1.50 per word for every word you quoted.  I didn’t feel like seeing what their limit would be, so I always look for on-AP stories to quote, and apparently I am going to have to keep that policy in place.

It is time for the AP to grow up and accept the 21st century or this truly will be the end of newspapers as we know it.  So go ahead, AP, keep annoying the people who might be your only salvation and see how far you get.

1,460 days of blogging down!

Yep. today marks the fourth anniversary of uninterrupted blogging for me.  I wish I could say all of my posts have been masterpieces, but then there are posts like this one from Februry 2006:

is called on account of beer…wooooooooooooooooo *thud*

Yeah… oh well. Oh yeah, and it was called “Today’s Post”, hence it starting with just the word “is”.

When you add in the fact that over the past 18-months I have also been working at Mashable, and I’ve been going almost daily at StarterTech for 11-months now, I do a heck of a lot of blogging each day.  While I did consider cutting back on this site with all of the other work, the record has become like a drug.  I now have to see just how far I can go without missing a day, as opposed to when I used to have make a big announcement that I updated the site once a year or so such as in this screen shot from September 2004 of my site.  My how times have changed over the years.

As with every year, I have to thank Luis at BlogD for inspiring me to try this, and I think it has worked out well for me, and it’s almost like second nature to me to blog each day.  I’m hoping to make it at least one more year without stopping, but I honestly think I may go beyond that, we’ll just have to see when that day comes I suppose.

Thank you to all the readers who have been making this worthwhile.  2008 was the best year yet for the site, and year-to-date the site is running 233.51% ahead of 2008, so this year is off to a spectacular start.  Over the next few months I will be adding a video blog to compliment Scattercast, the audio podcast I have been doing for months now.  And as always, you can subscribe to the SeanPAune.com RSS feed to keep up with all of my latest ramblings.

if you feel so inclined, feel free to leave me some comments about which type of posts I do that you enjoy the most.  Movie reviews?  Rants?  Current news such as the teacher sex scandals and so on?  Let me know, and here’s to another year of me doing the writing, and you all do the reading!

Well, this was a pleasant surprise today.

Time came up with a list of the 25 Best Blogs 2009, and while they didn’t assign numbers, somewhere in that mass is my employers, Mashable.  You can read the entry about us here, and I have to say it’s interesting to see.  When you’re working on something day-in, day-out, it is sometimes difficult to know what is going on outside of your “cubicle”.  I quite often go days without even talking to my co-workers at the site as my particular assignments keep me pretty autonomous.  I get a batch of assignments, I write them one at a time, leave them notes on which ones are ready, and by the time they see that, I’m already on to the next one.

Working in such a manner can make it easy to forget sometimes that there is a whole world out there reading what we publish, and to wake up to something as auspicious as Time naming your company one of the 25 best in its field?  Well, it’s a bit humbling to say the least.  Don’t get me wrong, I am just one of the cogs in the machine at Mashable, there is a whole team of us that this honor goes out to, but it is still nice to notice someone is noticing our caffeine-fueled ramblings.  (Maybe this will finally bring in that coffee sponsorship editor-in-chief Adam Ostrow and I have long dreamed of…)

Do make sure to check out the full list of 25 as there are a lot of great blogs in there that are well worth your time.  And thank you to all of the loyal readers of Mashable for making this possible.  Well, and thank you to Pete Cashmore, the CEO of Mashable, for taking a chance on me back in July of 2007 when I joined the site.  Sure I had been a writer in print media before then, but let me tell you all, blogging is a whole different beast, but I’m glad I could play at least some small part in all of this.

As we start another year, it’s time for me to take a look back at what struck a chord with my readers.

2008 was very good to this blog, and I have to take a moment to thank you, my readers, for an amazing year of growth!  Unique visitors grew by almost 600%, and total page views was darn close to 700%!  I hoped for a year of growth, but I could have never dreamed readership would be up that much!  Don’t get me wrong, this blog is still a long ways away from the major leagues… a long, long, LONG way… but it is still a nice amount of growth.

So, without further ado, the 10 entries that helped me see this growth.

Who Is The Best James Bond? – Who knew people were this interested in who made the best James Bond? Published in September, this post brought in more page views in three days than this blog got total in the year of 2007.  It is still getting viewed every day, some days only 1 or 2 views, but it is still looked at on a constant basis.  Quite surprising, I must say.

Anonymous Takes On Scientology -This post came in second with a very healthy showing (the Bond post has about 4 times the page views), and it was also one that took me by surprise in how it took off.  It didn’t hurt that members of Anonymous put links to it all over the Web, and with that in mind, I am sure I am now on the Scientology watch list.  -waves-  Hail, Xenu!

The Music Industry Vs Net Neutrality -This post was from January of last year, and was my biggest success to date at the time.  Net Neutrality is always a touchy subject, and the music industry seemingly want to wage war on it is not sitting well with anyone, and understandably so.

How To Watch Internet Videos On Your TV -This is a very popular post, and one on plan on revisiting soon as a lot has changed since I published this last February.  This was also part of the inspiration for the launching of StarterTech.com.

Olympic Beach Volleyball Uniforms -This was my second article about my anger over how women’s beach volleyball athletes were treated by the medie at this past Summer Olympics.  The first article, Olympic Beach Volleyball, was only a few hundred views behind this one, but I am counting them as one entry on this list.

I will admit, from analyzing the search traffic on these two posts, they are found for all the wrong reasons, and that being mainly people looking for pictures of the athletes asses.  Somehow I doubt they read the accompanying articles that say that is what I’m talking against…

Who Is The Best Doctor Who – Okay, I am not too proud to admit this was an obvious attempt to copy the success of the James Bond post, but apparently I went a little too obscure with the subject matter.  It obviously still did well as a post as it made this list.

JJ Abrams Unveils The New Enterprise From Star Trek – This is another one that surprised me with how well it did.  I guess people really, really wanted to see how the new Enterprise looked!

Dancing With The Stars Band – My dislike for the Dancing With The Stars band, and it’s conductor, Harold Wheeler, has turned this in to my most controversial post ever. I have received numerous nasty comments and emails about me and my opinion of these… “musicians”… and all I can say is… Keep it up! I always need more laughs in my life!

New The Dark Knight Trailer Hints At Joker Greatness – The massive upswing I saw in traffic to this post in October prompted me to write a post entitled “Just Put Down The Clown Makeup!” as I could see it was mainly being found by people looking for pictures of the Joker.  Sure enough, it was all about people trying to dress as him for Halloween.

Weighty Issues For Cheryl Burke of Dancing With The Stars -Poor Cheryl Burke took a real pounding for her non-existent weight issues on the fall season of Dancing With The Stars.  It was a whole lot of hype over a woman gaining a meager 5 lbs, and I personally found that the fact anyone was even calling her “fat” just silly.

Honroable Mentions – Somehow my review of a Combichrist/K.M.F.D.M. concert from 2006 was technically in my top 10 viewed posts… I have no clue why.  Also, my post on Armando Montelongo also made it into the top ten, but I like to keep this list about posts published in 2008.

So, there you have it, the top 10 posts of the year for this blog.  Just like last year, this list tells me entertainment related posts do well, but I will probably continue to talk about just whatever is randomly on my mind at any given time.  I will say that the increased readership has made me a lot more self conscience about my posts, and what I tend to pick as the subjects, but at the end of the day, this is still just a personal blog… filled with a lot of ranting.

Thank you all so very much for making 2008 such a great year here at SeanPAune.com, and I only hope I can keep you all as interested in 2009!