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.

The winners for the 81st annual Academy Awards have been announced, and, not too much to my surprise, I have seen hardly any of these films so far.  I have been dying to see Slumdog Millionaire, and surprisingly, it is actually in my town now!  I’m going to try to sneak out of work and see it as soon as possible.

That being said, there weren’t too many surprises with this year’s awards.  Slumdog Millionaire winning just about everything was expected, but I find it fascinating for all of the awards it won, it received no acting nominations.  Did the script just magically appear on screen without anyone acting it?

- Kudos to Kate Winslet for finally winning on her sixth outing.  She is a great actress and has been deserving for some time of winning.

- Heath Ledger put in an amazing performance in The Dark Knight, but I wonder how much of his win was his passing away and how much was truly the role.  I felt he was deserving, but you will alway shave to wonder.

- Hugh Jackman did a good job hosting, although the format was way different than it has been in the past.  And yay for him getting to sing.

- How was Don LaFontaine left out of the remembrance video of those who passed this year?  He was the voice of the movies to millions of people.

- What was Whoopi Goldberg wearing?  Did she get dressed in the dark?

- On the flip side… Tina Fey was… wow.

- Speaking of Tina Fey, her bit with Steve Martin was fantastic just for the thinly veiled joke at Scientology.  A mighty brave move in Hollywood these days considering the big names that buy in to that sham of a “religion”.  Wonder how many of the millions of people watching actually caught the meaning of that joke.

See all the nominees and the winners after the jump.

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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.

The nominees for the 81st annual Academy Awards have been announced, and, not too much to my surprise, I have seen hardly any of these films so far.

Every year I wait for the Oscar nominations, and each year I walk away saying, “Wow, wish I had seen most of these.”  I think it is a combination of my living in a small town that doesn’t get the lesser known films, and even for the major releases such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I simply don’t have the time to get out to the theater often enough.  This film will probably be the big winner this year as it has 13 nominations (second only to Titanic that holds the record with 14… and I can still say I have never seen it), but there have been other big disappointments in the past, so who knows.

The most intriguing category is Best Supporting Actor.  Lots of people debated if Heath Ledger would make the cut for his turn as the Joker in The Dark Knight, and he did, but you wonder if it isn’t based somewhat on sympathy.  I felt it was a brilliant performance, and worthy of the award, but it will always be questioned if he wins.  And did anyone see Robert Downey, Jr. getting a nod for Tropic Thunder?  I haven’t seen it yet, and I heard he was amazing in it, but still a bit of a surprise for a comedy to get in there.

Overall, an interesting mix this year, and several films I am dying to see (most notably, Slumdog Millionaire), but, for now, we will just have to stay happy with the nominations.  I’ve listed them all below the cut for your convenience.

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I have returned from SummerMash Seattle, and in the words of Karen Hartline of Mashable… “We rocked it out.”

For those not sure what a SummerMash is, it is a tour of seven cities Mashable is holding networking events in, where our sponsors can set up to meet people, and Mashable employees can talk with fans and startups.  So, thanks to Sun Startup Essentials program, Yoono (who is nice enough to be taking pictures of all the attendees who want them done), MySites (hi Rameen!) and SocialMediaCamp.

It was nice for me because I got out of my own town for a weekend, and finally met some other Mashable folks.  I have worked with the company for a year now, and this my first chance to meet Pete Cashmore, the CEO of the company, and the man who hired me.  (For those who are interested, you can click the image for a super-sized version of the image… it’s very exciting)  It was nice to actually get to talk to him in person and go over some of the stuff going on in the background at Mashable, and getting instant feedback on it.  I am hoping to make it to some unknown future event, but we shall see how things work out.

And no slight to Karen Hartline!  She is a fairly new hire at Mashable, and it was nice to meet her also, but Pete won first mention as for the past year he has been the guy with the funny accent (he’s Scottish) that I have talked to a grand total of 3 times on the phone.  Karen is fun, and our event planner, so much credit to her for putting the event together.

Anyway, much fun was had, and it was a delight to finally meet some of the people I work with and write about.  Do make sure to check out Mashable for info on the next six stops in the tour!

I’ve made it to Seattle for Summer Mash Seattle, and no, I can’t see the Space Needle from my room.  (I can see an office building, but everyone seems to assume I can see the Needle)

I was up at 6:15 AM, which for me is unheard of.  The only time I ever see 6:15 is when I’m heading to bed, but see it I did.  The flight wasn’t as awful as I feared as they took pity on me and put me in an exit row, but that’s where it got a bit odd.

As you know, to sit in an exit row, you have to be willing to open the door in case of an emergency.  Well, the person closest to the door was a tiny Asian woman who couldn’t have weighed more than 90 lbs.  The door weighs 49 lbs… you do the math.  The stewaress talked to her about if she was comfortable with this:

Stewardess: The door weights 49 lbs, are you sure you can lift it?

Woman: … yes.

Stewardess:  It’s pretty heavy.

Woman: … yes.

Stewardess: You’re sure you understand your responsabilities?

Woman: … yes.

Stewardess: You’re sure you can lift that door, we can move you, but if you’re sure you can lift it, we’ll leave you.

Woman: … yes.

Stewardess said “Okay”, and walked on.  Um… she didn’t answer the last question correctly!  The guy behind me and I both asked if she was sure the woman understood her.  “Well, she answered ‘yes’.”  Guy behind me and I informed the stewardess that, yes, she answered “yes”, but that proved nothing.  She went on her merry way.  So the guy asks me, “Are you sure you can lift a 49 lbs door while shoving aside a 60 lbs woman?”  Iinform him he should be ready to catch her as I fling her over the seat.

I have nothing against the woman, but it was pretty clear her English wasn’t that good, and the Stewardess should have made sure the woman could actually speak English before deciding a bunch of “yes” answers qualified her for the exit row.  Luckily nothing happened, but I wasn’t really looking forward to flinging a little woman over the seats.

In short, I’m in Seattle, I like it here, though I’m still forming my final opinions.  It seems to be full of contradictions between the old andthe new, the mainstream vs. the non-mainstream.  Very interesting place.

Ages ago I talked about the possibility of me working on some video blogs (vlogs), but it ended up never happening until this week.

The original project ended up never happening, but I ended up doing one episode for Mashable’s new video series, Mashable Conversations, a few weeks ago.  After a few false starts, this has now morphed into a daily video cast co-hosted by Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins and myself.

Our first episode went up on July 2nd, and features Mark and I discussing the current blogosphere thoughts on Digg, followed by an interview with guitarist Ryan Newell from the band Sister Hazel about his involvement with iVideoSongs.  Most episodes will follow the format of Mark and I discussing a topic of the day, followed up with an interview with someone from the web 2.0 space.

The second episode is out now where Mark and I discuss domain name changes (well… only Mark was on the video for that part as I messed up my recording) with Rob Johnson of EventVue, and then followed up with a discussion of what his company is about.  (I liked the concept a lot… as I said numerous times on and off cam)

There is a definite learning curve to being on cam when the only person you see is yourself, and you have to ask yourself questions such as, “Have I nodded enough?”,  “Why am I smirking?”, “I shouldn’t have had those beans for lunch…”.  I think I’m getting more comfortable with each recording session, and since I have several more weeks of episodes to do under the current promotion, hopefully it will get better with each one.

I’ve embedded the first episode below for you all to check out, feel free to give me comments and feedback on it!  Just try not to rip me apart…

On Saturdays and Sundays I put in 8 hours each day with Mashable, working on my lists for the coming week.  Since my lists are rarely time sensitive, this works out great, except for one small problem.  Have you ever tried working from home?

I admit I break the golden rule of home working in that I don’t set up a designated work area free of distractions.  I could if I really wanted to, but I used to do that here, and I don’t miss it.  It is also in a part of the house the dogs aren’t allowed in to, and I don’t want to lock them up while I go work.

However, it’s not the distractions that get me, it is the mad urge to take a nap.  It probably doesn’t help matters that I typically sit in “the comfy chair” with a warm laptop in my lap all day, because warmth is something that will put me to sleep in a nanosecond.    The thing is, I love my chair, and it really is the only chair in the house I’m comfortable in.  I’ve tried sitting in hard wooden chair when writing, and all that did was make my butt numb for an entire day.

So, how do I fight the napping urge to get my work done?  Coffee… copious amounts of coffee.  I try to get up and walk around every hour or two just to get the blood flowing.  Even with that, there are times when I’ve woken up to a depressed key and a seemingly endless row of a letter as I pressed a key in my sleep.

While I prefer working home just for comfort and ease, it’s not always the easiest thing in the world when it comes to self discipline.  What do all you readers out there do to make sure you are productive when working from home?

Well, it’s just been settled and I will be attending my first, and possibly only,  Mashable party.  For those of you in the tech world, make sure to mark your calendars for July 12th for Summer Mash Seattle.

Besides myself, boss man Pete Cashmore and Karen Hartline will be in attendance, so no need to worry about just talking to “the list guy” all night with nothing else going on.  “This one time, I wrote a list, and it had over 120 items on it!  Why are you falling asleep?”

When: July 12th, Saturday, 7:00 – 10:00 PM
Where: Showbox SoDo, 1700 1st Avenue South, Seattle, WA 98134
What else?:DJ El Toro, Light Appetizers, Drink Tickets, Door Prizes and more…
RSVP?: Tickets will be released through Eventbrite, 21+ Only
Socialize: Facebook, MySpace, Meetup and Upcoming

I’ve never been horribly comfortable with self-promotion, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do it. With that being said, I would like to introduce you to my newest time consuming project, StarterTech.com.

This is a new blog which, as the tag line implies, tries to simplify technology so that anyone can understand it. The new project was born out of my own mother’s problems with trying to educate my 60-year-old father about technology, and her constant exasperations with him. She finally asked me one day if there was a blog that did nothing but explain various aspects of technology as simply as possible, I said I didn’t think so, and thus StarterTech was born.

Technology is something I have always been passionate about, but I don’t think it is nearly as all inclusive as it could be, and those of us who live with it everyday sometimes forget that people don’t just “know” all of the ins-and-outs of it. I learned several years ago to try to take a much more patient approach to teaching people about technology when I taught an adult education night course in computer basics. I had agreed to do it because a friend asked me, and it really opened my eyes to the fact that -gasp- not every one is computer savvy or a tech geek! After a few false steps, it really gave me a sense of satisfaction to convey my love of tech, and what it can do for us, to people that were just learning, no matter what their age.

I am hoping to do the same with StarterTech, just with a broader audience. And, no, it is not lost on me that people have to know how to use a search engine to find me, but there is not much I can do to teach them before they even find me. This is part of the reason I am trying to write the simplest headlines and phrases I can in the hopes it will aid them in locating the site.

While it is done in a blog format, I am trying to make it so people who go to a search engine and look for an answer to their problem won’t have any trouble finding it. Yes, it is being written in a normal chronological fashion, but it is much more about being a reference site and trying to explain how to do things on the web, as well as explaining basic concepts.

The first article went up on April 12th, so I am still trying to get the body of work up to speed, and right now I am trying to cover very basic ideas that will be referred back to numerous times, such as What Is Social Networking?, How To Pick A Password and even things like Web 101 Guide To Acronyms.

I am actually fairly excited about this project, and I plan on getting guest bloggers in to do articles about fields I don’t understand myself, such as capturing video from your TV. This is very much not just online tech, but all technology.

So, please stop by the site, or sign up for the RSS feed, and join me as I lose my mind as I add yet another project to the 5,000 things I already do! And to all my tech-guru type friends out there who will probably laugh at me, why not drop me an email or comment about guest blogging on a subject near and dear to your heart?

I can finally talk about this since it has been published, but I am now one of the hosts of the “Mashable Conversations” podcast. My first audio episode is an interview with the lead singer of Dredg, Gavin Hayes, about the new microblogging service, Blip.

Blip allows you to share what you’re listening to in music with other members in an interface similar to Twitter. You can find the actual song, insert it into your message and other users can listen to it, so it turns into a huge music finding/online radio experience. Quite fun. You can find my Blip profile and follow along, though I haven’t had much time to use it yet.

You can check out my article and podcast by heading over to the article on Mashable.

I just spent the past four days blogging my little heart out over at Mashable due to it being the holidays. Since I live with my family, and had nowhere to travel to, I went ahead and took all the open shifts, including Christmas day. I figured if I’m going to have my laptop on anyway, I might as well be earning money.

The news was fairly sparse, so I didn’t do all that much writing, but I did get to work on my first all opinion piece for them which was nice. You can swing by there to see my part of our predictions series, Mashable’s 2008 Predictions: Sean’s List. Some of it won’t make any sense to my normal readers, but it was fun to put together.

So what does this have to do with my normal blogging around here?   It’s amazing what I’ve learned about blogging as a career since I started doing this in July.  A few of the highlights:

1. It doesn’t matter how little you think is going on in the world, you better be finding something to blog about.
2. Holidays?  What holidays?
3. There is always someone out there who will take great glee in pointing out your mistakes… including a simple typo.

Overall it’s been a great experience.  And come New Years… I’m working it again!