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Smaller week than the usual for me on the writing front. I had some computer problems while in Boston and had to sacrafice some slots to other writers. Next week will be back up to full speed.

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Sean P. Aune’s Articles For The Week Of August 23rd

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Could A Four-Day Work Week Be Coming?

Sean P Aune — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 03:25:29 +0000

It seems there is a movement out there to cut the standard work week from the familiar five days of 8-hours each to four days of 10-hours each.

According to a recent article from Scientific American, numerous studies have been conducted about the economic and environmental benefits of eliminating one day from the standard five-day work week. Instead of working a 40-hour schedule over five days of eight hours each, you would instead do it over four days of ten hours each. This would give everyone a three day weekend each weekend.

Before you start whooping it up about how wonderful that is, remember this means you would be in your office ten hours a day for four days a week. Imagine an 8 AM – 6 PM or 9 AM – 7 PM schedule. Imagine trying to still cook at home… going to the gym… running errands… anything else you might try to do on a work day. Still excited about the concept?

Before you start making up your minds, there are some actual benefits from the scheme. In August 2008, Utah impletmented the plan with 17,000 of its state employees. Here are the pros according to the state:

Local governments in particular have had their eyes on Utah over the last year; the state redefined the workday for more than 17,000 of its employees last August. For those workplaces, there’s no longer a need to turn on the lights, elevators or computers on Fridays—nor do janitors need to clean vacant buildings. Electric bills have dropped even further during the summer, thanks to less air-conditioning: Friday’s midday hours have been replaced by cooler mornings and evenings on Monday through Thursday. As of May, the state had saved $1.8 million.

There is no arguing that not only is the state saving money, but all of those things they listed should have a definite impact on the environment, and it also impacts your wallet as you are spending one day less a week on the road commuting to work, no money spent on an expensive lunch out and so on.

While everything everyone is listing sounds like it lands on the size of positive, I have to be my usual nay saying self and bring up the fact that unless you get the rest of the world on board, this will be a disaster if it should ever get wide spread in the USA only. We already lag behind the majority of the world in many ways, and if we give them a leg up of working five calendar days a week as opposed to four, and mind you this has nothing to do with hours, they will have a distinct tactical advantage in reaction time to market movements, world developments and more. Again I stress that this is only if by some wild-eyed chance this schedule would gain wide spread acceptance in this country.

If it remains in the realm of some state employees and a company here or there, more power to them, but as a national plan, I would have a problem with it.

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Could A Four-Day Work Week Be Coming?

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I’ve Joined SiliconANGLE As The Head Of Their Mobile Division

Sean P Aune — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 01:56:00 +0000

Well, I have a small addendum to yesterday’s What A Strange Journey The Past Year Has Been post: I got another job.

Effective today I am working at SiliconANGLE as the head of their new mobile division. Yes, you heard me, “head of the division. Or as Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins put it to me in an IM conversation today:

Rizzn: we’re looking for contributors for your department.

Rizzn: you’ll have underlings.

I really wish he had said “minions”. I’ve always wanted me some of those.

The division will be covering mainly mobile application development and monetization news for developers. I’ll again hand it over to Mark to describe my job from his announcement article:

Sean is joining our staff as of this week to help us boot up a new vertical of coverage in the mobile sector, focusing on mobile monetization. He’ll primarily be doing weekly wrap-ups of what’s hot in the mobile device sector, with an eye on angles that app developers looking to monetize might find interesting or useful.

We’re also looking for more contributors to work with him, as he’ll be the section editor for all that falls under the the Mobile category button up on the top of the site. If you’re interested, sign up for an account here, and join the “Mobile” group.

Please do join the Mobile group, I need more minions underlings.

I have one more resume floating out there in the world right now, and if I get that job I’m thinking I will call it a day on applying for any more positions… maybe.

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I’ve Joined SiliconANGLE As The Head Of Their Mobile Division

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What A Strange Journey The Past Year Has Been

Sean P Aune — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 03:54:41 +0000

Reflections can happen at the oddest times, like when you log in to your blog to think about what to write for that day.

Whenever you log in to a WordPress powered blog, you see the main Dashboard page, and one of the things it shows you is posts you did on that same date in past years. Well, a year ago today I was in Seattle, WA (and writing thoughts about the city that did not please all of my readers) for the SummerMash event hosted by Mashable, and that made me think a lot about the past twelve months.

First off, I guess I have never made this overwhelmingly clear due to the number of emails I still get about it every week, but I’m no longer at Mashable. I searched my archives and see that I only made one very tiny mention of it in a post, but I have left Mashable effective April 1st of this year.

I wasn’t fired, and I didn’t exactly quit, Pete Cashmore, the owner of the company, and I kind of reached an amicable understanding that we weren’t perfectly matched any more. I had been hired to do list posts (you can still see the archive of my work), and after having done around 400 of them, I was feeling very burned out on them as they are extremely mind numbing work, and Pete felt we had pretty much played out the category due to the speed with which I had worked through the available list subjects. He did offer my the chance to stay on with the company after I expressed my desire to just make a break of it, but I needed a change of scenery. So, no hard feelings on either side, we just weren’t in the same places work wise any more.

So, I walked out of Mashable, and… had another job doing lists at SitePoint within a day or two. Yes, I am still doing lists because I seem to have the ability to withstand doing them. I have no clue why, but I seem to be one of the few people in the tech blogging industry that can take the grind of doing them, and believe me, they are a grind. As SitePoint is far more technical in nature, the lists are extremely different from what I was doing at Mashable, and due to the amount of research I need to do for each one, I only have to do one a week compared to the four a week I had been doing previously.

I also went back to BLORGE.com whom I had worked with previous to signing my exclusive contract with Mashable. I had been told I had an open invitation to return, and sure enough I dropped them an email saying I was available again, and I was back with them in the very first reply. While they have shuffled me around a bit as they try to rearrange their writers, I seem to have settled in to seven posts a week at Tech.BLORGE.com and two posts a week at Photo.BLORGE.com. I am also doing some lists for them (what can I say, I got it, I flaunt it), but they are at a pace of my choosing, so there is no pressure on doing them.

You can also find me here on this site every day, and every day at StarterTech.com. I am starting a couple of more blogs (announcements very soon, and they are actually up and in “testing mode” at the moment), my work with The Cynical Bastards and I just applied for another blog that I won’t name as I doubt I will get the job, but boy do I want it as I read it every day.

So, yes, a year ago I really didn’t see myself leaving Mashable, but it really was the best option for both parties when the time came up to renew my contract. And I know this seems like a lot of work I’m doing, but I think I’ve got juggling down to an art now… although I do have to occasionally look up at my white board where I write my schedule and go, “Who in the hell am I blogging for today?!?”, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I like changing up what I’m writing each day, hopping around keeps me a bit more fresh I feel than doing lists and only lists, so I think I’ve found a good balance now of lists and regular articles.

Now, lets see where I am a year from now…

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What A Strange Journey The Past Year Has Been

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Money For Bloggin’, How The Wall Street Journal Got It Really Wrong

Sean P Aune — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:09:18 +0000

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.

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Money For Bloggin’, How The Wall Street Journal Got It Really Wrong

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