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.

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…

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 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.

It seems all I am doing this weekend is writing: here, Mashable, an upcoming project I don’t want to discuss yet.

And when I’m not writing actual articles, I’m working on tweaking WordPress templates, reorganizing categories, trying to figure out a pixel issue at another blog, and more.

In short, I am attached to my keyboard more so than usual even by my standards this weekend, and not one bit of it is for “fun”. And all of this is bringing up the laptop debate again, but I have the answer that as soon as Windows XP SP3 comes out this month, I am going with a PC laptop. One of my co-workers at Mashable made an excellent point that I can basically get two PC laptops for the price of one Mac, so think of it as a really odd extended warranty.  All I know is that I need a new laptop ASAP, this one has seen better days, and the “d” key has a mind of its own.

Alas, I must get back to checking over 20,000 articles by hand to find something.  Good times.

In an article on TechCrunch yesterday, Michael Arrington, founder of the site, talked about blogs raising more funding, and one of the problems he listed was the rates bloggers are expecting to be paid working at the big name sites.

Writers suddenly want to be paid market wages, far above the $5 per post that they received two years ago. No, we’re talking a big salary, with benefits, and stock options. There went half your margins at least.

This led to Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb to bring up a subject that has floated around for ages, but been shot down every time it comes around: A union for bloggers.

A bloggers union is an idea that was most recently advanced last month in an issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. “It’s a Wild West out there for bloggers — even though, without them, the Internet’s frontier would not have expanded so broadly or so rapidly. And even though, without them, the Web-derived profits many of these blog sites are starting to rake in simply wouldn’t exist,” wrote Chris Mooney.

Mooney envisions a professional guild for bloggers, not unlike the Writers Guild of America, that would strictly rep professional bloggers. How you weed “professional bloggers” from the hobbyists would be task number one for guild organizers, whom Mooney thinks would initially be the blogosphere’s most successful writers — i.e., people who have sway with management. Unionizing bloggers is something the National Writers Union recently voted to be a priority.

I made no secret of my support for the Writer’s Guild of America strike, but that doesn’t mean I want a union in my backyard.

What I get paid for blogging is confidential, but I will say I have worked for blogs that pay well, and some that haven’t. However, that is the nature of being a freelance writer, but you know before hand what you are going to be paid. I am no longer considered freelance, and have an actual contract in place with Mashable, I accepted those terms and chose to work there. I have set terms as to what is expected of me, and I have a set term in what I expect to be paid, as it should be with any job you accept.

The Internet is a beast unlike any other job out there. A good portion of its appeal is its ability to change on a dime, and if it got regulated to everything having to be run through a union first, it would kill some of the very nature that made the Internet what it is today.

You also have to ponder the international aspects of the Internet. Mashable is technically based out of Scotland as our CEO and founder hails from there, while BLORGE, whom I used to work for, is based out of Australia. Would the union be able to follow the laws of every country on Earth? What if unions are illegal in the country where the blog is out of? Blogs could easily change server locations so they would be served out of that country, then claim that

And let us also not forget something in that blogging is not exactly the hardest job in the world. Yes, it is work, and there are some nights I get so flustered that I want to throw my laptop, but it still not exactly like we’re doing hard labor. Quite often during my weekend shifts I sit in my favorite chair all day, still in my pajamas, sipping coffee, TV on, and a dog laying on my shoulders acting as my headrest. I wouldn’t exactly say my work is harsh.

I am not alone in my feelings about this: Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, one of my co-workers at Mashable, has stated his displeasure at the idea, as has Leslie Poston, a former co-worker at BLORGE. From other bloggers I have talked to today, none of us like this idea, and I’m not quite sure how the National Writer’s Union even thinks they could bring us all together into some form of cohesive group. We are a notoriously independent lot of people, and we don’t take particularly well to “authority”.

I think part of the thought process comes from my time writing for print media.  I sometimes got paid as low as $.05 a word, or $30 for a 600 word article.  Considering the length of a lot of blog articles, $5 isn’t that far off the mark, and considering how much faster I can get an article done, it’s not that bad.  And, to be blunt, where were the unions when I was in print?  Why am I suddenly more worthy of a union because I’m blogging?  Not that I would have joined one back then either, but I still find it odd.

Either way, talk about it all you want, but I think you will find a lot of bloggers not being very receptive to the idea.  Oh, and question… say we went on strike… where would we picket?  Would we sit in front of our computers holding up picket signs?

Back in January I talked about how I feel like I am suffering from information overload.  To the right you can see my unread item number form Google Reader just about 3 minutes ago.  Daunting isn’t it?  That’s just today’s haul, not a couple days, just today.

Since I obviously consume so much info, I always find it amusing how I miss information about myself.  Remember when I recently mentioned how I got quoted by the New York Times?   I didn’t know until Pete Cashmore, the owner of Mashable, instant messaged to tell me about it.  I had no clue what he was talking about and had to go look at it several hours after it was up.

Well, last night the honor of telling me about myself went to Paul Joyce from SimplifyMedia.  (Check out his site for a nifty application that allows you to stream iTunes from your computer to your friends, and vice-versa)  It seems that a story I wrote for Mashable this weekend about the FBI looking into NCAA March Madness betting on Facebook had garnered me some quotes on PC World.  In turn, it turned out that was syndicated from this story on ComputerWorld.

Apparently I need to set up some filters to alert me of when I get mentioned on the web as it’s rather embarrassing always saying, “huh?” when someone tells me I get mentioned somewhere.  At least it wasn’t Valleywag!  (for those not in the tech blogosphere, Valleywag is a gossip rag all about people who work in tech)  Either way, it is always flattering getting quoted by another news source, I’d just like to know about it sometimes!

I’ve hinted before to my writing career of the 1990’s, but have never gone in to great detail about it. So… why not now?

In the early 1990’s I was running a lot of ads in Toy Shop magazine to advertise our mail order toy service. The publication was put out by Krause Publications, the leading publisher of collectible magazines. At one point they decided to do a toy price guide, and since I had a good relationship with them, they asked if I would look over what they had so far. Well… after I tore it apart and basically rebuilt it, they thanked me, and I thought that was the end of it.

Somehow people talked about what I had done, and it got back to Wizard magazine, a monthly magazine about comic books and related products. One of their writers, Brian Cunningham, called me one day to talk about his toy column and look over his price guide. Again… I tore it apart. It was a mess and it had to be rebuilt. After that, I consulted for Brian a few more times, but nothing major.

In late January 1992 I was prepping to go to Toy Fair for the first time, the annual sales conference for all the toy manufacturers. I get a call from Brian, but there was something different about it in his tone. We chit chatted for a few minutes and then he told me he had been promoted inside of Wizard and he was looking for someone to take over his toy column and wanted to know if I would be interested. I said sure as I had wanted to be a writer since I was 4-years old. He said great… and I needed to cover the Toy Fair.

That was a trial by fire like you wouldn’t believe and would be a small novel to explain everything that happened there.

A few months later another editor at Wizard called me and asked if I wanted to write for their retailer magazine, Entertainment Retailing. It would be a monthly column entitled “Toy & Game Chest”, and I would alternate discussing how to retail toys and role-playing games. I took it, but it only lasted 6-months as the magazine failed, but I still had my Wizard gig.

When some internal politics happened, that I won’t go in to, I left Wizard after a year and a half in quite a huff of anger. I figured my writing “career” was over, and just shrugged, prepared to go on with my life. I called an editor I had become friends with, who also had left Wizard, to tell him what happened. He told me he needed to make a phone call, but he would get back to me soonish.

The next day a man I didn’t know, Ian Feller, called me from a fairly new magazine named Combo. It seemed he had just lost his toy writer and he had heard from the friend I had called that I was available. Apparently when he lost his writer, he had told our mutual friend “Man, I really wish we could land Sean Aune, but we’ll never be able to get him away from Wizard.”

… heh.

So, I spent the next two years at Combo until it sadly went under. And I really was sad about that as Ian was a dream to work for, and I am still in contact with him to this day. (Check his company out if you ever need a press release done)

As the Combo chapter of my life came to a close, I again felt my “career” was over. I had picked up some miscellaneous freelance work during my time at Combo for magazines like Star Wars Galaxy Collector, Comic Buyer’s Guide, and some stuff under ghost names due to legal peculiarities, (I love my “ghost name”, but, alas, I can never share it) but nothing long lasting.

That’s when I got a call from someone who had left Combo shortly before the end, and he wanted to know if I’d like to join Beckett’s on their new publication, Hot Toys. I absolutely despised the name of the magazine, but it was a writing job, so who was I to argue? I got my first ever cover story out of the job, but I really disliked some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that was going on. And when we got a new editor around issue #7, well… let’s just say she and I did not see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. I left the magazine over “creative differences”, and was proven right when the magazine didn’t even make it to issue #10.

So, here I was again. It was 1996, I had pulled off five years of writing, and I didn’t want to leave the field, but there was no place to go. The Internet was gaining in popularity, and I knew that with the creation of eBay, price guides weren’t even worth the paper they were printed on. You could go on the net and find out all the toy info you wanted within minutes of it happening, I knew there really wasn’t going to be a place in the writing world for me anymore, so I just didn’t even bother looking around.

Over the eleven years that followed, I did miss it, and I especially missed having a couple hundred bucks a month to blow on frivolous things like movies. That’s what led me to looking around in July of 2007 for writing work online, and… well, we all know how that’s ended up.

I do miss being in print publications though. There’s something to be said for holding a tangible copy of your work, printed on high gloss paper. And no thrill matches standing in a book store and seeing a magazine on the racks with the story you wrote on the cover.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying the blogging, and it certainly pays better than print did, but there’s something so transient about it. At any moment one of the blogs I work for could close down, hit delete, and it’ll be like my work never existed. Yes, magazines only stay on the racks for one month, but you also know that tucked away in a box, back in a dusty corner of someone’s attic, there’s a magazine with the line “By Sean P. Aune” in it.

Well, it looks like it’s all over.  The Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) didn’t get exactly what they wanted the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers (AMPTP), but close enough.

So, when do you get new TV shows?  The Watch With Kristin column over at E! has a huge list done show-by-show, but basically, expect sitcoms back in mid-March, and dramas sometime in April.  Some of the most interesting tidbits is no 24 this year as it’s just too late, Heroes is done for this season, as is Pushing Daisies.

In other words, it’s a blasted mess.  Watch your guides closely for what’s new and what’s not.

All I can say is that at least the writers are getting some of the money they deserve.

I haven’t talked much about the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) strike because there isn’t much going on. There have been talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers (AMPTP), and apparently there has been some movement, but nothing definite as of yet.

The WGA did release the following letter to their members (and reprinted via Deadline Hollywood)

Dear Fellow Members:
I would like to update you on where we stand with bargaining with the AMPTP. While we have made important progress since the companies re-engaged us in serious talks, negotiations continue. Regardless of what you hear or read, there are many significant points that have yet to be worked out.

In order to keep members abreast of the latest developments, informational meetings are being planned by both Guilds for this weekend-details to be announced. Neither the Negotiating Committee, nor the West Board or the East Council, will take action on the contract until after the membership meetings.

As the talks proceed, never forget that during this period it is critical for us to remain on the picket lines united and strong. We are all in this together.

At this point, there is a chance of saving the “back nine” episodes of the season (most shows get an order for 13 episodes, and then for another 9 to finish the season), but as it will take shows 4 – 6 weeks to spin back up, things are looking sketchy.

The interesting thing is that no matter when this ends, it looks like NEXT season is in jeopardy of having any new shows.  This is the time of the year that the networks begin to go in to “pilot season” and start picking their shows for the next season, but nothing is currently in development, so, maybe no new shows next season.  What an idea: Develop what you have!

While listening to The History Channel today as I wrote, a documentary about Jonestown came on that got me to thinking about how words and phrases work their way into our vernacular.

For those unfamiliar with the story of Jim Jones and Jonestown, it would take forever to explain the finer details, but essentially it was a religious cult that set itself up a small town in northwestern Guyana. When the town came under investigation for various crimes, and was visited by United States Congressman Leo Ryan, several cult members decided to leave with the politician, setting Jim Jones into a rage. He ordered the Congressman’s plane attacked, and fearing retribution for their acts, he ordered the entire cult to commit suicide. Those that did not commit suicide of their own accord were killed by the devout followers.

The means by which everyone died is where this plays into my thoughts on language. A large vat of Kool-Aid was mixed up and laced with cyanide. The followers were then told to “drink the Kool-Aid”, those that did not do so voluntarily were injected with it.

At some point, this incident turned to the sayings of “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid” when you think someone is being blinded by someone or something, or “They’ve taken a drink from the Kool-Aid” if you think they’ve already been sucked in. Of course there are numerous variations of both, but you get the general idea.

So, I’m curious as to how this became such a part of the American lexicon when I highly doubt many people realize its origins. True, it is very fitting in some situations, but how many people realize they are referencing an instance of mass murder when they use it? Do people not care? Do they not know the origins? Do they not care? And don’t get me wrong, I’ve been known to use it, and I did know the reference long before today, but it is the best analogy at times.

What do you think? How did it get so ingrained? Do you know other odd instances? What do you think of this particular one?

It appears with the success the Director’s Guild of America (DGA) had in their negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers (AMPTP) has led to the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) asking to go back to the negotiation table.  Apparently talks could resume as early as this Tuesday.

I had wondered if the AMPTP settling so quickly with the DGA may have been their way of sending a message to the WGA without actually having to tell them directly that they want to talk.  So long as the writers get what they deserve, I could care less when the talks happen.