I love my blog. I really think that when it comes to personal blogs, I have one of the best. It’s a cool, different design. I have all my pictures available, and videos. I make my personal bookmarks available to people. And I even have a nice simple way of contacting me.
But what I didn’t have was a cool name for my blog. Every year I go to SXSW in Austin, and every year I meet people with very cool blog names. How I think my name should go to my blog, I really needed a cool name for my blog. So, sat in bed and listed out over 20 domain names that I thought might be available. Out of about 25 names, all but one were taken (can you believe someone already owns MoreCowbell.com?), OneBlogTooMany.com. So fate has handed me my new domain name. Even though you can still get here by typing in edshull.com…type in oneblogtoomany.com. Don’t be lazy!
And on the subject of blogging, I read an article today in Business 2.0 about “Blogging for Dollars”. The article had great stories on the creators of Fark.com, TechCrunch, and GigaOm. I love these blogs and have subscribed to all of them for a while. But I’m disturbed a bit at the treatment of the space. When I start hearing about people creating multiple blogs, hiring writers, selling banner ads, and getting VC, I have to wonder when it stops being a blog. USWeb handles the search engine optimization for a lot of major online publishers, and these new blogs seem to sound a lot like them. There is nothing wrong with being like them, but they don’t refer to themselves as blogs.
I love the idea of people making money off their blogs. The recent trend is one of those small things that give me hope in our economy. I like that a talented person with interesting things to say on a subject can make a living off that. People like John Gruber at DaringFireball.com who sell premium RSS subscriptions and t-shirts, and even 37Signals‘ blog with their job board and 1 ad from The Deck. But it makes me a little sad to see someone’s hobby, turned passion, turned profession, turn into a job. And when you start having to manage writers and taking ads, then you end up no different than any other news publication out there, except that you’re not an official news publication. Which brings me to my next point.
If you are going to earn income like a news publication, shouldn’t you have the accountability of one? BoingBoing posted a story about YouTube that ended up being untrue and poorly researched. It came out that the write simply got his info from some other blog. Why should BoingBoing be treated like a legit news publication, complete with press passes, when they can’t follow simple rules of journalism?
Anyway, I have ranted long enough about that. I really hope we see more bloggers able to earn a good living doing what they love.
