Why I Love Blogging

There. I said it. I love blogging. I know to many people that will invoke images of pajama-clad anonymous online journallers in cyberspace, posting their innermost thoughts, or oversharing to the max a la Julia Allison. I know some people won’t like it. And guess what? I don’t care. Because blogging is awesome.

Since I started blogging, and like actually blogging, I’ve gotten to know some of the most interesting people — authors, writers, entrepreneurs, and above all, leaders. All in their 20s, too, and yet they’ve accomplished so much. Imagine where all these people will be in 10 or 20 years: they’ll be the most successful people of our generation.

Anyways, it’s because I love blogging that I don’t feel guilty at all about the two hours I spent tonight moving my blog from Blogger (hosted on nomadlife.org) to WordPress. If anything I feel like making the big switch to WordPress somehow makes me a more legitimate blogger.

There are many reasons I am blogging. One, I obviously like to write, a lot. Two, everyone from Loren Feldman to Penelope Trunk to Mitch Joel — tons of successful people at the top of their industries — are heralding the benefits of blogging. It’ll enhance your career, your personal brand, your reputation, your goals, your network, blah blah, all the experts are saying it. Yet the vast majority of us are still too scared to actually give in and do it, despite all the proven and much-talked about benefits of blogging. People are still scared to really express themselves and say what they mean.

And that’s a shame, because social technology really has the power to enhance your life, if you let it. But most of this stuff, even blogging, is far from mainstream yet. Particularly among college students, which is unfortunate and is something I gripe about every once in a while. But blogging can open up a wealth of resources if you can put in the work and patience it demands. The rewards are certainly worth it, though.

Does anyone read print newspapers anymore?

Do you? I don’t. As avid of a news reader as I am, I can confess to not reading a single thing in print. I get everything online now, like everyone else. The big media companies are definitely feeling it — and the impending recession is making the situation even worse.

For my dad’s generation, print newspapers were an important part of everyday life. My dad still reads the Wall Street Journal every morning on the train to work and treasures it, but I think he’s of a dying breed. Yesterday he was showing me some stock quotes in the WSJ and I was struck by how long it had been since I had read a print copy of anything to get the news. Especially for something as rapidly changing as stock quotes, it seemed futile to me to look at a print newspaper published only once a day, when those stocks would fluctuate constantly throughout the day and the most up-to-the-minute updates could only be found online.

Last week the New York Times, still my favorite for news, announced that it sharply reduced its dividend — which will save the New York Times Co. about $97.8 million a year. This is after years of increasing its dividend. Some think that page by page, section by section, the NYT’s influence is fading away.

PC Magazine is shutting down its print edition and going completely digital.

And did you know over half the Washington Post company’s revenue comes not from WaPo or Newsweek…but from its Kaplan test prep division?

On the other hand, in July, Gawker Media got twice as many pageviews as the LA Times website. And Huffington Post has supposedly raised $15 million in capital.

AdAge questions whether print can even survive another five years — a little pessimistic if you ask me. But then there’s been so many media layoffs lately, that the blogging giants are trying to seize an opportunity by offering free blog accounts to laid-off journalists. So who knows.

One thing I do know is that mass media is changing. No one wants a one-way message from the media anymore; they want a two-way conversation that they can participate in. They want to be able to comment on news stories, they want to be able to discuss the news as it happens, they want rapid updates every minute, and they want to be environmentally friendly and save paper. I’m taking a mass media course right now, and I’m surprised by how little we have even touched upon the topic of the internet — we’ve studied nearly every kind of old media, but barely even touched upon the effects of the internet on the media establishment.

What I’m interested to see next is: which big media company will actually keep up? Or will they die out and be completely replaced by internet media?

Wow

I just found this on a blog somewhere, and I love it:

What The F**K is Social Media?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialmediamarketing marketing)

Guess who’s not getting a job in the Obama administration?

(Just FYI, this got cross-posted at Brazen Careerist, if any of you want to read it here)

Let’s talk for a second. The application for jobs in the Obama administration is, without a doubt, the most complex piece of work I have ever seen. I wanted to use other words to more accurately describe it, but I can’t. Because, if I ever intend to work in politics, I could kill my career before it has even started. Witness:

“If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-elect if it were made public, please describe.”

“Please provide the URL address of any websites that feature you in either a personal or professional capacity (e.g. Facebook, My Space, etc.)”

“If you keep or have ever kept a diary that contains anything that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.”

And my favorite:

“Please list, and, if readily available, provide a copy of each book, article, column, or publication (including but not limited to any posts or comments on blogs or other websites) you have authored, individually or with others. Please list all aliases or ‘handles’ you have used to communicate on the internet.”

As Web 2.0-savvy as Obama’s campaign was, his new transition team is not. Maybe the balding middle-aged executives they’re hiring into senior positions in the administration have never “used an electronic communication,” but for anyone under the age of 35 this application is going to be a virtual minefield. What packrat can track down every blog post and blog comment they’ve ever written? People our age have had blogs since they were old enough to say “internet,” for Chrissake. What happens when our generation enters the realm of career public servants and becomes serious candidates for these jobs in two decades?

In 30 years are we going to dredge up Facebook photos, blog comments, text messages, and old emails of the Secretary of State? We will have an electronic paper trail following us everywhere we go, something today’s politicians haven’t had to contend with. Who has even thought about how to deal with this? Seriously, imagine: the 50th President of the United States is probably some random, backward-baseball-cap-wearing, class-ditching, hard-partying frat guy right now, posting drunk pictures of himself on Facebook and writing on his friends’ walls about tomorrow’s barcrawl, oblivious to the fact that modern technology means that this will all resurface when he runs for office. What are you going to do about that, White House?

This vetting process might work for 2008, but it’s not going to work in 2020 when everyone will have an internet footprint that stretches back into cyberspace for years and years. That is, unless the federal government’s HR wants to drive themselves insane. Are you worried about employers googling you while applying for XYZ corporate job?….this is that job application on steroids! There’s no way to win this. Good luck to anyone crazy enough to apply!

Congratulations, President Obama: you’re going to have America’s most boring people in your administration!

shoutout

I have been hearing all the fuss about the Twitter “phenomenon” forever now in tech blogs and business blogs and even the New York Times. I think it’s funny because it seems like Twitter is a huge hit but hasn’t yet really infiltrated the college crowd yet, from what I can tell. Aren’t we supposed to be the ones addicted to Facebook, MySpace, RSS feeds, and IMs? Yet why is Twitter hot shit for 25-35 year olds but not really noticed by college kids, when we’re the ones who grew up permanently attached to our PCs?

Anyways, I got bored today and I need to figure out why Twitter is so popular. So I jumped the bandwagon. If anyone else is on Twitter let me know… and “follow” me!