This is part 1 of Scribkin’s I Am Blogger series, which started out with this post.

A lot has been written about, and by, a guy who has seen his reputation in social media grow, often exponentially, over the past year.  He has been writing about technology and new media for just a hair over twice that time period on his own eponymous blog.  Oddly, his income is not based in whole or in part by his blog, as evinced by the lack of any advertising on it.

The man in question is Louis Gray.

You might be wondering, as I have, why he has kept at his hobby of writing blog entries up to three times a day, for at least a year without any significant readership or an aspiration of monetary compensation in the technologies he was covering.  The answer, as far as I can tell, is simple:  He loves to write, and he writes about stuff that interests him.  Fantasy football, TiVo, Apple stuff, iPods.. the list is diverse and changes over time.

Louis may have started his blog as a way to codify his thoughts on these subjects, but he was also ‘home schooling’ – in this I mean that all that writing was practice.  Sure, hardly anyone saw his first 100 posts until well after they were posted.  But when people did start to notice his blog, he had already taken his blogging game to a new level.  Full opinion pieces on technology, new media, and corporate politics.  In-depth statistical reports. Honest assessments of new technologies and software, as well as a number of exclusives.

No wonder people were drawn to his writing.

And Louis has become very popular, probably thanks in no small part to Robert Scoble ‘discovering’ him on FriendFeed and hyping him as only Scobleizer can do for a while. All that attention would go to anyone’s head, and they would probably parlay that fame into a better job, higher-profile gigs, etc.  Louis, however, stayed modest.  He decided to open his blog to other voices, other bloggers.

I should interrupt myself here and explain that, at least in social media circles, it’s fairly common to see ‘guest author’ posts on blogs.  They are a good way to expose an established blog’s audience to a new voice, and afford a little cross-promotion.  But here again, Louis never referred to his contributing bloggers as “guests,” he felt that they have a stake in the welfare of Louis’ blog as well.

For full disclosure, I am an author on Louis Gray’s team.

So Louis is a great guy.  But why is his writing compelling?  First, he has a very conversational tone.  It’s easy to dive in to anything he’s written.  He maintains a clear thread of thought through each piece, and he prefers to write from a perspective that isn’t just a re-hashing of the same news and memes that have been covered on other sites.  Often, he will present a different opinion, or attempt to reconcile the logic made on different sides of the same issue.  He is a mediator as much as he is a pundit.

Most of all, Louis hardly ever writes ‘from the hip,’ so to speak – you can be sure that if he is sitting down to write about something, he has given the matter a lot of consideration, and taking as much information as he has available to him (which usually is a lot more than I notice, I can tell you that!) and synthesized it into a thoughtful, comprehensive post.

Generally, it takes him about 20 minutes to write and less than an hour to post.  Another benefit of all that practice.

I do envy him that.

Word.Line by apesara

A few days ago, I got an email.  This email was from a fellow blogger that I was in the middle of a round of correspondence with.  This particular email.. it made me realise something about blogging, and about writing.

All the bloggers I know would write whether they got paid for it or not. We have a love of writing persuasively, and journalistically, and passionately.  We simply love the language.  And that drive to write means we get a lot of practice becoming better at our craft.

OK, enough waxing poetic about the Muse.  My point is this: We bloggers have power. And blog posts aren’t the only place we can employ that power.  That is what the email I mentioned taught me — as a writer, we can choose to write well to audiences great and small.

This may seem fairly obvious, but bear with me.  You send and receive emails every day.  But how often do you get a really well-written email, that really tells you someone sat down and spent a significant amount of effort crafting it, and then sending it only to you?

It doesn’t happen that often to me.  When I got an email like that recently, I felt, somehow, that I was in the presence of greatness.  As if a president or statesman from a time gone past, a time when fine writing was valued as much for its art as it was for its utility, had set quill to paper and hashed out a missive just for me.

I suddenly realized that this is why the electronic newsletter is still alive, and still great, despite criticism.  This is why writing a blog entry is important, no matter the size of your audience.  And this is why taking time to write an email with the same effort and thought is equally as important.

I’m going to spend a week doing something a little different here on Scribkin.  Although burdened with lack of preparation, I’m going to select  someone each day or two whos writing has made a difference to me in the past year, and attempt to give you my perspective on that person, and why I follow their writing.

I thought I’d kick off the project by highlighting one of the blogs I’ve used the longest, LiveJournal.  Up until recently, LiveJournal was owned by startup Six Apart, which still owns blogging platforms Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox.  Late last year, Six Apart sold their LiveJournal unit to Russian international media company SUP, who had been managing LiveJournal in Russia since 2006.

What is LiveJournal?

LiveJournal (or LJ) describes itself as a journaling community, and they stress the tight-knit nature of the community.  Of course, anyone can create an ad-supported journal for free, and you make it as private or public as you like.  However, most of LJ’s features are designed specifically to keep the conversation between LJ users inside the community.

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I’ve had a really exciting idea growing in my head for about a week now.  I guess it germinated when I overlooked giving some credit for an idea on a previous post.  Since then, I’ve been more aware of the people involved in stuff that I find interesting.  To that end, I wanted to give back a bit.

For the next few weeks I am going to concentrate on different social networking applications and the people I have met on them.  I’m going to write to my strengths by focusing on presenting a primer of the service in the first of each article, and the people in the second half.

I hope to have my first article written tonight or tomorrow.  I will follow up every three or four days, and continue until I’ve covered all the services I use actively.  After that, I may follow up as I get involved in a new community.

Please feel free to speak up, suggest a community I may have forgotten about, or even if I missed you!  Obviously, following hundreds of people on certain networks means I can’t give everyone equal time.  But not to worry, I promise to really make an effort to find really quality folks. 

It appears that I am behind with my weekly update on the RSS Reset project.  This is probably going to be my last update on this project, and in my last paragraph I’ll make an effort to determine if I felt it was a success or not.

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