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.

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.

An example of this focus is their privacy settings.  In addition to public and private entries, by far the most common entry type is called friends locked.  This means only people who are listed friends of the person with the post can actually read it.  This allows more intimate details to be revealed without fear of the internet at large barging in.

Another tightly-bound feature unique to LJ are the communities.  These communities are groups that you can belong to (either by joining or by being invited) and act as moderated message boards that encourage conversation around a topic.  You can see what communities are being promoted here.

Of course, these features also give LJ and similar sites such as Vox and Blogger an insular feel.  People heavily involved in these sites tend to favor interacting only within them, and generally aren’t interested in interacting on more traditional blogs such as WordPress or Movable Type.

The Shout Out

Due to the community nature of LJ, it is really hard to become well-known across a lot of different circles of friends.  So there aren’t really any superstars I can point to and say, you really need to follow these folks.  Oh, LiveJournal has its share of drama queens.. it is, after all, a personal journal community.  But, oddly enough, there are certain feeds that are syndicated and widely read that seem to be the real cross-network stars.  Feeds like XKCD, PostSecret and Wil Wheaton dot Net (WWDN) are very widely read, even if those feeds see little or no reciprocity from their LJ readership.

So, most of the folks I read on LJ I have been following for years.  Like old pals that you play poker with once a week, I can count on them to be posting there indefinitely.

You can see a list of the folks I follow (and who follow me) on my profile page, down near the bottom of the page.  About two-thirds of them are people I know in Austin.  A few of them are friends I know in person.

I’d list them here – but honestly, they wouldn’t care about the attention.

Oh, I will mention Corwin, but only because he runs his own WordPress blog and is on Twitter.

When You Should Consider this Service

If you are looking for an established, sometimes-sleepy, sometimes-high-drama community that is very similar to the the old site The Well, LiveJournal is perfect.  There are hundreds of themes to choose from and quite a few customization options.  However, it does not allow advertising (other than its own) or special plugins to be run alongside your blog. 

Plus, gathering friends is not as easy as just following a bunch of people.  It requires interaction and having a shared pool of friends helps a lot.  LiveJournal has been known as a tough nut to crack at times, but the reward is having people you can call friends that are interested in your daily life.

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. 

A Quick Recap

I started the RSS Reset project with Corvida just over a month ago.  Soon after that I listed my starting feeds.  A week after that I wrote an update on my personal progress on the project.

Recent Activity

I’ve added a lot of feeds and gone through a bit of turmoil in Google Reader recently, so I’m going to have to play it by ear with how I develop the documentation.

The two or so weeks after my last update I concentrated on adding feeds.  Below you’ll find a list of feeds I’ve added, grouped by category.

• Smaller Blogs: JeetBlog, FPettit.com, Development on a Shoestring, The KnightKnetwork, The New Media Diva, Michael Fruchter.com, Dirtbag Tea Party, Mobi·gas·mic, everwas, The Jeff Pulver Blog, Geekwhat.com, tadSpot, Technobabbles, Webomatica, Technovia, Adam Ostrow, World of Slippy, Broadcasting Brain, Webtropic
• Biz Feeds: Official ReadBurner Blog, scribkin, RSSmeme Blog, FriendFeed Blog, TheSocialGeeks
• Smart/Filter/Human Feeds: Share your Google Reader! – FriendFeed
• Webcomics: Kawaii Not
• Exceptions: Scobleizer, Micro Persuasion, Profy.Com, sarahintampa, Josh Bancroft’s TinyScreenfuls.com, The Drama 2.0 Show
• Not Sure: Tech Success, Andy Ihnatko’s Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (BETA), boren.nu,  peter.roj.as, Culinary Abortions from Japan, GracefulFlavor, CableTechTalk

A lot of the smaller blogs belong to fellow FriendFeed frequenters.  All the links above go directly to Toluu if you want to view recent entries and/or add them to your reading list.

As you can see, I added 7 exception blogs and a bunch of blogs of unknown size.  This sort of blows my 10-feed exception limit out of the water.  Also, quite a few smaller blogs are in the 300-500 subscriber range.  I decided that under 500 was still acceptably small.

So, that brings my total RSS feeds in Toluu to 103.  The number of subscriptions I show in Greader is 95.  Hmm.. that’s not right!  I have a theory of why the number would be lower, but more on that later.

Big Jump in Shared Feeds

A few days ago, I asked people to send me a Google Talk invite in a FriendFeed post.  This resulted in an explosion of shared feeds that expose me to new and interesting articles on the internet.  I went from 6 or 7 direct shares to 28.  Also, this effectively doubled the number of unread articles I get per day, pushing it up to around 300 – 500.  This is still better than then 1100 – 1500 that I was getting before the project.

Plus, now I can email or chat with 20 more cool people then I could before.

Feedly Fun

A couple of weeks ago Louis Gray broke news of a new Firefox-based application called Feedly.  This is a beta plugin that integrates tightly with Firefox and gives you a nice portal page view of information that it gleans from the places you have visited, such as Greader and other places.  It is very slick and has some very nice features, that you can read about on the link I provided earlier.

Without getting in to a lot of detail (you can read about here, but I will say Edwin has been very responsive), Feedly messed with my feed configuration, adding some new feeds and removing others.  I am incredibly sensitive about my Greader feed config especially because of this project, and it just came at the wrong time.  So, I am still recovering a bit from that, and for the moment am not using Feedly at all.

This may explain why I list 103 feeds in Toluu but only have 95 in Greader, and I know there are a couple of differences in feeds (I added a couple of personal and biz feeds directly).

Conclusion

Well, I’ve been putting out some observations as I go along, but I will re-state them here:

• I have gone from a core of 40-odd feeds to over 100 in the course of a month.
• I don’t think I am finished adding feeds, even essential feeds, yet.
• I still have much less volume coming through than I did pre-reset.
• I don’t think I have too many big gaps in my feeds, except surprisingly, certain high-volume feeds such as io9, Gizmodo and CNN.  Additionally, these feeds are either not shared by anyone on my shared feeds page, or they are not subscribed to them either.
• I have a much broader view of a niche (social media) and the topics du jour than I have in the past.
• FriendFeed has given me a quick, easy communications channel when I have a social media project in mind, such as when I put a call out for more Greader shared items.
• I’m not going to go back to my old OPML, I don’t think, but on the other hand I don’t think I will do a full reset again in the future.

I hoped you got something from this project, please do take a look at my profile on Toluu and find a few new blogs to add to your reading list!

Shout-Outs

I wish to thank Corvida for co-conspiring and planning this little caper, Caleb Elston for his excellent application Toluu, Jeff from (jeff)isageek.net, Rashunda from The New Media Diva and Caleb again for taking it upon themselves to do their own RSS Reset, The Google Reader team and the FriendFeed team.

Here is where you can find me:

• On Toluu
• On Google Reader
• On FriendFeed
• On Twitter