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.

I just realized I haven’t linked up a number of posts I’ve done on other sites in the past week or two.  I should correct that.

(more…)

I’m still enjoying it here in sunny (yes, sunny) Seattle, so my web presence is somewhat reduced. But I wanted to point out that I wrote my first post for louisgray.com, and it was green-lighted and is up now!  it’s on the hot product of the day, Chrome.

So, without further ado, please head over and give it a read.  Thanks!

Swurl

I’m playing with a site called swurl. Signing up is free, so I made my own site. So far, it smacks a lot like Tumblr, but it seems to handle aggregation of high-volume sites better, but the tradeoff is that there is little in the way of customization of the theme. You can specify a logo image, logo text, background image.. and that’s about it. But the theme does allow the content you re-syndicate to speak for itself, and has a very clever commenting system built-in.

Also, it doesn’t have a way to enter in new articles directly. It is more of a new, unique take on a content aggregator/lifestream app than Tumblr.

(more…)

I was going to write an opinion piece tonight, inviting my readership provide feedback on the best tactics I could employ to start moving toward blogging as a profession.  Apparently, the wait for someone to offer me riches in return for writing for their blog tactic I have been taking up until now hasn’t struck pay dirt.

With plenty of hubris, I was pleasantly dreaming of my easy entry into a work-from-home lifestyle, writing insightful, hard-hitting prose for a thankful employer and fawning audience.  If only they saw in me that spark of brilliance that I would sound too egoistic to point out directly! I thought to myself.  I perused my writings on my blog.  Why couldn’t this be my job?  I love it, I’m good at it.. perfect!  .. right?

Wrong.

(more…)