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This is the Fifteenth entrant in The Blogging Essay Contest from WeblogToolsCollection.com If you would like to participate, please email me your entry at mark at wltc dot net. Please rate this article using the star system below. The competition will be judged primarily on the input from readers like you. Thank you.

This is written by Tyler Durden

November 2006. Romania. I decided to add an element into the romanian blogosphere, an element that might shake it up so badly that people wouldn’t even know what hit ‘em. And that element, my friends, is a blog corecting the language errors of other blogs. And a purpose I had: get the blog on the front page of the most visited blog in Romania, in under 1 month. To ruin the surprise, I managed to achieve my goal in just a week’s time. This is my story.

Being only a humble second year journalist, I wasn’t (and am not) an authority in the field of grammar, semantics or linguistics in general. What I possesed was something that all of us have, but are to afraid to use it: better judgement, the ability to criticise other people’s work or - more general - speak your mind.

After countless days in which my wordpress domain remained in an incapacited, almost retarted form, I decided to act upon it. Assault it with my cunning plans to achieve undeserved popularity. First day came and gone and there were already 10 posts on my blog. I started commenting on people’s posts, telling them an error had been detected (as if I was an R2-D2 wannabe, bent on world domination and mistake correction). Fairly quickly, more and more people started gathering on the site and commenting on my methods and expressing their concern regarding my identity. But I had bigger fish to fry. Good things come to those who wait.

Day two and more mistakes, more blogs and even more comments. People cheering, people verbally attacking me, as if I was the reason they had poor linguistic knowledge. Most mistakes were typos, but mistakes nonetheless.

By day three, I had already visited about 30 different blogs started receiving vengeful comments. They would end up eating their words, as their blogs would appear on the front page.

Day four was rather important to the evolution of the blog and to fulfilling my dastardly plan to become famous in under a month. That day I discoved the blog stats, integrated in the wordpress dashboard. “My god!” I thought, “Over 100 views/day?”. I couldn’t believe my eyes: people were actually reading this? Paying attention to it? “Then it can’t be that hard to get to where I want.” I said.

Day five, day six – I finally got an email address (loads of thanks towards gmail) and started responding to the people commenting on the site. And then everything came to pieces (or so I thought) on day six, where I myself have made an syntax error on my blog. That unleashed hell. I was quoted, corrected and put in my place. Hard. Then, out of the blue, a knight in shining armour came to my rescue: a tenth grade blogger approached me in a chatroom and we started talking about this and that-mostly about the (now) controversial blog. To my surprise, he posted an entry on his blog, stating that I had NOT made a mistake and that people were just over zealous (I was receiving mistakes via email, people were really hating other people and were demanding punishment!). Then, once again, this stirred up the romanian blogosphere and people were commenting left and right, bringing up the weirdest reasons why I should quit blogging (Just die; you suck et cetera).

On the seventh day, I found out I had “too much free time on my hands”. But hey, I was a hit. The statistics said so. And statistics don’t lie (do they?).

All the fear and loathing came upon me on the eighth day, when I tried reasoning, via email, with a fellow that really had it in for me: “Your blog sucks. NO! YOUR B-L-O-G sucks! Read my lips, mister! It sucks. Nobody reads it. Shoot yourself.” Of course, those aren’t his exact words, but keep in mind, he was a deluted poor youngster, to say the least. Me? I knew what I was waiting for and I was smart enough to wallow in my triumph. I had made it to the front page of the most read blog in Romania and the guy liked my idea. “Great!”, I said. “What now?”

Oh, and I thought I was off the hook. Boy, was I wrong…Podcasts! I was featured in an audio podcast on another blog. Not really pleasant things to hear about something you’ve devoted a week of your life to, but hey, there is no such thing as BAD publicity, right? Turns out, the guy doing the podcast is an old buddy of mine, somehow time has split us up and we disconnected in the fog of time.

This is where my story ends…or at least, this is where I’ve gotten so far.

Conclusions?

1. Girls pay more attention to spelling and grammar.

2. One powerful man with a blog can make you or destroy you. (from the usual 100+ views/day, I ended up having 800+, which is no small potatoes where I come from).

3. Scandal is good for advertising. If you’re selling something, if you’re trying to promote a book (or a blog), nothing will get people talking about it faster than a good scandal (if sex is involved, even better!).

4. If your site/blog gets some advertising, then you’re set. I haven’t updated the darn thing in two days and visitors come pouring in, at the advice of people they can trust.

5. The (romanian?) blogosphere is an organism. It reacts to every single change in the society herein.

As my purpose has been achieved, what is there left to do? What peak is left to triumph over? What giant awaits to be slain? Oh, the pity I feel for childish blog authors posting pictures of their cats and talking about how much their lives suck. Is this it? Are there no more things to talk about and dissect?

I check my blog stats for the last time today (910 views) and hope that tomorrow will bring me wisdom and courage to pursue my (other) goals. Bloggers everywhere, beware!

This is the fourteenth entrant in The Blogging Essay Contest from WeblogToolsCollection.com If you would like to participate, please email me your entry at mark at wltc dot net. Please rate this article using the star system below. The competition will be judged primarily on the input from readers like you. Thank you.

This is written by Abhijit Nadgouda

I never considered writing a necessity. Understandably, I was not a big fan of documentation. It required me to do a lot of things that I was not interested in, like improving my language vocabulary and grammar, and getting it proofed by the ones with an upper hand. I was too busy with programming languages to worry about such things, talking to the machines was more interesting than talking to people.

Things slowly changed with my work. I was suddenly supposed to do many more things, and my talks with people were more important than machines. I still hated writing down stuff. The first started jotting down things when I started forgetting things and missing appointments. And this helped me.

I kept wondering how come just putting things on paper helped me. What did it do? When it dawned upon me that, writing did what I was missing a lot of times - thinking. This is something I could relate to when I read Tim Denton’s quote.

You don’t know what you think until you have to write.

Writing down things on paper was more than just recording words, it was about thinking. The thinking helped me plan, it helped me prepare five minutes before a meeting, it helped me look at the bigger picture. It appealed to me because I had experienced this earlier, designing did this same thing to us programmers. And this made me more efficient and productive.I discovered the joy of writing, even for my personal use. I wanted to make writing as a regular event so that I could explicitly sit down and think. I started writing down my thoughts, mostly on software development. I still hated the entire formality though, and the thought of publishing made me as scared as a baby preparing to participate in the Olympics. Imagine my joy when I discovered blogging. It was quite unexpected, in fact I had a misconception and a negative opinion about blogging at this time. I hit upon Wordpress while building an article management system for a friend, which introduced me to the real blogging.

It was exactly what I was looking for, I could write without any restrictions. Being able to write such freely felt like driving on an interstate after driving on a desert road. There was more importance to my thoughts than to the language. No one could tear it apart because they did not like it. I could write what I wanted and the way I wanted it. The only restriction was to stay honest. Even if no one monitors you, it reflects out of your writings.

I started writing regularly on my blog. I made some mistakes, but unlike the professional world, they were pardoned and I was encouraged to write more. Blogging is one exercise where you can explicitly realise that you learn something everytime you make a mistake. I liked that blogging made me think. Blogging empowered me to express myself, without any adulteration or corruption. However, blogging did many more things for me.

I started reading a lot more, reading people more than blogs. I started looking for that person behind the article, usually written in the small font. As I read more I could build a relationship with that person. It was like peeking inside the author’s mind. I have able to connect and exchange thoughts with so many people, who probably are unreachable for me in the physical world. In a way, this has revolutionalized the way I read. It is no longer just one article that I read, I also read conversations on it. Every single happening in the world had a reaction in the blogosphere, and sometimes the blogosphere has an impact on that event.

I no longer read just books, I read what others think about the book, I discuss it with them and I learn more. I was pleasantly surprised to find that authors of a lot of books I read were blogging. And this included the greats of software development. Their blogs were probably more valuable than those books because they reflected their thinking and was dynamic with time. I follow blogs of books, I follow blogs of authors and I follow blogs of readers. I have started to discover much better books to read through this.

More reading meant I got more information. I realised that I was better updated than earlier. I tried to make sure that I knew about what was happening inside the industry. It made me realise that industry news does not come from press releases, it comes from individuals. Reading these individuals is important because it made me someone inside the industry, which helped me in taking well-informed decisions.

As I changed jobs I realised that my blogging could easily be irrelevant to them. Blogging is my own, personal, not owned by anyone else. This was the biggest advantage to me. I could do out of job thinking. It is quite natural to think about your field from your job’s perspective, and this creates limitations. As I kept blogging about software development I understood it more from a higher platform, and it did not change with every job or project I changed. I could keep building on it, which today has turned into a treasure for me.

The technology involved in blogging helped me converse with other people. The comments, the pingbacks, the trackbacks all helped. The fact that I could just press one button and open up to anyone and everyone on the Web made it so easy. This was not possible in the physical world, we are always limited by various boundaries, which very easily disappeared on the Web. When I started working from home, blogging provided me some of the war rooms and the brainstorming sessions.

Of course, blogging also has its own anxious moments. I got too obsessed with statistics earlier, but eventually realised the only thing I wanted to gain out of blogging was expressing myself; everything else was secondary, including commercialising it. This also consumed a lot of my time, and initially it was not easy to balance. Eventually I could find solutions using technologies like feeds. I think blogging will always take one with surprise, it has so much potential hidden that it can be too much to digest at the first instance. But eventually it only enriches you.

People are putting them to various uses - from social causes to businesses to alarm the world of incidents which otherwise would have been hidden under rubble of the mainstream media. Blogging has had such an impact and quite regularly there is some hate-mail from someone in the mainstream media. This, in spite, of the fact that both are quite different and are not in competition. But blogging has been more effective in bringing out news of individuals, and news by individuals.

There is another benefit of blogging, which makes me smile when someone googles for my name. My blog is my identity on the Web. I am truly on the Web, I am discoverable and I am reachable. This has far reaching impacts on my life in the physical world. Not only does it increase my equity, but it also makes me smile when I get an email from an old friend saying “you are all over the web”. My friends have found it easier to find me because of my blog.

Blogging makes methink, it helps me express myself, it helps me learn, it helps me connect with people, it helps me stay informed. I try to write regularly on my blog, at least once a day. I will suggest you to give it a try if you have already not picked it up, it can turn out to be an extremely valuable asset for you.

The 2006 Weblog Awards The winners have been announced and just as everyone must have suspected, the usual suspects were chosen for the same old police lineup and the witnesses pointed out the same criminals with over half a million fingers pointed, nonetheless. Not much is new (besides Fark maybe) and not too many exciting new places to view. Yes the TLLB Ecosystem is used to judge on a whole new set of categories, but that looks more like an afterthought. I wonder how the world of movies would judge their peers if movies could participate for subsequent years in the Oscars or if the movie houses (such as Pixar, MGM, Sony) could throw their names in the Oscar hat. If there were an Oscar for the Software world, would Microsoft and the FSF win every time?

What is the point of knowing that Little Green Footballs was the best conservative blog or that Daily Kos was the best blog? Not that these aren’t good blogs, but they have already been discovered, over and over again. What was the best NEW technology blog? Which was the best NEW political blog? Who was the best NEW satirist in blogging? Can anyone fill me in?

This is the thirteenth entrant in The Blogging Essay Contest from WeblogToolsCollection.com If you would like to participate, please email me your entry at mark at wltc dot net. Please rate this article using the star system below. The competition will be judged primarily on the input from readers like you. Thank you.

This is written by Claudia Pena

Entry 9-21-06: Mayans and many Mexicans today still have a delicacy of quail in rose petals…wow, they can say their fecal matter smells like roses and be honest. Are there any more cultures that have such delicacy?

On that same month I also wrote one of my longest pieces about my strained relationship with my mother and took a political stand on the climate fear on my website. I spent hours on the computer. From the time I came home from work at 5 until midnight, I was writing, reading, searching, and revising so that the following day I would have a beautiful sacrificial lamb to offer to the gods of the internet while I awaited a signal. My blogging became an Aztec ritual thirsting for the blood of words; pulling all nighters when creativity walked on my back like a featherweight sumo wrestler. Until the signal came: a comment, a response. Wow, I was silenced into shock. No one other than family or friends had read my writing and of course they had to be positive, but a total stranger? A total stranger in another city didn’t have to read, comment and much less be nice. But there it was:

Wow, that was nice, it was deep, and i can definitely relate to some of it, i remember mopping the floors at mcdonalds thinkin there’s got 2 be something better, i worked hard, made it somewhere and now it doesn’t seem better…–A. Shunz

My writing was like a delicate chocolate decadence cake eaten by total strangers and they LOVED it! I slowly sank into the deep hole of ego maniacal, self proclaimed importance and random sporadic thought addiction that spews forth into the world through the internet of those who called themselves bloggers. In less than two months, blogging had done what MTV, Nintendo and Friends had been unable to do in years: glue me down to a screen awaiting the next comment or how many people had seen my website. My webmaster/boyfriend informed me with a huge smirk that over 500 people had seen my website in the first month but that the majority of the hits came from my own IP address. “You’re your own best customer, darling!” and he busted out laughing. “But when I goggle myself I come up first!,” I retorted. He laughed harder, “It’s all you, darling.” And with that, I was banded from my website for 2 weeks so he could get an accurate picture of the number of hits. My addiction returned to a normal sitting down only 2-3 days a week with the occasional all night binges in front of the screen.

To tell you the truth, it wasn’t until this contest that I realized that the word blog meant web log, an online journal. (I was just overtaken when he gave me the power of a website.) What was even more interesting is that the word didn’t catch on until about 2003 in our dictionaries, and the earliest mention of it was in 1998 in Acronymfinder.com. So, to humanity this concept of blogging is much more novel than deodorants to Europeans but has caught on faster than deo to bo for euros. Why?

First and foremost, there is a high demand for information both for the reader and author. For the reader, yes it does serve the obvious purpose of getting to know the writer better. However, a blog is a very personal intimate look at experiences and thoughts. Reading about my mother, undocumented immigrants and Hispanic education, involves no financial transactions but does offer a very honest look at issues a reader has faced with difficulty at one point in their life. There’s an aha! moment of relief or just gaining a new perspective. Similarly, as a writer, if the reader chooses to leave a comment, I get a kick out of affecting people I’ve had no contact with ever in my life. I want to write more if I know there’s someone reading it.

Second, blogs are the Wal-Mart’s of the on line world: there are no restrictions to the format or content. For a writer, this is heaven. I don’t have to pretend I like anything in order to get published, nor do I have to search a great deal if I don’t want to. Before, it used to be that if you felt political, you went to an online political forum, if you wanted to know a female’s experience birthing, you went to a gynological forum and so forth. That was annoying and time consuming. You are still at liberty to do that but it is nice to know I can go to someone’s website and get all that plus a story about animal rights. With blogging, there’s no need to fragment your self.

Third, don’t think a little ol’ blog the size of plankton can’t bring down a whale. Companies take commentaries on blogs seriously. Just ask ihateshipley’s.com or KillerCoke.com who displayed all the injustices to Colombia’s population by the company. Can’t find them? Exactly. Companies take blogging seriously and spend thousands of dollars on image control and lawsuits yearly. Not only are individuals bringing companies to accountability, but also public entities like police departments. After one person caught a police raid of Walters on Washington on camera, there were several people who placed it on their website catching the attention of many attorneys and Houston business people. Needless to say, Houston Police Department did a lot of backtracking afterwards. Oh what the power of a blog can do!

Fourth, the internet is faceless and, if you so wish it to be, nameless, making it the ultimate guerilla warfare battle ground. Spammers (@#%!) as well as the average Joe who is getting screwed over with property taxes for a public school system where kids deal and cut lines in the middle of class can have a voice without reprimand. Just look at Google school rankings and commentaries. Corporate world gives great fodder and as long as you remain anonymous with a secure job, people will not hesitate to blast a company or person by name. The power of anonymity spills over even into the artistic, just look at postsecret.blogspot.com where we view from the cheeky to the cruel, to the obviously insane truth about life. What can’t you say if there is no reprimand? The answer then becomes, anything your conscious doesn’t feel bad about (and when it does, just erase it).

Last, with the exception of getting cozy with it in a bathtub or taking it to remote places where you should probably be worried about the mosquitoes more than the Hilton’s latest drug induced anorexia, what the hell can’t blogging do better than a traditional paper copy book, journal or magazine? Plus it’s FREE!!! Think about it, as writer I don’t have to wait for a haughty publishing company like Houghton Mifflin to read my manuscript, get back to me nine months from now, compromise my artistic vision, offer me the thrill of having a book as payment (maybe), become a pr person to promote sales and deal with all the red tape that I could really care less about as an artist. I am taking it as I see it, when I see it and without anyone’s permission on my blog, so bite me Mifflers of the world! And if I ain’t writing about it, I’ll be sure to support my friends who are. Why should I have to go buy a book when I am already paying enough money for my high speed? The flexibility of bloggers and internet are becoming serious competitors to publishing houses, who have no choice now but to morph into e-books to keep up with the market. (Don’t believe me, ask the four time bought and sold hot potatoe of Houghton Mifflin.)

So take it form this newbie to blogging: blogging is the wave of the future…You know we should have a bloggers’ convention, just like a book convention. That would be really neat. Just a thought. God loves the bloggers…wonder when the Catholic Church will come out with a special prayer for us. Anyways, so readers, stop by my site, bookmark me and show me some love. Your comments make me a better writer, so don’t hold back.

By Claudia Pena

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy Holidays to all. Even though most holidays are working ones for me anymore, I am very thankful to have a wonderful family to spend Christmas with. I hope everyone gets to enjoy some time off and have a safe and happy holiday.

This is also the time to donate money to the poor and help those in need.

AdSense and image placement We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn’t actually being offered. That’s not a good experience for users or advertisers. This is important for many AdSense publishers. From the examples that have been provided, if you are using a plugin like AdSense Beautifier, you might be violating Google’s AdSense policies and might want to look into removing the plugin.