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Blogging For Paychecks
prostoalex writes "When you hear about blogging, you're most likely to hear about personal journals, self-expression and youngsters sharing their daily routines online. However, as Wall Street Journal notes, the word blogger can now frequently be seen in corporate job ads. Blogging jobs pay anywhere from $40,000 to $70,000 and frequently require writing copy for corporate Web sites and ability to promote on the Internet. A search for blogger and blogging on one of the job meta search engines yields several hundred open positions."
So, I'm supposed to take a significant paycut _and_ throw away any sense of decenty I have?
I see. So to corporate america, blogging equates to marketing.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Raydude
For all the whining teenagers... your time has finally come. yes, people want to pay you to get all angsty.
A little thing to realize about want ads is that they are usually filled by the time you read them.
So what is the job seeker supposed to do? Well, according to What Color is Your Parachute, the key is to use your connections to get in.
If you are a blogger with a dedicated audience, you will already have people knocking on your door to get you to write for them. I know I do, and all I do is write a few words on this site here.
If you want to blog for a company, see if you know anyone working there. They have a better idea about the hiring situation inside their company than any want-ad could ever let you know.
I wonder how much he gets payed by Slashdot?
You make a mistake and screw up our pr by saying something wrong and we're unable to take it off the blog in time to prevent a media disaster.
At most of the places I've worked, the grammar of a significant percentage of the employees bordered on illiteracy. At least these bloggers are likely to be able to write coherently.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
This is just a marketing extension really, businesses have long since been hiring people to go "put out the good word" for them. It happened for a long time on the Internet without many people noticing, with company rep's using a sock puppet attack to gain support for some company. I've seen them all over tons of forums (usually given away by talking about _any_ company and having less than 5-10 posts, and all those posts being total garbage), onto IRC for certain channels of people counter-pointing some viewpoint, and even in Slashvertising. Seriously folks, nothing to see here, move along.
Jason Kottke blogs for a living, taking voluntary "micropayments" which, so far, have been enough to support him.
It's now just another word for marketing gopher.
Gullible hacks are all over this 'blogger' gibberish because somebody somewhere thinks it's a hot new word.
It isn't - it's silly and it rolls off your tongue wrong, like "Pog" - but that hasn't stopped anyone.
In fact, it's gotten so bad that I was reading Time magazine today and saw a totally serious sidebar on this hip new phenomenon, "Blogebrity". This is a nonsense Contagiousmedia hoax, and I'm surprised the editors let it slip through. (Or I wonder how much they got paid.) At any rate, Time's sloppy standards there exemplify the cultural phenomenon where anything that says 'blog' and sounds trendy is brilliant and worth supporting.
Yikes.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
They have corporate prostitutes (obviously they're not called that), why not corporate bloggers? And then we wonder why Enron goes bust!
-Palal
I never thought that I would ever see the day when being a loudmouth with NO credentials is worth $40,000 or more. Where do I sign up?
Frequently updated and interesting content like /. can develop a community around it. From there, whether the site chooses to simply offer a service for the goodwill of their readers, or incorporate a more conventional way of monetizing website traffic, provides the business payoff.
Smart business IMO, and we'll probably see more of it.
__Laugh Daily funny free videos
Rely on the corporate bussiness to take advantage of something new. Im just surprised the pr0n industry wasn't here before :)
:)
But then again, maby they where?
(like I wouldn't know.. because I don't surf pr0n).
*emptying cache*
I never thought that I would ever see the day when being a loudmouth with NO credentials is worth $40,000 or more.
Welcome to 1997.
First, they took an individualistic form of expression and commercialized it (all the cool kids these days have Xangas... and have the nerve to call them blogs!). Now they turn it around and corporatize it. It's interesting to see how new forms of media evolve in positive ways, as well as get exploited.
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
As long as they state on the blog who they are paid by, I'm fine with it. It is where they don't tell you that they get paid to do it that I get concerned about where blogging is taking itself.
Wonderful! Now, instead of professional journalists writing shoddy articles on shaky ground for widely circulated publications, we can have complete amateurs do it, too!
If you're reading this, stop it.
If they disclose that they're being paid by $COMPANY$ to blog, fine. If they don't, that's unethical.Just like advertorial in newspapers or on TV, actually.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
bloggers, webmasters, when are we trolls going to get some respect!
This is my sig.
Corporate America is willing to pay to steal the last shred of legitimacy from an already specious source of information.
Not only can we count on unedited accounts from the mouths of non-specialists... we can count on those non-specialists being paid off by corporate interests to spout off opinions that those corporations will not have to take any responsibility for.
This can apparently only be used for good.
I am glad to see companies begin to drive magnetic web-readiness so they can reinvent ubiquitous niches and streamline impactful deliverables. The whole idea of deploying viral infomediaries is the first step in transforming intuitive infrastructures and recontextualizing impactful channels. Good for them!
%s/blogger/astroturfer/g
While companies may think they are using blogging as a marketing tool, I think that the reality is somewhat more complicated. Corporate sponsored blogs tend to end up being a focal point for interaction related to specialized (corporate related) topics. And specialization is the crucial attribute that make blogs so interesting.
For the first time in the history of the world, we now have a direct channel for hyper-specialization. Blogs + RSS amount to a revolution; The high availability personal-press.
Each of us tend to seek out and interact on subject matters that we are interested in, believe in and/or know something about. In the past, that generally meant your choice of friends and organizations that you belonged to. But today, we can gather around micro-press engines that allow us to interact (as I am doing now).
The end result is that like-minded people from all over the world end up exchanging ideas and critical thought with one another over subject matter that is important to them rather than what a media outlet wants to be important to them.
This new explosion of specialization will have profound and unforseen results as it evolves, such as a completely new and transcendent awareness in society. The populations that make use of blogs are literally transforming themselves from network/newspaper zombies into their own people with their own refined views that match their own personalities. In a very real sense, the blog is an attractor that is pulling us towards a new form of collective awareness or sentience.
So in summary, I think it is a good thing.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Wake up: the emperor has no clothes. Blogging has been owned by vested interests for a while.
Look at all the technology companies who encourage their employees to blog and wax effusive about their products. (picking a couple of easy examples) Sun, Microsoft, Redhat and many more do this.
Witness the co-opting of political blogs of all kinds during the last season of US and Australian elections. Notice the tight coupling between the language used by certain bloggers and spin crafted by political parties?
Observe the abuse of blogs to gain or destroy Google ratings.
If you think that what you are reading in a blog is somehow automatically more "real" than something you would read in an advert, press release or partisan hack's column, then you are deluding yourself. Blogs are another tool in the bag of PR and marketing people and they will continue to be used as such.
It's main stream media trying to get a piece of the action..I wouldn't touch their sites(CNN, DrudgeReport, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc.) even with blogs.
Honesty and integrity means something to me.
I was immediately excited when I saw the headline.
Bobbing for paychecks, what an easy way to make money.
Thanks Slashdot, for yet another disappointment.
Wow, so they managed to create a job title lower webmaster?
I can remember when blogging was cool.
Now it's just another fashion to coopt for marketting reasons. These people will make lots of money for a months until everyone realizes that anyone can write blogs -- that's the entire point. Then it'll be just another job requirement for employees.
Wait, that's not true. Blogs were never cool.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Must have method of transferring data into computerized format. Must be able to spout rumor and opinion, and mix with a believable amount of fact to present a digestable blog. Roland Piquepaille need not apply.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
If you still think blogging is about teenagers keeping their journals, you're so 2003.
Blogging has entered business in a big way, and people getting paid to blog is a natural progression. A good blogger must be able to crank out topical posts every day, often more than one entry a day. It ain't easy. I try to keep up my graphic blog (at: http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/) regularly and the best I can do is about one post every two days.
The lady in the Wall Street Journal article blogs for a yogurt company. I'm sure blogging is a more effective way of pulling in business than, say, sending out sample dispensers in supermarkets, which is kind of messy, plus the company has to provide all the samples that always get eaten by people who never buy. Of course, her blog will be even more popular now that she's got a write-up in Wall Street Journal.
Sun and Fun
http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/2005/04/28
Ask a garbageman. Everything is a paycheck to someone.
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Some random thoughts... no disrespect meant to anyone..
... bloggers, for unsophisticated marketers, are shills. Corporations should look at other ways of creating buzz if they cannot find a handful of users / customers who cannot say something good about them.
.. not what you want them to read.
... I doubt a blogger will.
Most corporations have been hiring shills for centuries. Shilling has been done online for years
The best bloggers are loyal employees. Use them to show that the company has a soul and a heart. No need to hire outsiders... look within.
I've tried to hire some tech bloggers to help me develop content on a website or two... specially given that my skills are in putting together sites and not blogging or reporting or even writing coherent articles.
To me commerical blogging (from a non corporate but money making perspective) is essentially fairly similar to running or working for a newspaper. It has to be a very controlled equation that manages egos, commercial reality, discipline, ethics and discipline.
Egos: The most dedicated bloggers I've met (and I've met a fair few in person) walk around with their egos in their pants.. (and moan about not making enough money to pay their hosting bills). Sometimes it is this wonderful mix of poverty and passion that produces great blogs... usually it is passion.
Commercial Realities: At some point, people stop caring about the bloggers mundane life and start caring more about the news and information in the blog. In a corporate environment, no one cares about how much salt you put on your fish and chips... deal with it and develop a focus on what the readers want
Discipline: Can you produce a story or two a day that will keep readers coming back? Most blogs are abandoned, usually because the bloggers loose interest... If you can discipline yourself and produce a good story every day (hard to do in most areas) or week, you will see people return.. this will equate to $$s
Commerical Realities: At some point we all need to accept that anything commercial needs a disiplined approach. Commercial entities do not understand that the best journalists often don't file a story a day... they are good because of the quality and not the quantity. If their PR department cannot find something new about the company every day
Those would be blah-gers.
The CB App. What's your 20?
At last, we can know what the Anime Hair Color of the 757 is.
Now, if only they would add "jerking off" and "reading slashdot instead of actually working" to the job descriptions, imagine the flood of applications?
:)
Sorry, I just could not resist
It will of course be framed according to the POV of the corporate reality distortion field.
Only a very naïve person could really enter the field to get through the interview stage. Likely their local equivalent of Darth Vader will sense you coming from a distance. He may yet leave you alone and bide his time in the hopes of turning you over to the dark side.
However, if you start to portray their products for what they really are, the Emperor might find out, so be ready to grasp your throat.
If the taggers can get paid for what they call art, it will be art, and they will be artists.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
"Blogging jobs pay anywhere from $40,000 to $70,000"
;-)
Thats' what... around 10,000 euro's these days?
Go Anonymous Coward!
which company will pay me for dissing them?
Manojar - pronounced like Manager
Just around Y2000 everone talked about web developers and web sites.
Where are they now the IT buble has gone ? Nowhere, my web dev friends have a hard time to work now.
Surfing the trend is dangerous for your career...
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
The secret to moderating fairly, is to read everything as if the professor from futurama was speaking it.
...
Now spammers will infiltrate blogs. You THINK you are looking for something ("we have proof Senator Cottonpicker does bad stuff" or "how to raise children", perhaps "social security benefits") and wham! Penis enlargement advertisement (or something else just as useless). Have erectile disfunction? Tough! No advertisement here. I'm sorry to suggest this but I'm sure they are already thinking it.
I was able to use autocomplete for the subject, big surprise there, another Zonk blogging story
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
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So basically it's the same old copy writing jobs, except now they're throwing a buzzword in the ad?
...and that's all there is to it.
So now the vast majority of online users will be ignoring corporate shills disguised as bloggers as opposes to just ignoring clueless idiots disguised as bloggers.
...to write coherently, they'll have it made.
loads of bloggers making big money from blogging these days.
I follow ProBlogger every day - he's someone who earns well over $100,000 per year from his own personal blogs - and he's one of the small guys.
I just read the business plan of a friend and it had every buzz word imaginable...
blog, podcasting, voip, social networks, blogrolls, text messaging, rss, photo rating, and SEO options in addition to forums and a variety of other things
and it was a stinkin' picture sharing site!
I'd never heard of simplyhired.com, so I checked them out (since I got laid off AGAIN last week). I've already found several (non-blogging) jobs I'm going to apply for that I haven't found on other job boards.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
But people too stupid to handle or lazy to learn the minimum HTML required to create a simple webpage really isn't the kind of people I take my advice from.
Think of it as trashing the web like the easy to use IRC-clients have caused a similar "evolution" of IRC. It really doesn't bring much more useful content out there, just more.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
where do you think newspapers came from? most started off as pamphlets by some guy trying to push political or commercial ideas. funny how this has never changed. the vast majority of news sources are and always have been shills, either for political and/or corporate interests, thats what they're for.
I followed the link. When you subtract out the blog software devel positions, the QA positions, the marketing positons that want hip ideas like blogging, etc., how many real blogging jobs are there? One or two maybe?
Of those handful of blogging jobs listed, how many are real, and how many are work at home scams?
$70K for blogging. No experience required. one is born every minute.
Working as a blogger...the 21st Century's "HTML Editor"...oh to be a $50.00 an hour HTML editor...I weep silently...
I kinda doubt that Hulk's Blog is going to go Corporate ... ;-)
That may be the case with most blogs, but Microsoft doesn't just promote their crap, on slashdot they actually mod people down who dare to talk down about their doomed future and their crappy proprietary software.
:)
Even on anti Microsoft posts where I got +5 moderation, that was usually after 10 mod downs and 15 mod up's. Yeah, you really gotta be that good at making your point to nail them.
Perhaps, shashdot should have a special rating for anti Microsoft posts that make them more difficult to mod down, and they should completely block access from known Microsoft ip addresses.
This has been happening for years already. It's annoying as hell.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
Is this guy: http://devrock.blogspot.com/
I don't know if he's making any money, but it's one of the few, rare, raw blogs I've read. I just wish he'd update it more often.
I fear most of those 'jobs' are going to be outsourced to India ... and the precious few who remain stateside will probably be powered by A.I. content-generators like AutoBlogger. ;)
The Pjammer Chronicles --
" Wake up: the emperor has no clothes. Blogging has been owned by vested interests for a while."
Most blogs ARE "vested interest". The question generally is "who's interest"? The blogger pushing a particular viewpoint over all other alternatives, is just as biased as say being a corporate frontpiece.
"If you think that what you are reading in a blog is somehow automatically more "real" than something you would read in an advert, press release or partisan hack's column, then you are deluding yourself. Blogs are another tool in the bag of PR and marketing people and they will continue to be used as such."
Much like the flatearthers are pushing their own agenda.
Can't some pipsqueak in P.R. do the job? Do they actually need someone who specializes in posting daily non-sense? If I recall correctly the blogging movement was started mostly by those who DIDN'T have jobs and were writing about their daily complaints and boring details of life.
[[ the only 15 letter word that is spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable: it may soon be, however. ]]
Web development hasn't gone away. It's GROWN UP. The amount of knowledge, and skill has gone up considerably. Especially in smaller companies were you wear many hats.
George bush?
It's fine if the person is actually working with the company and doing more than blogging ... but if they're just blogging, then it's just a new term for advertising.
Q: What's the difference between a paid blogger and a shill?
A: A shill can go home in the evening and keep quiet.
That is all.
in my area they have been paying these taggers to paint murals on all the railroad overpasses. It gives them some money for things they like to do.
Public Relations.
But hey, call it whatever you want.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I know "shill" is an inflammatory word to some, but that's what I equate with blogging for money. It is a natural consequence of tying salary to writing.
I realize this is proabbly is very much depending on your point of view, but still.
1. HTML is easy. That was my point. As long as you don't want to make fancy stuff like CSS Zengarden, HTML is pretty darn easy.
2. I would prefer a different analogy, but in the end it doesn't really matter, because an analogy is only just that, an analogy. Anyway, mine goes more like this: People should know the basics of how a car works to be allowed to use it. Like for instance knowing what the dials on the dashboard means. IMO the "Automatic versus manual" diversion is rather irellevant, as what kind of transmission you use doesn't really affect the car being a car.
3. My point was that if you want to publish stuff on the net, knowing how the net works might be a good idea. I, myself, when I make a website always write my own db-backed system from scratch, and even make a nice front-end for adding content, but that's beside the point. Again, what I meant was that "1. HTML is darn easy". People incapable of learning it, are people I will assume are too stupid to be worthwhile my attention.
Now that's me being arrogant, presumptious and probably a tad elitist, but given the amount of junk out there, I don't see the problem in doing some rough filtering. Now 'Blogs' have definitely increased the SNR of the net for the worse, and that's why I'd like them dead, buried, gone and away with.
(4. This is definitely getting mod'ed offtopic.)
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I see. So to corporate america, blogging equates to marketing.
How is this different from anyone else? "Self expression" -- give me a break. I can express myself without doing it to the whole world. There's definately an element of narcissism in blogging -- ie "look at me" -- which is self promotion.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Neither. It just is. I wonder what took them so long to figure it out. The internet as a commercial space has been around for how many years now?
You're here on slashdot. But you're really posting for engadget.com, aren't you? Aren't you???
I'm sure these guys are paid on this site, but this dude writes some fascinating stuff about computer crime case files. He updates is pretty regularly too.
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/security/investigator
The writing style is great.
I'm wondering if most corporate bloggers are up-front about the corporation that pays them, or ideally the corporation that funds the corporation that pays them. A hypothetical example: Laura Didio == Yankee Group == Microsoft.
The potential for abuse of this "buy-a-blogger" system is huge.
I think you might find that the purpose of corporate bloggers, is it's another avenue of propergander for the corporation to use to get it's message out there. Only by using blogs, it will probably be camophlaged in a way to make it look like it's a persons opinion or facts from an unbiased source, rather than part of the Corporate Internet Advertising machine.
... depends how much the craze hits. I think it probably won't be too bad, but I can certainly see an eventual decline in the nummber of Blogger jobs required. A lot will depend on the success of it.
:-)
As such, a good blog with a good disguise might pull in big bucks for the Corp (by selling their products), provided they get enough people reading them. After all, some blogs have thousands of individuals visit them each week. (Some of my friends have hundreds each day, and they are all different IP addresses, so it is most likely they are individual people.)
Will it go bust
Just my two cents worth.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)