I wrote a guest post for Diogenes’ excellent series over at Quasi Fictional.

Please give it a read, and offer up your thoughts on what blogging is, or what it should be.  There are lots of great posts on this topic in the series, with more to come.  Come join in the conversation.

And if you don’t subscribe to Quasi Fictional, do it now (feed link).  You’ll be glad you did!

Jay Neely follows up on our conversation about blogs and social networks and the differences between the two:

What’s the difference between a social network and blogs or a blogging service? One is for your friends, the other is for your audience. The key difference is that one group already knows you (it’s easy to replace “friends” with “coworkers”, “family”, “neighbors”, etc).

As I mentioned the other day, there is logic to that distinction.  But the more I think about it, I don’t believe it’s as clear-cut as that.

Jay says bloggers write for their audience.  Clearly some do, like Guy Kawasaki, the folks at Mashable and other bloggers with one foot remaining in the old media pool.  But lots of other bloggers are writing not merely to have a soapbox, but for the multi-way conversations that are a central part of the blogging experience.  Robert Scoble is the best example of a popular blogger who, it seems to me, approaches blogging from this perspective.  Doc Searls is another.

There are other reasons why Jay’s line of demarcation sometimes breaks down.  Take connecting with old friends, for example.  Very few, if any, of my real world friends even know what Facebook is.  None (to my knowledge) use it.  As a result, I will have a much better chance connecting with people I know by nurturing my web site and waiting for people to Google me.

It’s the same with new friends.  No one will ever accuse me of being shy, but at the same time, I’m not big on chatting online with people I don’t know.  That’s the reason Second Life lost its appeal to me.

On the other hand, I have made a bunch of friends via cross-blog conversations- many of them from other states, countries and continents.  Chip Camden, Earl Moore, Randy Morin, Blonde 2.0, Brad Kellett, Dave Wallace, Ethan Johnson, Frank Gruber, Hugh MacLeod, Nick Carr, Martin Gordon, Mathew Ingram, Susan Getgood, Mike Miller, Ric Hayman, Richard Querin, Rick Mahn, Seth Finkelstein, Steven Streight, TDavid, Tom Morris and Warner Crocker are just a few of the people I likely would never have become friends with if I had set up camp in Facebook.

Plus, the community that develops via cross-blogging is so much more meaningful than merely adding a few hundred “friends” to the botton of your butt ugly MySpace page.  When I visit MySpace I see very little that looks like a real community.  Mostly, I see a gallery of bad web design.

Granted, the cross-blogging community is distributed, inefficient and sometimes impolite.  But it exists, and without walls.

I think Jay is onto something, and I hope he keeps writing about it.  But at the moment, we’re all standing on the tip of the iceberg.  Below the surface are a lot of other forces at work.

These lines that seem bright and pretty today may disappear completely tomorrow.

Or they may begin to look like walls.

Dave Winer points out that some conferences he recently attended were not unconferences.  He says “people don’t seem ready yet to accept that knowledge is distributed through the room.”

I agree that the structure of an unconference is a better way to learn about a lot of stuff.  But I sort of feel the way Dave felt at those conferences every time I fire up my feed reader.

If we want to promote unconferences, first we need to promote an unblogosphere.

Earnest – a serious and intent mental state.
– Merriam-Webster

I’ve noticed a trend lately when reading my feeds.  There are so many bloggers churning out earnest posts about supposedly earnest products and events that the fun quotient in the blogosphere is really taking a hit.  My feeds look like hundreds of little sleep-inducing Wall Street Journals.

It’s boring.  And ironic.  Ironic, because so many people are spending a ton of time and effort to mimic the very thing they claim to be in the process of replacing.  Infinite potential manifesting itself in the digital equivalent of the neighborhood newspapers we did as kids.

Blogging should be so much more than that.  Why should we albatross this new, improved and dynamic medium by using it in such a provincial manner?  How many “me too” posts do people really need to read about the latest Web 2.0 application?  One might be too many.  Hundreds are far too many.  It’s imitation to the point of irrelevancy.

Many, if not most, bloggers have the potential to be so much more than that.  To be more interesting.  To have more fun.  But fun makes the earnest blogger uncomfortable.  This is serious stuff for him, and he believes that serious and fun just aren’t compatible.  It saddens me to see all this brainpower, potential and effort directed at something so…indistinguishable.

And it doesn’t work.

No moat can contain attention.  It flies across the blogosphere at the speed of broadband.  Clicking here and yon with abandon.  And abandonment- of things too common, or too uninteresting.  Or too earnest.

The toll of earnest writing is heavy.  It’s hard to be serious all the time, particularly when you’re not being paid a decent wage to act that way.  After a while, you just give up, the way we did with our little neighborhood newspapers.  The way so many do with their blogs.

The remedy for this is a healthy dose of fun.  And the realization that fun only has three letters.  Fortunes are made on fun every day.  In fact, when you cut through the jargon, most of the stuff bloggers are concerned with are based on fun.  No one ever confused YouTube with Masterpiece Theatre.

If you want to create a new journalism, you can’t do it in the staid image of the old one.

You have to live outside the box.  Let you hair down.  Write something fun or funny.  Let it all hang out.

Otherwise, you’re just another boring newspaper nobody wants to read.  Fun beats smart every time, and in every way.

In my Darren Rowse post the other day I asked what people would do if they had $1,000 to promote their blogs.  I have been thinking about budgeting a little money to promote Newsome.Org to potential new readers.

TDavid responded with a fantastic and detailed post, full of ideas for anyone looking to spend a little money for more traffic.  It is a must read for anyone trying to build a blog.  Even if you don’t plan to spend money promoting your blog, it’s still a must read, as he includes a number of cost-free promotion ideas.

As TDavid points out, I went on a non-scheduled, unannounced blogging hiatus for several months.  I didn’t intend to.  I just got burned out and one week turned into two, etc.  I went through the same sort of thing Scoble talked about the other day.  A confluence of real world responsibilities and what often seems like a low rate of return on the hard work of blogging put me out of the blogging business for a while.  When I started back (also unplanned), I had lost some of my audience and my Technorati ranking was in free fall.

The point is that blogging is a marathon, not a sprint, for most of us.  This is particularly true when you are geographically remote and unable to plug into a local blogging culture.  Steve Gillmor, who I have met in the real world and consider a pal, tells me geography doesn’t matter in the blogosphere.  I respectfully disagree.  It’s not something you can’t overcome, but I believe if I lived in the Bay Area, I’d become friends with a lot of the guys out there, who would in turn include me in more of their online conversations.

But, like a lot of us, I don’t live out there.  So I have to find another way to promote my blog.  TDavid has some great ideas, many based on his personal history of successfully growing both a blog and other web sites.

TDavid says you need at least 75 posts a month to be in growth mode.  Historically, I would have disagreed with that, but I come from an old media perspective, having written for newspapers and trade journals for years (where a coveted monthly column became burdensome to the point of impossibility).  But having been involved in the blogosphere for a few years, I think he’s probably right.  If not for the content itself, for the content and the embedded links to draw other writers to your site, and to seed the reciprocal links which are, for better or worse, one of the established measuring sticks for blog readership.

TDavid gives some stats that support his more posts the better theory.

Then he proposes an allocation of my $1,000.

He breaks it down into 4 areas: design, widgets, contests and advertising.  Go read his post for details.  Now for my thoughts about each.

Design:  I think I should spend a little money on design, and perhaps a better search approach.  I used to use an internal Perl search engine at Newsome.Org, but I switched to Google a couple of years ago.  I think the first thing I need to do is figure out how to move my content to a WordPress platform- as there are a lot of design possibilities in WordPress that don’t exist via Blogger (my site is locally hosted, but I use Blogger (via Live Writer) to publish content).  Eric Scalf kindly wrote a WordPress template of my basic design for me last year, but I didn’t make the switch because of the frustrating URL problem.

If you are a new blogger, start with WordPress, because it’s sometimes hard to switch once you have a large archive.

Widgets: I have experimented with a number of widgets, and have a few on the site now, including my poor excuse for a tag cloud in which “nbsp,” html for a space, is the most popular “tag.”  You’ve got to love that.  Again, I think I could solve a lot of this if I could switch to WordPress.  Some widgets have a material adverse effect on page load times, so you have to be thoughtful about which ones to add.  After ignoring it for a long time, I have become a fan of the MyBlogLog widget, and find a lot of new blogs via the people who visit Newsome.Org.  I also like the Flickr widget, but it drives very little traffic to my Flickr photos.  I’m still using the GoodBlogs widget, but it’s currently under review, simply because I don’t know how much inbound traffic it generates.  I use the Twitter widget mainly to encourage readers to add me to their Twitter lists.

Steven Streight has a good summary of some available Widgets.

Contests: This is one area that I’ve been thinking about for some time.  I will definitely have a contest or two in the near future.  It seems like a good way to reward current readers and hopefully attract some new ones.

Advertising:  I have also thought about doing some advertising.  TDavid suggests Google Adwords.  I may give it a try, but I have no idea how much bang for your buck you’d get from say, a $250 purchase.  I like his idea about doing a post on the experience to get some added value.

TDavid then provides some effective, cost-free ways to promote your blog.

I used to do trackbacks a lot more than I do now.  I need to start doing them more, because they worked.  I think commenting on other blogs is also a way to get in front of potential new readers.  TDavid has several more good ideas.

This I know: no one is going to read your blog just because you write it.  And the be a good soldier, write hard and wait to be discovered technique is too remote to be a good bet.  We all have to do something to attract readers.

What do you do to promote your blog?

I’ll add links to any posts addressing this topic here, so others can read them too.

Some folks are revisiting the Twitter vs Blogging thing tonight.

Fred Wilson says we are in the era of conversation.  That saying blogging is journalism and Twitter is not misses the point.  He says we will get our news from blogs and Twitter in the future.  I think that’s true to a point, but not for the reasons Fred talks about.

Tony Hung says that Blogging and Twitter are both journalism.  Part of this is semantics, but I don’t agree.  Not unless graffiti is journalism.

As I have said before, blogs and Twitter and bathroom walls are platforms for the distribution of content.  They are not a new species of content.  The gathering and accurate reporting of news is the lynchpin of journalism, not the medium in which that news is delivered.  There are blogs and print media and maybe even bathroom walls that are journalism.  And there are ones that aren’t.

So I don’t think blogs and Twitter and all those butt-ugly MySpace pages are going to magically turn into a distributed, global Wikipedia maintained and fact-checked by our collective online consciousness.  The platforms don’t make the content any more than the bottle makes the wine.

Rather, I think blogs and Twitter are the new water coolers.  The places around which we share all sorts of information.  News, gossip, humor, photos, videos and music.  The bloggers who are fair, accurate and accountable will get more mindshare, just like the best story tellers get more ears at the water cooler.

There will be journalism.

Over time, more and more journalists will move to a blogging platform.  The main obstacle to that migration being the difficulty in taking the subscription (as in pay to read) model along with them.  As this inevitable migration happens, people will claim that blogging is reinventing journalism.

That’s not true.  It’s the journalism, or more accurately the journalists, that will reinvent blogging.

And you need not have a fedora and a old school press pass to apply.

I need to do a Top 5 post so I can get a little link love, and maybe some cash, from Darren Rowse over at Problogger, which for some reason I always read as prob logger.  What better list than the five biggest reasons Darren is the blogosphere’s marketing genius.

So here they are, Letterman style:

5) He founded an emerging church, according to Wikipedia.  I don’t really know what an emerging church is, but it sounds brainy and sorta cool.  As long as he doesn’t start writing science fiction novels and hanging out with Tom Cruise.

4) He also founded a blog network.  I’m not really sure what a blog network is either, but I’ve never belonged to one, so they must have taste and standards.

3) He might be making $1.2M a year from blogging.  That is a pro blogger, by golly.  And even if he doesn’t, he makes at least $120,000.  That’s $108,000 more than Jeff Jarvis (according to the post linked above).  I’m not sure why I find this so funny, but I do.

2) He is the father of multi-level linking via his crafty Group Writing Projects.  He has a lot of juice in the blogosphere, so people crave links from him.  He gives out 2 links each to project participants and gets a zillion links in return, thereby multiplying his juice.  Someone could write a dissertation on the brilliance of this.  And the thing is- it’s a win-win deal.  Anyone can participate.  It’s sort of like the un-blogosphere.

1) I just spent over an hour writing this post, just for a couple of links and a 1 in a zillion chance to win a grand.

While I am poking a little good-natured fun here, let me say for the record that I have been a reader of Problogger for a long time, and Darren strikes me as a good guy.

And a marketing genius.

Bonus question for Darren and everyone else:  If you were a struggling blogger and you had $1,000 to use to increase traffic to your blog, how would you spend it?  Even if I don’t win the contest, I am thinking about budgeting some money to market Newsome.Org.  I’m not going to buy books, or tapes or go to some seminar.  But other than that, anything legal and moral is fair game.