BlogSavvy.net Money | Business | Education | Community
Professional Blogging: 100′s of free tips on how to make money with blogs, monitization, build traffic, build a bussiness online with us.

Ross Mayfield posts beautifully on net-enabled bootstrapping, and he should know. Specifically, how Socialtext has used the web to get around the most common cause of crashing for start-ups… the cost of ‘real’ real-estate.

Ross uses:

* Socialtext — the building and garden
* IRC — the hallway
* FreeConference.com — the conference room
* Skype — the meeting rooms
* IM — talking over the cubical
* VNC — peeping over the cubical
* Our blogs — the front porch [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

So how does this compare to your working environment, do you think you could replace the…

Probably the biggest question you want to ask when you’re considering blogging as a means to making money is whether you’re going to be better off blogging for ads or blogging for yourself.

For example, if you are just looking for some supplemental advertising income you’d better choose your topics right… write all you want about your life, your profession and the books you enjoy… you’re not going to get many search engine hits (which are what will bring you ad revenue… just don’t even think about RSS, unless you’re planning on getting syndicated).

Receiving the latest Union newsletter today I had a look down the list of ‘What can I do’ (write to your MP, newspaper, talk to colleagues etc.) and, well, found one aspect in particular missing.

“Blog it”

Seriously, I know that a lot of people would argue that no-one pays attention to blogs… but that is fast fast changing. Not only are Journalists starting to set up pubsubs galore but search engines have and always will pull up blogs ahead of pretty much all other content.

Blogtalk Downunder is coming up with an amazing number of high quality papers looking at blogging in education, here they are so far:

Zenon Chaczko, Venkatesh Mahadevan & Emil Wajs-Chaczko – Paper – Blogging as an Effective Tool in Teaching and Learning Software Systems Development

Glen Fuller – Paper – The eventual potential of Blogs

James Farmer – Paper – Centred Communication: Weblogs and aggregation in the organisation

Online social networks are notoriously difficult to map, there are few (if any) concrete boundaries, multiple modes of communication and just as many theories examining and exploring how the internet is going to change our communities.

Perhaps one of the most interesting developments in this area is that of the online community built around the ‘real’ community (or lack of it). For example, Urban Vancouver uses the community management system Drupal to provide users with “a free blog, image gallery, and [a space] to post your own event listings”.