I always try to write directly to that one hypothetical person, who may eventually bring back like-minded friends. If I haven’t got that loving feeling, I’ll leave an article for later – sometimes for months. If I don’t get that feeling within four or five months, I usually delete the article and have faith that my subconscious will come up with new topics for me to write about.

But that mental smile is crucial to developing a steady base of readers. Brian Clark has it. So do Liz Strauss, Yaro Starak, Om Malik, and several others – albeit, some are a bit more reserved about it. (Just examples; no ass-kissing going on here In the same way that people on the other end of a phone can feel you smiling, readers can feel whether or not you cared about writing an article. They may not realize it consciously, but if your writing is hollow, they won’t come back, no matter how important your topic is to them.

While I’ve known the smile-on-the-phone thing for years, I never consciously thought about the analog advice for writing until more recently. I’d noticed in June that one of my weblogs was getting small but steady daily traffic that was growing gradually (and still going). Much reflection finally led me to the conclusion that despite the infrequent posting, that weblog seemed to have the most warmth about the writing – that feeling of, hey, here’s something you might like to know – compared to most of the rest of my weblogs.

Other writers who smile when they write:

• Write Happy
• Speaker Sue
• Coincide Publishing

Now given that the US is not even an official bilingual country, like Canada is, what can American bloggers do to keep up? Steve suggests that news feed readers/ aggregators could translate content on the fly, but if you’ve seen the results of machine translators, you know that they are not always accurate. What’s more, they are particularly bad at translating colloquialisms, which give the conversational form of a language its current flavour. And since blogs are supposed to be conversational, I’m not sure I’d trust machine translation for more technical blogospheric research. (This is my own personal reason for increasing my language skills.)

What I’m suggesting is that serious onine writers and bloggers should attempt to learn at least one other language than the one they speak fluently. So what languages should English-speaking bloggers learn? Here is my own shortlist, based on what I’m seeing in the blogosphere, plus a few comments for each language. The languages are listed in my own order of importance.

(1) French
(2) Japanese
(3) Spanish
(4) Portguese
(5) German
(6) Mandarin

(1) As a Canadian, I learned French early in my schooling, but without someone to practice speaking with, the best I can do now is read at about a 75-80% ability. I can no longer converse more than a few words, and terribly at that. I do occasionally watch French TV (from Quebec) and understand spoken Quebecois French at about 50-60%. However, I think that there are some very important French-language blogs, particularly from Europe. There is also a list as long as my arm of literary novels that I’d like to read in the original French. Thus French runs high on my shortlist.

(2) I love the sound of the Japanese language and taught myself about a decade ago, so that I could get an interview with the fun Japanese girl-rock band Shonen Knife. I had a great time learning, and fun meeting the band. I’d written out all of my interview questions in Roomaji – the Roman/ English-letter version of Japanese – but promptly forgot all the Japanese I’d learned shortly after greeting the ladies, so the bulk of the interview was conducted in English.

While conversational Japanese is highly phonetic and thus relatively easy for English speakers to learn, there are four different written forms in use. Kanji consists of ideographs that are mostly borrowed from Chinese. Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic symbols. Roomaji uses Roman letters (plus accent marks) and numbers to represent Hiragana and Katakana words.

Hiragana is the standard form of written Japanese that you see on packaging and newspapers. Katakana is also used fairly regularly, but mostly for words borrowed from Western languages. I have yet to come across any blogs written in Roomaji. Still, for my own research, Hiragana and Katakana are very high on my list. I do a lot of writing about consumer electronics and computer technology in general, and since a great deal of tech is manufactured in Japan, it would be to my advantage to know Japanese more fluently.

(3), (4) In my blogspheric surfing, I’m seeing an increase in both Spanish and Portguese blogs. There seems to be a particular increase in Brazilian blogging, and thus Portuguese blogs. I know a smattering of Spanish and can tell the difference between written Spanish and Portuguese, but I don’t know enough to know the top bloggers in these two languages. Still, there are many classic novels originally written in Spanish that I’d like to read, so at least Spanish ranks high on my list. If I can read a few more blogs because of it, then great. And learning Spanish helps in learning Portgueuse, if you can tell the difference between them.

(6) Germany has long been a leading center of technology, like Japan, and I’ve tried to learn German in the past. At present, it’s relatively low on my list, but that may change. There are a number of German research institutes that have websites which I’d eventually like to be able to read in the original German.

(6) Mandarin is a very hard language to learn, even for someone like myself who has a penchant for languages. There are up to 11 different inflections for vowel (consonant?) sounds. I tried learning Mandarin two years ago because I was seriously considering teaching English in China, particularly Beijing. It’s the first language I gave up on only after four weeks. (I stuck with Russian, Greek, Italian, and German for much longer.) It’s not currently on my list per se, but one day soon, I think that’ll change, with the rise of Mandarin blogging.

There are of course other languages that have a strong presence online, such as Philipino, but I’m listing only those languages that have a research-based importance to me.

If any of these, or other, languages interest you, these days there are all kinds of free language lessons online. I went to my local public library and borrowed CDs and books. Just make sure that you get CDs which use native speakers, to get the best lessons.

You might think that if you’re just planning to learn a language to read blogs in, it will not be enough. You need to learn the language, or it’ll be very easy to forget what you learn. Aural cues help trigger memory, and unless you’re already fluent in a language, just sticking to reading will likely be a waste of time.

While it’s well-known that you cannot copyright a general idea or a topic, crediting ideas is a professional courtesy, especially when you are presenting something that’s not really yours. Courtesy goes a long way online. If you understand the concept of Six Degrees of Separation, you’ll know why I say this.

Six degrees of separation is the concept that any two people on Earth are separated in knowledge of each other by at most six intermediaries. Although some definitions of this concept say five intermediaries, in my math research, I’ve only seen “six” mentioned, and it’s the definition of always used. I mean, wouldn’t it be called Five Degrees then?

Six degrees is an extremely important sociological concept, and has mutated into the related “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” Hollywood connections game. That in turn led to the idea of a Bacon number. (Go ahead; have some fun and calculate your Bacon number, if you’ve been in a feature film. I’ve been a background actor in a few movies, including Back to the Future with Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox, who both have a Bacon number of 2. If I had actually acted in the movie, instead of just appearing in the background, my Bacon number would be 3.)

If you go on pure Six Degrees, though, I can connect myself to a lot of celebrities, especially in the music biz, within 3 degrees or less. So what, right? Well, besides showing off, I actually have a point: You’d be surprised who you are connected to. And that applies in the blogosphere. A smile and link-love go a long way online, and not just because of Six Degrees.

But that said, I have to ashamedly admit that I don’t always credit the sources of my ideas. Not often, but sometimes.

Why not? It’s certainly not due to any malice or jealousy or what have you.  It’s purely due to inefficient methods of recording both new ideas and their sources. I use a variety of software tools to research ideas for future posts, and sometimes that means I forget to record the inspiration.

So how to fix that? Discipline. That’s all I can think of. But failing that, if I personally ever present a new idea that you feel I plundered from your writing, feel free to tell. If it’s true, I’ll more than happily publish a credit/ link to you.

But let’s make a distinction between the above situation and another. Lately, in pressing hard in my research to break stories before some of the ultra-popular bloggers, I have managed to write something “first”. However, because I’m obsessed with editing, I sometimes post an hour or two later. A casual observer might think I stole the idea without attribution. While no one has accused me of that, I’ve been finding this situation occuring more frequently as of late.

Let’s face it. Contextual advertising is generally tough to earn – or not, depending on who you ask. For me, it’s tough. I make more money writing for other people’s blogs. At least for now. But my website statistics suggest that I might someday make good money from my sites. If I can keep up the pace I’ve set for myself.

The keyword, though, is “someday”. There’s an exponential growth curve in blogging revenue, and some weblogs experience a shallower initial curve than others. Sure, there are people who experience faster growth and earn a living from contextual ad programs for AdSense – often spending less time than I. But I haven’t discovered the magic yet.

I have, however, discovered some other honest writing opportunities, courtesy of a website owner I’m collaborating with. He’s already started a successful online publishing business writing and selling targeted niche e-books and e-reports.

He wisely set up an affiliate program, whereby the affiliate takes 25%, he takes 25%, and the author takes 50%. He’s written two e-books himself, and my guess is that he has done quite well.

I am currently working with him on a series of e-reports, which require less of a commitment than a full book. I figure, one e-report should take me an elapsed time of about 20-40 hours, start to finish – including research, writing, editing and producing a reasonable layout before creating the PDF file. Let’s do some approximate calculations.

The e-books will sell for between US$17-47, depending on the content and the length. Even at $17, and because of the actual umbrella topic and its rising popularity, indications are that the e-publisher can sell up to 1000 copies in a year’s time. My 50% would then give me about $8500 for just one project. At 20-40 hours of work, that’s about $212-425/hr. Not bad. To achieve the same kind of earnings writing for a few dollars per post for some of the weblog networks, you’d have to write, well, a lot.

But of course, that’s a lie. To make an e-book/ e-report publishing venture work, you need a high-traffic site with a good conversion rate. To get that, you need to build trust and prove that your writing is worth buying. In my estimation, that means writing a weblog, with regular fresh entries containing valuable information. And that, of course, takes time for research, writing, and building up a regular readership.

Furthermore, I think the reason why this e-publisher’s site works is that the only advertising on his blog is an advert for his book. There are no other ads to distract the potential customer’s eye. This is the same technique that Seth Godin uses, and, I believe, the same one that Brian Clark of Copyblogger will use. All three of them are marketing geniuses, in that they realize that in addition to blogging, they need to give something of value away for free.

In fact, Seth Godin gives away many of his e-books for free, and makes his living from sales of print books and speaking engagements. Brian Clark hasn’t shown his pimp hand yet, but no doubt will do so soon. They are not the only two doing this, but if you want a career from writing online, you’d do well to read both their weblogs.

So, yeah, I think that you CAN make a profitable living from online writing, but not necessarily from contextual advertising. It’s a question of finding some popular topics and writing freshly about them in a weblog, and supplementing them with free e-books/ e-reports. When you’ve built up a sizeable readership, then consider offering an e-report for sale, to test the waters. You need to give the project enough time, to make sure that a sizable number of people (maybe 1,000?) have been exposed to it.

Unfortunately, this method means that you need to pay your bills by some other means, until your e-books (and others, if you’re planning to go that route) start selling. In other words, you might still have to write pay-per-posts for a while.

But while I’ve not disagreed with Brian to date, I don’t completely agree with the reasons he thinks these so-called paintings work. Either he’s being entirely too graceful, or he’s actually missed one main reason why they work. Or I got frustrated with the whole nonsense and skimmed over Brian’s articles instead of reading them thoroughly. And since I’m a more blunt person than he, I’m going to throw in my 2c. (And so you don’t get the wrong impression, I think Brian is a genius and a phenomenal writer. I may have missed something important.)

As he rightly says, it’s not the actual paintings themselves “that mean anything.” Sure they’re unique, but so is the furniture that a New York City artist made with his friends’ poo, frozen for texture. I’m not making that up. And they’re limited editions. So were Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup paintings, which still generate great debate to this day. And there’s the Canadian artist who painted three stripes of colour across a giant canvas and received millions for it. From the Canadian government, no less. But this latter example doesn’t actually fit in with the others.

Why not? Because what I get of the whole thing is that you only really have to find 1,000 interested people to make an online project successful. That’s if you are single entrepeneur as opposed to a company. There’s an old saying that if you want to be a millionaire, you can sell $1 items to a million people or a million dollar item to one person. You could also sell $1,000 items to 1,000 people.

But if you are just one person, say a blogger/ online writer, your overhead is not nearly as much as for a print publishing company. Think you could get by with $27,000/yr? That means selling $27 items to 1,000 people. Every year.

$27,000 doesn’t sound like a lot. But if you’re not commuting to work, you’re actually saving a great deal of money. And in the United States and Canada at least, you should be able to write off some or all of the expenses related to your online writing career.

Consider the alternate – or at least my alternate. On the very last computer contract I did before becoming a full-time starving writer, I calculated that including car payments, gasoline, toll road costs, and unavoidably expensive lunches, plus the necessity of working Saturdays, I actually spent close to $1200 every month getting to work.

That doesn’t include the outrageous amount of time I sat in traffic jams in the Greater Toronto Area. Some days, I spent an extra 2-3 hours just sitting and doing nothing except wishing I could work from home. That’s time I could have spent doing something more productive, may be a side business from home. But even just 5 years ago, I couldn’t have imagined that an entrepreneur could make money on the Internet. Now I’m sure they can, if they approach is right.

Granted, I sometimes miss the whole working in an office thing, simply for social reasons, I don’t miss the traffic, the road rage, the fumes, the insane toll charges, and the politics. But after my sober reflection about my one-year blogiversary, I thought about some of the potential ways to actually earn a dollar writing online. I’ll reflect on them in the next post.

No doubt, bloggers often feel the same way, but I think that if there are more than two blogs on a topic, that’s actually a good thing for everyone. In a similar but different situation, a blog with multiple writers is arguably going to do better than most blogs with just one writer.

There are many examples of this, including most of the Weblogs, Inc blogs. My own writing has recently started appearing on other people’s blogs by request, and on one website, I’m getting several hundred pageviews per post. In just a day or two. None of my blogs have individually received as many pageviews in a single day or two, despite writing my ass off for 11 months now – and even though I publish the same type of writing and topics on my own blogs.

Why is that? I think it’s pretty simple to answer. When there is more than one writer, there’s something for everyone. There is more fresh content daily, and variety. And when writers on one weblog inter-link to each other’s posts, it’s an invitation for their loyal readers to read the other writers. A synergy is built up. But if a weblog only has one writer, the success of it depends solely on the cult of personality that that writer can build up, regardless of what they are writing about and how often.

As much as it might sting, there aren’t many writers who can achieve this cult of personality. A FEW good examples of such types of writers – in no particular order – are Darren Rowse, Seth Godin, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, Brian Clark, Yaro Starak, Steve Pavlina, Debbie Weil, and Guy Kawasaki.

The moral, for most bloggers, is that synergy is a good thing, but it is possible to be a successful soloist. You’ll note that every one of the above writers regularly have something of value to tell their regular readers.

Know of any other solo bloggers who you think are developing their own cult of personality with their insightful writing?

The article is particularly focusing on blogs whose content heavily block-quotes other content, give link love and attribution, but do not necessarily add an equal or greater amount of fresh content. For example, a site might consist of posts where half the article is a large blockquote and the other half is original commentary – or worse. These blogs, Jonathan suggests, are treading on “fair use” guidelines.

The Berne Copyright Convention developed copyright guidlines which all member nations of the United Nations supposedly follow. Fair use, by the Berne Convention, dictated that no more than 300 words of a written work be republished, and only to exemplify a point or as a base to build an idea, or teach a concept, etc. On the other hand, if the original written work is less than 300 words, you’ll be republishing the work in its entirety – which you may not do unless you have the permission of the copyright holder to do so.

By the letter of the (copyright) law, that actually means that inserting a third-party RSS feed, whether partial-text or full-text, violates copyright, unless you have permission from the author. When in doubt, ask. Similarly, if you use, say, 150 words and later 200 words from the same piece of written work, even on two different posts on your website, you are violating fair use rules. Your total usage, in any collection of writing, of someone else’s specific work, should not exceed a total of 300 words, unless you have explicit or implicit permission.

Another potential gray area is the reuse of someone else’s RSS web feeds on your own web pages. By inserting an RSS (or Atom) feed, you are reproducing many snippets of text from many articles. These snippets provide a link back to the original articles. Many websites welcome this, but may do not. The problem is that it’s essentially the same as if you wrote a bunch of articles in print and I copied and republished the first paragraph of each article somewhere else.

Because the Internet and a collection of technologies make it so easy for so many, people often mistakenly believe that it’s okay to copy or excerpt as much as they like. The worst offenders are those websites that republish song lyrics or poems in their entirety, without permission. But since most of these appear to be fan sites that do not try to monetize the site in any way, they are often left alone. Lyrics publishing rights are often owned by some publishing company, not necessarily by the author. The publishing company would no doubt be unhappy about copyright violation. But some might say that this sort of copyright violation is actually beneficial to the artist in question because it promotes them – something that’s usually not true for photographers.

Technorati Tags: countwordula, count wordula, copyright violation, berne convention, plagiarism

I used to work with 2 Nikon cameras and a Pentax, plus a couple of inexpensive digitals (Olympus, Kodak). Aside from any environmental concerns, I love cutting my own rolls of film using a bulk loader, then working in the darkroom making magic. There’s just something – tactility, I guess – about handling glossy film paper. Slides and negatives still provide far higher resolution pictures than the digital. It’ll always be that way.

Sure, I could do without having to inhale photo-chemicals. But it isn’t just environmental issues that have made DSLR cameras so popular. Despite the lower resolution photos, they are sufficient for their primary destination: the Internet, or sometimes family photo albums. Neither destination needs the high resolution that slides or negs offer.

It’s also so much more convenient and speedier to work with digital cameras. I can snap off as many pics as my Flash card (or whatever) can hold, load them onto my laptop, then use Google Picasa or Adobe’s Lightroom (beta) to sort the wheat from the chaff and make minor adjustments fast, or undo them. For more elaborate editing, I can use JASC Paintshop Pro (now owned by Corel) or Adobe Photoshop or something similar. Definite ease of use.

Which type of photography is better? I’m still undecided, but as much as I love slide film, as an online publisher and writer, I’m leaning towards digital photography. The process is simple, quick, and easy. Film-based photos that might have been unpublishable are often easily corrected for lighting and contrasts in digital mode. It is an efficient means of communicating visual ideas.

Technorati Tags: countwordula, count wordula, digital photography, analog photography, nikon, pentax k1000, kodak, olympus, google picasa, adobe lightroom, paintshop pro, photoshop

In fact, during “Da Vinci Code Week” (Mon May 8 – Fri May 12) on the History Channel (Canada’s equivalent of History TV, I believe), they showed a variety of programming related to Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”. (This book is a combination of fiction and fact, and implies that Leonardo painted information about the supposed bloodline of Christ into his own paintings. Thus, the Da Vinci code.)

One of the programs showed a demonstration, using a dummy hung outside over 12 hours, of how the Shroud of Turin may have been created, using canvas and a Camera Obscura – and a man. The host’s hypothesis is that because the man would have to have remained perfectly still for the entire time, he must have already been dead.

I’ve forgotten the exact date, but a corner of the Shroud has been carbon-dated around 1430 (predating Da Vinci).  However, other evidence, such as the unique weave of the fine linen cloth, indicates that the shroud must have been from the Masada plateau region of Israel around the 1st century AD. (An old TV mini-series from 1981 showed that the inhabitants of Masada, who were one of the 12 tribes of Israel, were completely wiped out. So how would the cloth have ended up in Turin, Italy?)

So why the 1400s for the corner of cloth from the Shroud? Apparently it’s due to some micro-organisms that contaminated the sample. I didn’t actually catch any program during Da Vinci Code Week that indicated that the Shroud had been re-dated from another sample. However, it’s still possible that the cloth itself had in fact wrapped Jesus.

Nevertheless, logic suggests that the Shroud’s actual image could not be of Jesus Christ simply because the necessary glass lens did not exist during his time. The image is more likely to have been created around the 1400s, so the image must be of some other male. Why anyone would do that, of course, is anyone’s guess. But one researcher suggested that the man in question had broken bones in his face. There was also evidence of pooled blood in the hair and forehead, consistent with a crown of thorns.

The mystery remains. I spent 25 years loosely researching the life of Jesus Christ, by talking to people of six or seven different faiths and hearing their culture’s knowledge of Jesus. I learned a great deal, but I had never previously heard of any tie-in to photography. Maybe the mystery of the Shroud will one day be revealed.

Technorati Tags: countwordula, count wordula, photography, jesus christ, leonardo da vinci, dan brown

Chris wrote about phototherapy in his DSLR (digital SLR) blog, about how he de-stresses by taking his camera and going out to a park to shoot a few pics. I suppose part of it is the outdoors part, smell freshing air when you’ve been cooped up in the office at work or even at home. When I lived in Ottawa (Canada’s capital) in early 1982, I used to go out regularly, early on Saturday or Sunday mornings to shoot the sun rising over the two graveyards near by. As it was winter, and Ottawa was nasty cold back then, I’d have to put on 4 or 5 layers of clothes – but you just can’t take pics with mitts or gloves on.

Nevertheless, no matter how much I was shivering, with fingers freezing, at the end of a session, I always felt good afterwards. I particular find that shooting waterfalls, rivers, and trees to be highly relaxing.

The problem for me, though, is that I have a crazy relationship with photography. I’ve always considered myself a writer, but I’d rather have been a photographer. (There’s just somthing so invigorating about communicating with photography.) It just never works out that way for me. I keep buying cameras and keep getting into situations where I either have to sell them, or end up leaving them behind. (I left 3 hard-body nikons/ pentax, 1 olympus digital, and sony digital camcorder behind in Atlanta, Georgia in September 2000. I haven’t been able to recover from here in Canada.)

I think I know why I have this problem with cameras, and it has to do with guilt. I was brought up to seek a “respectable” profession. While I can justify writing as a career via technical writing and project management, photography is always, in my guilty mind, a creative endeavour – something that is frowned up from my cultural background as far as a career goes.

But what I have done in the past to assuage myself of this guilt is to make sure that I nuture the photography bug in other people. In early 1991, I returned to my “home” town from the big smoke (Toronto) to finish my university degree that I’d skipped out on a few years previous. Later that year, I volunteered as a math tutor at my old high school.

Two male students were assigned to me. One ended up in juvie for something he did. The other one spent a bit of time with me. I could tell that he was rather intelligent, but he had trouble with math. When I met him a year ago, 13 years since I’d last seen him, he told me that he had later found out he had attention deficit disorder (ADD). But neither of us knew this back then.

Since traditional tutoring didn’t help, I asked him what he had an interest in. Way back in the 1970s (I think), there was a TV sitcom called WKRP in Cincinnati. If my memory doesn’t fail me, one of the DJs, known as Venus Flytrap, was asked to teach science to a high school kids from low-income families – kids who for obvious reasons didn’t always feel that they could learn. He used the paradigm of gangs and territories to teach them about atoms, electrons, and protons. It’s fiction, of course, but it worked.

Inspired by that, and always looking for an opportunity to teach in that manner (my father is a retired mathematics professor), I asked my young friend what interested him. For him it was photography. Fortunately, I was volunteering at the local university’s student newspaper, both as a writer and photographer. Inspiration struck me, and I took him under my wing as my photo apprentice (I’m the perpetual “amateur professional” photographer).

I taught him math via lens apertures and focal lengths. And it worked. Sort of. He still had the undiscovered ADD issue, but he did do better in class, and enjoyed doing photography work with me besides. I also managed to teach him how to process black and white film and to make prints – the latter being another application of mathematics.

So for me, photography is more than a means of communication. It is a creative outlet, a teaching tool, and a therapeutic device.

Technorati Tags: countwordula, count wordula, photography, teaching aids, phototherapy, art therapy, communication