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Bloggers who made it
“Bloggers who made it” was inspirational for people considering starting up blogs or quitting their jobs to focus full-time on their Web sites or blogs.
Celebrity baby blog writer-founder Danielle Friedland spoke about how she got the idea for her site while watching the Golden Globe awards in 2004. She noticed a lot of celebrities were having babies, and her husband suggested she write about it. But nobody cares, she said. Well, she was wrong.
The panelists included Ken Fisher from Ars Technica, who said he has about seven full-time staffers now, including a physicist. It’s important to him, he said, to really know what they are talking about when writing about technology.
There’s also Manish Bhatia with Left Lane News, who said he started blogging in 1996, which may make him one of the first bloggers.
Then there’s Jill Fehrenbacher, who runs Inhabitat.com, a design blog.
She used to work at a marketing company, designing banner ads for credit card companies, when she decided to simultaneously go to architecture school and start a blog. She ditched school and kept the blog.
They all had interesting things to say about what it takes to go from hobby to business. Friedland said she not only quit her job a couple of years ago, but her husband quit his job. “Being able to put him on an allowance is pretty cool.”
Fehrenbacher’s take on journalists vs. bloggers: “What makes blogs interesting and different is they have perspective. It’s not people with journalistic training. That is a benefit to us.”
Bhatia commented that at the Consumer Electronics Show, bloggers had different badges than journalists. He didn’t know which to take, so he grabbed both.
But they all agreed that more than anything, it takes passion. You can’t go into blogging thinking you’ll strike it rich, Friedland said. You have to really care about, well, in her case, celebrities making babies.
Bhatia said he almost gave up in 2001 and went to graduate school. What stopped him? Google’s AdSense came along and gave him a much-needed revenue boost.
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