It's not that I don't have anything to say. Trust me, that won't happen anytime soon. Rather, it's more a combination of freakishly busy and paranoid that keeps me from weekly blogging.  Busy is not something I can change. But there are way around paranoid... namely, the super secret blog or two.

That's right. Whenever possible, I blog to my heart's content elsewhere. I found that I am all about the open confession / personal journal style of blogging, and that does not lend credibility to one's professional life.

You heard it here last: Uncensored blogging can get you fired, mocked, abandoned, rejected, and more. My thoughts are too straight-from-the-hip. I call a spade a spade, and I don't do so in a trendy i'm really artisticly random sort of way.

In review, I am one of those guys who points out society's ills and demands someone acknowledge the damage that has been done. And if someone should admit the existence of said damage, I would go a step further and demand change. And then I would probably go gorge myself on some toxic Jack in the Box tacos while downing a Dr. Pepper or an iced venti vanilla latte.

It's a confusing life we live, no doubt. And in the middle of it all, a guy like me wants, no NEEDS, to express himself daily in order to keep from exploding. And should I do so in plain view, someone somewhere will hold it against me because my opinions are black and white with little room for grey.

I should wear a sign that reads: CRAVES CONFRONTATION. And once someone has been a real jackass to me in public, I would go to a secret blog somewhere and really spell out all nine ways his jackassery took emotive expression.

So, other than that, I love blogging. Hell, I may write another CF blog tonight. I am Jack's constant paradox.

At first, I could not be bothered, and my friend Dara and I would just roll our eyes with sheer boredom. As she became less and less interested in the class, I became more fixated on blogging and the Internet. I was one of the very few students who updated their blogs more than once a week because I was genuinely interested in what I was writing about (Public Relations and Popular Culture).

As my program was winding down, past graduates and PR professionals were invited to the college for a Professional Development Day, that included seminars on compiling a portfolio, resume writing, a mock job interview and a an open Q&A. the woman leading the Q&A group was Zoe Siskos who works for Social Media Group in Dundas, Ontario.

She is like a social media guru, and her company works alongside many very well known companies, establishing them in the realm of the Internet and becoming more social media savvy. Zoe began talking about how awesome and important social media was in today’s world, and she name-dropped a site called Twitter. “That’s an interesting name for a social media site,” I thought to myself. Zoe explained the concept of it to us and described it as micro-blogging. I took down the website address, and forgot about it for about a month.

When the class ended, so did everyone else’s blogs (with the exception of a few). I decided that since I had grown to love blogging and social media so much, that I was going to continue updating. I also remembered that Zoe mentioned Twitter, so I signed up for an account and was on my way.

Fast forward a few months, I am working full time now. Many of the projects I have been working on, and have been assigned have had a very youth oriented and social media feel. It is now my job and responsibility to create fan pages on Facebook and MySpace, establish a YouTube account, and the biggest, and most important task I am responsible for (and it really is my baby), is the photo blog created to help promote an upcoming event at my work. 

I definitely do not mean this in a harsh way, but many of the people I work with and around, have no idea what is going on in the world of social media, or what it really means. During my job interview, I mentioned my online activity and the Special Events Manager and HR Associate looked at me bewildered and asked me to explain further, what exactly a “Twitter” was. The pair were amazed that I was blogging for a website thousands of kilometres away in Texas, while I sit and write from my home in Ontario. While my co-workers are busy planning the events, I am busy promoting them online.

Sure, I would have been able to do the majority of the things I complete at work without the help of that social media class, but just knowing how to create and maintain projects has really helped. Because of that one small step I made, I find myself more and more interested in learning about social media and dipping my toes into the waters of Web 2.0. There is more to life than Facebook and MySpace, and I kind of like it.

Not only that, but because of Zoe and her passing along of information about Twitter, I would not have met so many great and amazing people from around the world, been able to share and exchange ideas with my new friends, and the most important part, I would not be contributing to Culture Feast.

Note: the following are summarizations, not direct and/or complete quotes.

Why do you need a blog?

Aaron: Transparency is key in today's business world.

Matt Mullenweg asks the room, "how many of you read blogs?" Everyone raises their hand. "How many of you read press releases?" Six. Point made.

John doesn't let his employees contribute to the company blog, even though they go to trade shows and conferences and speak with clients. His reasoning is the permanence of blog posts and the greater risk of human error. A one on one conversation can be handled more easily if erroneous information is given.

Matt: If you can help your customers appreciate your product as much as you do, you're going to build brand, product, and customer loyalty.

Liz: Relationship builds trust. People buy faster when they trust you as opposed to when they don't. They don't have to do additional research to make sure you're telling the truth. 

Mark: I believe that everyone's a blogger. It's not how good you are at blogging, but how passionate you are about the subject you're blogging about. My dad is passionate about alternative medicine. I recommended that he blog about his personal research. He is now going to publish a book next year from his blog. 

Mark: If you find someone (an employee) who's passionate about something in your company, get them to write for your blog.

Liz: You can teach people how to write. You CAN'T teach people how to love your company.

Aaron:  I wrote a post lately about the process I go through when writing a post. Lately, my quality has kicked up a notch. I usually have 5-10 things rolling around in my head... random topics inspired by life. When I finally sit down to write, it's more or less an email. I've already spent time formulating the idea in my head. 

Liz: Zappo Shoe Company sent flowers to a customer who couldn't pay their whole bill because of a family crisis. That customer wrote a blog post about it. If a company cares that much about their client, they must have good shoes. 

Matt: On Writing Well, by William Zinnsser, is a well-written book writing well. 

Liz: The Speed of Trust is a book about how increasing trust improves ROI. 

Aaron: Your customers ARE GOING to have the conversation about your brand, product, or service. The question is: Do you want to participate in the conversation? Do you want to host the conversation? Or would you rather it go on without your involvement?

Matt: Have you read the DreamHost blog? It's crazy. It's actually really, really cool. It sets a tone and culture for the whole company. It shows that they care about the customer but that they're not weak. They had a huge problem recently when they overbilled customers by millions of dollars. That was TERRIBLE, yet they were blogging through the whole thing. 

Matt: Through the whole thing, I really appreciated how human it was. When things go great, they're not talking about you. Companies who have status blogs on external sites do very well when there's a problem. If their hosting goes down or something crashes, they're still blogging from this external blog and maintaining relationship with their customers during crisis. 

Matt: I like to encourage bloggers, as a public service announcement, take time to write the positive posts too. Don't just cover the complaints and negatives of companies and products, but give credit where credit is due. 

Aaron: Basic SEO practices. Use descriptive titles, particularly when blogging about a product or service. Second is to really understand the conversational nature of blogging. Many blogs are strained and forced. It takes away from the authenticity.

Liz: You have to know what it is that you do and make sure other people know as well. Know who is reading. Pay attention to what they're coming to read about and build a relationship with them on their interests. 

Matt: Avoid hyperbole at all costs. All hosting companies claim to be the best at everything. Your customers aren't stupid. Treat your customers with respect. Don't dumb things down for your readers.

Mark: Patience. Practice what you preach.

My Question: What do you think about companies who remove attribution of employee's names on blog posts once those employees leave the company? And what is the employee's incentive for writing on a corporate blog rather than an independent blog when they can lose all credit for their work?

Mark: when you work for the company, you are the company. When you leave the company, your identity that could compromise the company's reputation can be modified to fit the company. 

Aaron: If a company wants to take/keep the attribution, they should. It goes back to "why is the employee writing on the corporate blog?" I neither support nor denounce a company that does it either way. 

Liz: When you work for a publisher and you leave the company, they own it. It's understood. 

Matt: I WOULD feel weird if the company removes the employee's name from the post, though. 

End of Session. Debating whether to stay for the last one. It's about coding.

Chris Smith specializes in local optimization. He contributes to SearchEngineLand.com and WebProNews.com. 

Optimizing Your Blog

Beef up your internal hierarchical linking structure

•   tag clouds and tag pages (ultimate tagwarrior plugin)
•  related posts (contextual related posts plugin) 
•  top 10 posts 
•  next & previous posts

Build inbound links

• add technorati tags to your posts (claim your blog first)
• get onto bloggers' blogrolls
• trackbacks and comments won't help with link gain in most cases

Compelling Illustrations make articles interesting. If you post photos to Flickr and link to your blog as a source of the photo, you can get some traffic and rankings from it. Photos need to be visually engaging.

Hop on a PR Feeding Frenzy

• hop on it early
• say something significant (don't just rehash the same info)
• link over to other top blog posts (Google blog search)
• watch top stories mentioned by Techmeme and comment on them

Note: I know people who have done this and made money strictly from this.

Research Jeff Crilley for tips on gaining publicity. 

Link to your blog from LinkedIn.

Title Tags

• put your blog name at the end of the title tag, not the beginning
• tag name should go in the title on a tag page
• customize with additional keywords for display only on your home page
• override title tags with a custom one (SEO Title Tag plugin) (note: his company, NetConcepts, created this plugin)

URLs

•  Rewrite to contain keywords, using hyphens not underscores
• 301 redirect from yourblog.com to www.yourblog.com (canonicalization)
• maintain legacy URLs even after switching blog platforms

Keyword rich domain names and blog titles are helpful.

Anchor Text

• make the post's title a link to the permalink page
• internally link back to old, relevant posts within the body of a blog post. use keywords for your anchor text

Header Tags (h1, h2)

•  category names on category pages
• yes for post titles, no for post dates

Sticky Posts

• always appear at the top of the page
• adhesive plugin

Add author profile page and author links for group blogs

Add nofollows to trackbacks and comments where you don't vouch for a site.

Ping search engines with each new blog post - pingomatic.com, etc

Optimizing Feeds

• use full text, not summaries
• 20 or more items (not just 10)
• multiple feeds
• keyword rich item
• brand name in the item
• compelling site description

End of session. I need caffeine.

Categories and Tags can coexist. Aaron exclusively uses tags to help new visitors find valuable older content.

Can you have too many tags?  Many tags are more easily picked up by Technorati. It's easier to explore related content with more tags. It's easier to find various formats (podcasts, video, photos, text) with tags. You can't have too many tags.

What is GPL and why is it important to WordPress?

Any code that goes into WordPress has to be GPL. All code can be redistributed as long as it goes with the copyright. 

The very foundation of WordPress is to share code freely. You CAN charge for open source, which is a common misconception. The big money maker for GPL is services, however. Those are people/companies who benefit from the open source community and offer services related to the open source applications.

What do you think about premium WordPress themes?

 The problem I have is when these themes come with riders that say you have to keep the copyright and author info. I have no problem with people who create themes and charge for them.

What are hooks?

Hooks are provided so that plugin authors can modify the behavior of WordPress without changing the code. 

...

Now with WordPress 2.5 you can add photo thumbnails that automatically become individual posts. 

Note: the consensus among the big whigs here is that Tagging is more important than Categorizing. Technorati and many other social bookmarking sites focus on tags, and this is more important than picking a WordPress specific category. In other words, tags are more universal.

My home page is more of a portal, with bulleted lists to a series of important topics. I got very fortunate to get Lisa Saban, who wrote WordPress for Dummies, to design my blog. 

Question:Why doesn't WordPress support iframes, or what are we all doing wrong for posting coveritlive live blogging code to our WordPress blogs?

It's a good question. If you have an iframe you're trying to add to a post. Use the plain editor or use the short code (non-html). 

Question: I've been using categories but haven't been tagging in the past. What should i do about past blog posts?

I'd say go ahead and continue using categories, but go ahead and begin adding tags now. There's a plugin also that converts categories to tags. 

Question: How do you compare tags with a book's Index?

That's an excellent point. Tags are more like a book's Index, whereas the categories function more as the Table of Contents. 

End of session. Lunch.

Next Session: Chris Smith on SEO for Bloggers will begin in one hour.

Matt Mullenweg just showed up to join the panel discussion about WordPress 2.5 and plugin performance. 

Matt: To determine which plugins to use for which versions, be sure to review the ratings and number of downloads on the Plugin Directory and also check the Support Forum.

Matt: On issues of security, the best thing you can do is to keep your WordPress version up to date. 

Discussing the future of WP themes and quality control... look for theme ratings coming soon.

Matt: Truemors, Rolling Stone Magazine, People Magazine, About.com blogs, NASA, Harvard, Flickr and hundreds more sites you wouldn't guess all run on WordPress.

Mark: Apple's students blog runs on WP too.

Question: why do i have to select the wordwrap check box in order to see the html version of the post i'm writing?

Matt: let's take a look at that after the podcast.

Mark: The Sandbox theme is really cool because it tags every post with days, weeks, and months. 

Matt: Sandbox is incredibly detailed, which is its weakness for new users. If you download Movable Type today, it's 4-5 MB. I think we're around 2. I want to see WordPress remain small and easily downloadable. 

Matt: I'd be open to a new stylesheet to the Classic theme. I'm personally fond of Regalus. You can do really deep sites with it. It can work well for a CMS type blog. 

Matt: things I hate about WordPress... I'd like to make the navigation setup easier to modify.When you click on an image popup on the WYSIWYG, you should be able to add captions and creative commons license more easily.

Question: is the Digg Effect too big a problem for WordPress? 

Mark: it's definitely a problem, especially if you're on a shared host and/or you aren't using Super Cache plugin or WP-Cache plugin. 

Matt: i'm in an unusual position because i now know a LOT about traffic on WordPress blogs. The problems with going down due to spikes in traffic are caused by web server configurations. TechCrunch had this issue a year and a half or two ago, and since we modified their web server settings, they've had no problems. 

Mark Ghosh: In my experience, it's 99% of the time a server problem and not the code. If you keep things simple and you don't have really intrusive plugins like the Bad Behavior plugin. Their tables need to be optimized EVERY HOUR on heavily trafficked sites. I would be very careful with some plugins on heavily trafficked sites. I personally don't think that the Digg Effect has anything to do with WordPress code.

Matt: if a host shuts you down due to the Digg Effect, let me know. Their are hosts that are shutting sites down for NOTHING. So let me know. The hosts that we partner with are well configured handle the Digg Effect. I don't know if every hosting company we partner with is 100% optimized to handle this issue, but they WILL be within a few months. 

End of WordPress Podcast session. Break.

Aaron Brazell from B5 Media on WordPress FAQ

More to come.  

Below is where I'm live blogging from WordCamp:

So far, CoveritLive.com has not been functioning properly for me. You can check out my WordCamp updates on Twitter. 

Saturday will focus on general user topics. Sunday's focus will be mostly developer topics. Did I mention it's only $20 to attend?!?!? Coffee, snacks, and lunch will be provided both days. Register now and you'll get a WordCamp t-shirt as well.

Here's the schedule for Dallas WordCamp 2008

Saturday, March 29th

9:30am Registration and Coffee

10am WordPress 2.5 and Beyond - Matt Mullenweg

11am 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog - John Pozadzides

12pm Lunch 

1pm How to Prevent, Detect, & Stop Content Theft - Jonathan Bailey

2pm GeekBrief.tv Discussion - Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell

3pm C'mon, Let's Talk: Building Influence and Interaction with Blogging - Liz Strauss

4pm WordPress Power Tips - Lorelle VanFossen

Sunday, March 30th

9:30am Registration and Coffee

10am The WordPress Podcast Live - Charles Stricklin and friends 

11am SEO for Bloggers - Chris Smith

12pm Lunch

1pm TBA - Aaron Brazell

2pm Panel: The Business of Blogging - Mark Ghosh, Liz Strauss, and Aaron Brazell

3pm Testing with WordPress - Jacob Santos 

Brian Clark shared another valuable post on strategic content development from his Innovative Content series recently. This is stuff that every aspiring blogger should read and every established blogger should revisit. Because regardless of our background and experience, it's easy to get busy and lazy and let the content of your blogging suffer. And let's face it, everyone loses when your blogging suffers. 

Rather than plagiarize Brian's content, go read the post for yourself. When you are taking on a new blogging project, it's good to begin by asking yourselves the right kind of questions. It can be difficult to break out of the generic mental vomitting style of MySpace, but just asking yourself these questions and following these three steps will prepare you to write a more informed, adult sounding piece. 

Always make sure you have fun with blogging, but part of the fun lies in doing something well. Nobody would pay Kobe Bryant if his shots were all air balls.  

You see, I'm the type of guy who buys a domain name and feels compelled to host it with blog software as soon as possible. Some of these domains I thought I would sell, and eventually I will. But in the meantime, I have put this huge burden on my shoulders to maintain too many blogs on too many topics. Despite what my parents think, I simply do not have that much to say on a daily basis.  

So how do like me find a way to overcome overwhelmingly random interests? Pick three domains to be blogs. Make one your personal blog. You can take full credit for this personal blog if you want, or you can keep it anonymous. Use this blog to vomit all your randomness into. Who knows? Maybe you'll build a following over time. Beyond your personal blog, pick two topics max and dedicate yourself to covering them. Give yourself a full year of blogging on these three topics before adding another, and add only one new blog per year IF ANY. 

This may seem like it will take forever to establish yourself online, but you'll do far better than I started out if you limit the number of blogs you own and operate. It's okay to cover every topic under the sun as long as you isolate that blog from your niche blogs. There's really no reason to own and operate 7-11 blogs unless you miraculously build a staff of bloggers to do the heavy lifting for you. 

You'll do well to learn how to moderate yourself from the beginning. You'll save yourself a lot of stress and frustration if you do. Best of luck, and happy blogging! 

After a profoundly enjoyable evening with a local writer's group, I walked away with a newfound sense of appreciation for artists. I am an artist, though you couldn't tell by my daily production. Duty calls for marketing messages that compel readers to act. But at my center, I am a poet and creative writer. 

And while the tips from Copyblogger, Problogger and dozens of blogging, branding, and marketing experts are invaluable for corporate blogs, the same principles are stifling and unnatural for many strictly creative types. I call all creative types "artists", because anything creative can be art: words, paint, dance, sculpture, song, design, etc. 

I've spent the lion's share of this site's existence on marketing principles recommended by the experts. The danger there is missing the forest for the trees. CultureFeast will be two years old in November. Prior to this, the only writing I showed anyone outside the office was poetry, prose, or journal entries that I felt were worth sharing. 

You have to be careful not to suffocate your art with marketing. It happens all the time. You have something worth sharing, but in order to get the public's attention, you have to walk a fine line balancing marketing and artistic sincerity. 

My advice: read the tips and study effective marketing strategies, but realize that they must not overtake the art. Balance. It's not a fun word. It's not a sexy word. Balance is not a popular concept, because it's one of those responsibilities people don't want to take the time to mess with.

Be true to your art. Look for ways to hone your craft that can make it more successful without losing power. Whether you post words, photos, or video, there are sure-fire ways to improve your presentation without sacrificing content. There are also plenty of opportunities to focus on results rather than the message.

There are enough self-improvement gurus already. Guard your art with your life! If you don't, you'll discover that the purpose of your art has declined from the pleasure of creation to that of recognition. Recognition is wonderful, but it's fickle and fleeting. The first and foremost active ingredient in successful artistry is quality product. Preserve quality at all cost.  

I had the opportunity to interview her at length, so enjoy!  

Daniel Dessinger: First off, thanks for agreeing to take the time to talk with me. I know you're busy with your columns, a new book, and speaking engagements. I recently read on Wendy Piersall's blog, emomsathome.com, that you just spoke at the BlogHer Conference in Chicago just a few days ago. You spoke with Stephanie Cockerl and Nina Burokas about personal branding, correct? What were the top three takeaways from that session?

Penelope Trunk: I am not sure what people actually took away from the session, since there was subsequent online hoop-la. But here are three things to think about when you want to create a brand out of yourself:
1. What do you stand for?
2. What do you not stand for?
3. What do you give people that is unique to you?

Daniel: Is this your first time at BlogHer? Can you describe the atmosphere of the conference and tell us how it differs from other conferences you attend?

Penelope: Well, I can compare this recent BlogHer to BlogHer Business -- I went to that. And, not surprisingly, it was much more business oriented. I went toSXSW earlier this year, which is also full of bloggers. SXSW had a lot more men.

Daniel: Based on Wendy's comments, I'm picturing a collection of professional work-from-home women who have the conversational floodgates burst open for this three day event. Is that a fair description? Um. I don't know very many of the work-from-home bloggers and I didn't talk with many when I was at BlogHer, so I'm not really sure about the answer to your question. I do know Wendy. I have come across her blog before because she has such a successful business.

Daniel: Changing subjects, I've kept with your Brazen Careerist blog for a little while now. My coworker is infatuated with you and, sadly, he is passively wishing you were single. I guess you've found a professional way to turn on the charm!

Penelope: Not a question, right? But tell your co-worker thanks

Daniel: Your tagline is: Advice at the intersection of work and life. How would you say you've done at balancing "work and life?"

Penelope: I don't believe in balance because it implies that the two things are competing. I try to create a life where things are working together, and I feel whole and integrated. That said, I'd have to say I'm not doing the greatest job. It's very hard to do. One of the reasons I blog is to be with a community of people who are trying to improve things at the intersection of work and life and we're all doing it together.

Daniel: The reason I ask is because, for all your interesting perspectives on work culture and Generation Y, you manage to throw everyone off with a few posts on your marriage and the difficulties that arise in your personal life. Do you ever regret exposing your issues to the world? Does the transparency adversely or positively affect your life at home?

Penelope: I never regret talking about myself in an authentic way. I don't really know another way to connect with people. I'm sure that one of the things that my husband likes about me is that I'm authentic, no matter what. He is that way, too. So doing it on the blog seems inevitable. 

Daniel: One more personal question I have to ask: How does your husband feel about having your marriage issues made public knowledge? This is a tender subject for me, since I guard my relationship with my wife very closely. I don't pretend that we don't have our problems, because we have plenty. But until something is dealt with, I feel that to expose her faults to anyone other than a trusted adviser is disrespectful.

Since I'm willing to accept that everyone can and does feel differently about how to approach these types of issues, I'd just like to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Penelope: Newsflash: Your wife talks about your sex life with her friends. Every woman does. Men have a skewed idea of how private their marriage is because men don't talk about marriage with men. How do you think women learn to give blow jobs? Not from men.

That said, my husband doesn't care about what I write. I know it's hard to imagine. But try to imagine being married to me at all. A handful, right? In that sense, blogging about the marriage is nothing.

Daniel: My instinct is to apologize for mentioning your personal life, but I remind myself that you intentionally made it public, so you must expect to be asked about it.

Daniel: I read a bio about you somewhere, and it mentioned how you went from professional volleyball player to writer. Could you tell us, briefly, what it was that opened the door for you to transition into being a writer? If you could, highlight a few key circumstances that you might call open doors or an unexpected turn of events in your favor.

Penelope: I think the most important thing was that when I was playing volleyball, I was great at getting sponsors to pay to put their name across my chest. So I inadvertently discovered that I was really good at marketing. I have used that knowledge each time I changed careers. I've said to myself, how can I leverage the marketing talent to make a smooth transition?

Daniel: You have a book out there for sale entitled: The Brazen Careerist:The New Rules for Success. I've read that another book is in the works. Can you give us a hint as to the title or subject matter of this one?

Penelope: No.

Daniel: When can we expect release? 

Penelope: 2008

Daniel: While the feedback on your blog is mostly positive, I've read some overwhelmingly negative feedback from readers of your article at Yahoo Finance. Did you make some enemies early on, or what? I get the automatic feeling that you're rocking the boat too much for comfort in some reader's minds.

Penelope: Yeah, I think you're right.

Daniel: Do you think the feedback on Yahoo Finance is just the natural result of a wider audience, or is it the specific readership demographic that seems to be a bit more old fashioned and stuck inside-the-box?

Penelope: Both. I think when you get a wider audience you inevitably get more people who are not thinking along the same lines you are. It happens with everyone, I'm sure.

Daniel: You mentioned to me recently that you're already living my fantasy of blogging and writing for a living, and that this isn't the end of the line for you. Given the ability to choose, what is the next step in your career? Beyond that, what do you envision yourself doing in five years?

Penelope: I am actually in the middle of figuring that out right now. I'm thinking it's getting time for a next step. Stay tuned....

Daniel: Does being a woman help to propel you in your career? I ask this because my wife is very attractive and intelligent and doors just open for her that wouldn't budge for me. I think you're the total package if you can pull off the intelligent, witty, fashionable, attractive, and confident woman image. I'm not calling women eye candy, but it seems that these days, the world (beyond redneck borders) opens its doors to attractive and intelligent women. Thoughts?

Penelope: I think men like to do business with women they would like to have sex with. It seems totally normal. The same is true in reverse. This is why good-looking men and women earn more money than ugly men and women.

Daniel: I often wonder if our (yours and mine) motivations aren't opposite.While we both blog for personal branding purposes, my motive in blogging and writing is self-expression. The writing is the joy... The proverbial cake,if you will. Positive feedback is the icing. Would you say that writing is a means to an end, or the end itself in your career?

Penelope: Are you asking if I get joy from writing? The answer is yes. I could never write five posts a week if I didn't truly love to write. In fact, I've written in lots of different formats, and there is nothing I have loved more than blogging.

Daniel: With millions of blogs out there in the space, what are the top 3 recommendations you can make to someone who wants to build a readership for one reason or another but has no additional claim to fame such as writing for the Boston Globe or Yahoo Finance or publishing a book? Without those tools in their belts, what can bloggers do to establish a name for themselves?

Penelope: Write regularly, write on a focused topic, and write great posts.

Daniel: Can you predict 3 of the most radical shifts we have yet to see but can expect in the workplace as Generation Y takes center stage?

Penelope: Decentralized leadership, unapologetic focus on family, and financial downshifting

Daniel: What common beliefs does the average Joe or Jane need to revise in order to break through the "average career" barrier?

Penelope: To get a special career you need to specialize. People get nervous specializing because it narrows the types of jobs you can take. But being an expert instead of a generalist actually makes you more employable as long as you shift your expertise as the markets shift.

Daniel: Any parting words of wisdom to the less Web savvy readers out there?

Penelope: Blogs do not require you to be web savvy. If you start reading them without worrying about whether you undertand them, you will start to understand them. Click a lot.  

Thanks for taking the time to respond, Penelope.

I reprimanded myself this evening when I realized that I no longer enjoyed blogging. I contribute to four blogs and one article column, and I am sick and tired of fitting into the mold of SEO / copywriter / PR consultant. Each of those jobs can be rewarding to the right person, but that person is not me... at least, not right now.

Yes, I will continue to offer those services to those in need. But there's more to me than marketing. Way before I knew anything about marketing, I wanted to write books. I wanted to tell stories and I wanted to share life experiences. Ideally, I would find a market in young, curious adults who have more questions than answers. No, I don't pretend to offer all the solutions to life's problems, but perhaps I could share some wisdom that would make other people's lives easier and less confusing.

The problem with writing from the heart is that people read what you write. It's much like journaling, only without the privacy. That means that in the midst of my professional pursuits, those snoopy clients, employers, etc. may very well track me down online and read these words and reconsider working with me based on my publicized opinions and views.

Hence the spineless underpinnings of the blogosphere. Those intensely popular and utterly shallow industry blogs. Okay, I'm being a bit harsh, but only because I have no respect for an industry that promotes lives without political, ethical, spiritual, or moral beliefs. Everyone is so nice, they have no personality. We're all a bunch of identity-less bloggers who have sold out to become well known.

Well, you can have it. I'd rather be uncommon. I'd rather be true to myself than to make millions as the how-to guy.

Whether you're interested in advertising or not, here's the skinny:

Traffic is way up. The site saw 3,766 visitors and 5,505 page views in the past 18 days (April 13th to April 30th). May 1st saw 245 visitors in one day. That's small beans to megastars like Copyblogger and Problogger, but it's good news for us.

Posting has been slow lately, due to busy schedules. I'm even more amazed at our traffic since we're currently getting more new content daily from Papaya Clothing Company fans' comments than actual blog posts.

I have a list of topics to cover in the near future, so keep checkin' in and drop us a note whenever you can.

Oh, and I want to recognize Sarah Kuglin. She's been a friend for ten years, and she's one of the first to create a MyBlogLog account. The rest of you need to get off your duffs and setup your profiles. Since most of my friends are technology illiterate, one of my next posts may be a list of communities and websites everyone should join.... Yeah... that's a good idea.

This is surprising? Seriously? I mean, I'm no teenager, but this is still common knowledge. Walsh is showing that despite his finger on the pulse of the professional blogging community, he really has no clue about who is leading the future of technology. The question is ultimately, "what sells?" The answer is based on teenagers. Teenagers are the top consumers in today's absent-parent culture.

What good does it do to be a professional blogger if you have to go to a conference to learn that teenagers use MySpace? It is the most popular site for teenagers without exception. It is their homepage, their email, their blog, their calendar, their photo book, their chat room, their forum, their mp3 player, their games system, their video player...

Joke all you want about MySpace being for kids. I know plenty of adults who are too proud to join because of their misguided judgments. Not that everyone should join MySpace. No way. I can barely stand it due to the inappropriate advertising by True.com. I've already canceled my MySpace account once, only to return despite the advertising because it's still simply the best way to connect with other people. I don't care what purposeweb says, Facebook is not the future of social media and could never be unless it receives a total faceLIFT.

Sure, the older you are, the less you may find a reason to use MySpace. I can give you that without laughing at you. Something about being young gives you endless amounts of things to say and the burning desire to communicate all of them with the world. There's just something appealing to teenagers about having 300+ friends (most of whom you cannot possibly communicate with and still have time to sleep) whom you can flaunt like popularity badges.

I get it. A reasonable adult may look at MySpace and think, this is a waste of my time. I can respect that. Were I not addicted to my own computer and Internet access, I would wholeheartedly agree. There are plenty of things to do with your life that do not revolve around MySpace. If you are content living apart from MySpace, however, I will ask one special resquest of you: don't show your age by talking about it.