News you can use from the online news business:
Seal Beach Daily – Take two former reporters, add Web design and blogging skills and you’ve got the Seal Beach Daily, a virtual daily newspapers covering the neighborhoods in and around Seal Beach, a beach town that straddles the border of Orange and Los Angeles counties. The site is one of the latest examples of community microblogging – a new fangled word for the old fashioned community journalism you used to find in the metro section of daily newspapers or the neighborhood papers you could pick up in the grocery store or gym. The Seal Beach Daily is the work of author and former newspaper reporter and editor Donna Wares and partner Kate Cohen a long-time graphic designer and Web maven. Wares and Cohen are also the brains behind CaliforniaAuthors.com, “News and notes from America’s biggest book market.”
The power of blogging with a long term view – Blogging is not a get rich quick proposition. It’s a long, slow slog. At least that’s Duncan Riley’s take on the revenue-generating prospects of blogging, in a guest post he wrote on ProBlogger.com. Riley, founder and editor of The Inquisitr, basically a news & culture Website, writes:
Take it as a given up front that you will not get rich overnight from blogging. But how long does it take? I’ve always subscribed to the view that any blog needs a good 6-9 months to establish itself based on my experience in previous blogs and blog networks. The Inquisitr ended up being true to form, and it was our 7 month that things really took off in terms of traffic and actually making a profit. Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo and the founder of the Weblogs Inc blog network though thinks its longer, and commented recently that he puts the number at 2 years. The semantics may be a case of how “established” you would term a blog to be. I’m not about to spend Christmas on the Caymans from The Inquisitr, but in 2 years time…well, you never know that.
My own experience with this blog bears this out. Daily traffic to this blog doubled when I hit the 9 month mark in September and has doubled again since then. What’s most interesting to me, though, is how many posts visitors to WordCount read – on any given day it’s between 35 to 45. That means approximately 20 percent of the content on the site is being looked at every day. Some of my most popular posts are months old – definitely a long-tail phenomenon.
[...] all about community – covering it and working with it. Examples of this already abound, such as the Seal Beach Daily community microblog and the [...]