Sometimes life isn’t fair. There are the real winners, and there are the rest of us who are the real whiners. Or maybe that’s just in terms of money. But when you read about TechCrunch earning $240,000 per month, you’d be bound to have a double take. Hey, that’s more than what most of us earn in a year.

Today, TechCrunch has a full-time staff of eight. This year, it hired a CEO. In August, 1.25 million people visited TechCrunch or its affiliated blogs at least once, according to comScore Inc. It brings in $240,000 per month in advertising, according to Arrington, and pulls in additional revenue from conferences and parties. Most important of all, TechCrunch is in the black.

“When I started the blog, it was just a hobby,” Arrington said. But, after a while, “It was pretty clear that I could make more money blogging than from anything else.”

If I’d founded TechCrunch I’d be laughing myself to the bank right now. Wait, isn’t that what Arrington does? Probably.

I should stress that this is the exception rather than the rule. There are a very few excellent blogs out there that make really big bucks. Then there are those so-so blogs that still make even bigger bucks. A modest number of us in the blogging business make a decent living, but aren’t exactly swimming in cash. Then most bloggers out there can only dream of making a measly buck out of their blogs.

Yes, some blogs are profitable. Stress on some.

Over at some of the blogs we run, we get a lot of pingbacks that say

XXXXXX wrote an interesting post today on YYYYYY. Here’s a quick excerpt …

where

• XXXXXX = a random (or sometimes not so) name or email address, and


• YYYYYY = An excerpt of the original blog post title.

Sure, link to us, post about our interesting posts (today!) and all. But to get tons of trackbacks from our sites (linking to yours), which are obviously MFA blogs (for Made-For-AdSense or Made-For-Insert favorite ad scheme here), is blatant disrespect for the authors of original content.

I advise anyone reading this to add the phrase “wrote an interesting post today on” to your comment moderation list or even blacklist.

Curse those automatic content-scraping scripts!

Here’s yet another microblogging service (if it can be called that, at all). The name is Utterz, and it supposedly mashes up voice, photos, videos, and texts so you can just send in stuff from your mobile phone and it comes out automatically on your Utterz page.

Utterz is the first way you can instantly blog your experiences, thoughts and ideas, anywhere, using all the capabilities of your mobile phone. Utterz mashes together the voice, video, pictures, and text you call or send in and creates an ‘Utter’ that can immediately update your existing web pages on sites like Blogger, Facebook, LiveJournal, MySpace and more.

Utterz supposedly came from utter (which means to speak or say something), but I think it sounds more like udders. I think these guys lived up to their namesake, though. Check out their logo.

Now isn’t that utterly creative?

A post on John Chow’s blog led me to an interesting WordPress plugin with lots of potential, especially for network bloggers and administrators. The Manage Multiple Blogs plugin is supposed to let users manage multiple (external) blogs from a single WP control panel.

Yes now you don’t need to logon to multiple blogs if you want to write a post, edit a post, manage categories and yes manage your comments including approving, disapproving, spamming it, replying to it, threaded reply and more.

I’ve tried several add-ons and software that were supposed to help me become more productive by doing just this. But I still return to my old ways. Somehow I still prefer to login manually onto each WP admin panel and do my stuff from within there. Okay, it’s not fully manual since my browser saves my password for each blog.

Force of habit? Not really.

Thing is, with a ton of tabs open on Firefox, I’m prone to drafting blog posts on the wrong tab and hence, the wrong blog. Several times I’ve almost accidentally hit the Publish button. How worse could this stupid carelessness of mine be when all my blogs are in one basket? That would be very confusing and potentially embarrassing, too.

Still, as I said, this plugin shows a lot of potential. Now I wonder why the folks over at Automattic didn’t think of that in the first place. Over at the hosted WordPress.com site you could control all the blogs your account has access to from a single dashboard. Now why can’t you do that on a full, self-hosted version?

One of the better things I read lately is the new hype to shut down comments on blogs. Comments like spammers shut them down because they don’t want to share link juice? No, better even.

Comments shut down because the blogger considers her/his entries much better than regular content… a bonus for the reader.

If you’re a regular reader of a weblog there is this unspoken pressure that you ought to say something. (Did someone say national de-lurker week?)
But on a site with comments disabled there is no pressure. Once you’ve read the article that’s all. The author requires nothing of the reader but to enjoy the content. There are no awkward expectations. The article is a gift.

What gift if you don’t allow interaction? Even not to tell you what I liked most about an entry?
The bonus because you think that your content is that great, but doesn’t merit, need any feedback. Or the bonus that you’re the all-knowing master of blogging and your voice is THE only way things are supposed to be. Interaction excluded. Interaction not allowed or welcome.

No public criticism allowed, unless you get some external link juice. Sadly at the same time it means you exclude the angry mob bonus from helping you when you have things wrong and someone points this out. But reactions are not allowed. How poor is that?

Pretty poor bonus if you ask me. Wait, what was the bonus actually? Oh yeah… great content. Whatevah. That’s why I have a feed reader. To not see comments, and miss out on the great reactions in comment avalanches.

Long live the era where everyone has something to say on everything. No matter if they make sense or not. Even comment free entries don’t keep me from sleeping. And entries with thousands comments don’t make me ejamaculate either, but I believe in the power of interaction!
And if one day I leave a comment on an entry, it means that I think I can add something to your conversation. The comment is a gift.

One of the things about blogging I never understood is networking. What’s up with every one always networking and losing valuable time building their profiles? Why do people whore themselves out on sites such as Facebook, Linked In and many more?

If I were a blogger, I’m sure I would have other things to do than poke, stump and throw food at other bloggers on Facebook.
Admitted Linked In actually can be useful, but honestly… building profile just takes too much time away from the important things. Activities such as learning how to blog, monetize, leverage new blog launches, improve SEO knowledge (PDF) or leave insightful comments on other blogs. And obviously reading the whole echo chamber collection.

But networking? Honestly, I couldn’t care less. Quality always will come out, sometimes it takes more time than one had hoped, but I’d rather be an unknown blogger with 4 regulars than a$$ kisser.

The only thing I need now, is quality.

I do. And that’s because they make the world look cluttered. Imagine my disgust when, checking out a few favorite personal blogs, I realized all their latest posts were about rhinoplasty, botox, hair transplant, real estate agents in San Diego, liposuction and whatnot. And I hear these people only pay a couple of bucks per post—with the sponsored links of course. Sure, some people put in their paid links in the context of relevant posts. But others do it just plain wrong—the whole post is about the sponsored topic.

Heck, sometimes it feels that their blogs have turned entirely into sponsored blogs.

I don’t want my feed reader to get cluttered with posts about all that junk, so I usually just unsubscribe the first sign of having sponsored posts right on the blog post title. And I don’t have the patience of weeding through pages and pages of sponsored articles until I get to some relevant (i.e., non-sponsored) content. I’m okay with those links appearing discreetly within relevant posts. At least I get to read content with sense.

In my opinion, the purpose of sponsored links, anyway, is for link-building, so as long as the link URL and anchor text are there, the sponsors are happy. I don’t think anybody is still gullible enough these days to mistake those sponsored write-ups for honest to goodness blog posts by the author. We should be way past that.

A sign that a blog is going downhill is if it continually spews out sponsored post after sponsored post, again usually with the sponsored listing eating up the whole post.

Bloggers, consider the tradeoff when writing these posts! Is your credibility worth the couple of bucks per post that they pay you? I don’t think so.

Steve Rubel, power marketer raises a good point in yesterday’s entry, Building an Online Identity Through Lifestreams.

Where I will publish in a year’s time is anyone’s guess. However, what you can bank on is that I will have even more community accounts than I do now.

Right now, just as most other bloggers, the number of online profiles I have reminds me of the early days of domaining. You never have enough of them and any semi interesting, or worse even hyped, platform soon has you as member too.

But what’s the point of all those profiles? Agreed, there’there’s Facebook, where one can add almost everything. Or just stick to a Facebook profile and MySpace-ify the formerly geek cyber space of students.
But does exclusive Facebook networking alone satisfy the blogger or does one have to jump the bandwagon and spend valuable time on every possible network? And how much time does all this cost?

But most of all, where will you blog next year? Will any of those profiles, or services such as tumblr, replace your blog?

I didn’t realize it could be this bad. Suddenly, bloggers are asking their readers to be lazy. No more comments, you say. Just click those cutesy icons at the bottom of my post to say how you feel.

But none of ‘em buttons represent what I feel. All those clickety clicky ClickComments icons have are kiss-ass comments:

• Cool stuff


• Entertaining


• Inspired me


• Write more


• Creative


• Insightful


• Touched my heart


• Great find

If I had my way, ClickComments should have:

• STFU and GBTW (look it up)


• This post sucks!


• You suck!


• You call yourself a writer? This is lame.


• My grandmother writes better than you. And she’s dead!

Okay, enough of this. I just find it real stupid why a supposedly instant feedback mechanism would only give you a choice of positive feedback messages.

Clickcomments eliminates these barriers and provides readers a simple and expressive ways to respond to your posts. Sometimes someone else has already written what a reader wanted to write and didn’t want to write a “yeah, what she said” comment.

What she said, huh? You’re breeding a generation of lazy buggers who think with their mouse buttons.

Since I started blogging many moons ago, one thing that has never failed to amaze me is how blogging communities will fight tooth and claw when getting into arguments. Call it the blogging possé, if you must, because it seems to be that way. And I don’t mean possé in the (generally obsolete) legal sense (meaning law enforcers deputizing the citizenry for law enforcement functions), but rather in the sense of cliques and gangs.

People tend to act like angry mobs when they feel the need to defend their favorite bloggers. Or taken in a less favorable light, bloggers sometimes tend to gang up on other bloggers (oh, the poor, defenseless things). This kind of activity is polarizing and tends to tear communities apart. You’re forced to choose a side. Otherwise, it’s “if you’re not with us, then you’re against us.”

It’s sickening to think how many blog readers have turned out to be “yes” or “me too” people. Most of the time when you read through the comment threads of blogs (more particularly the personal-oriented blogs), majority, if not all, of comments basically say “I agree” or “me too” or “same here.” I don’t think people have the balls anymore to disagree or at least to give other perspectives. What a shame!

And sometimes I think it’s the fault of a blog owner why his or her readers turn out to be this way. Some bloggers I know would delete or sanitize comments that oppose ideas on their blogs. Sure, that’s fair enough. It’s their blog, after all. But what I find really silly is how other comment-posters would gang up on these people with dissenting (but valid) views. Kind of makes you want to avoid these blogs altogether, eh?

The blogosphere exists for people to have a voice and to express themselves. But where there are people—more especially groups of people—there will inevitably be mass stupidity.

Sharpen yer pitchforks and light yer torches, everyone!