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Thursday, October 9, 2008

To be a blogger!

According to a recent Slate.com article last week, there are various amounts of income a blogger can make.

Bloggers, such as LOLcat Empire, Perez Hilton, Jason Kottke, can rake in over $5,000 a month, leading the blogger's average income to be around $75,000.

The more hits a blog receives, the more it’s wanted for advertising purposes. In return, companies, such as Amazon.com and Google, hope to receive “clicks” on their ads and are willing to pay for advertisements on highly trafficked blogs.

Apparently, if you’re a good blogger, you can make a decent salary because of the number of visitors that look or read your blog. Furthermore, I had no idea some bloggers had made more than $200,000. The most significant conclusion I derive from this article is how blogs have impacted the Web’s readers.

I’m skeptical of blogs. My experience with blogs has been that they are mostly opinion based, and they appear to be more editorial, if anything else. The only difference, for me, between an editorial and a blog is that the reader can comment on a blog. If I want to read news, I’ll go to a news source. If I want commentary, I’ll read a blog.

Also, it’s become more difficult to conduct research on the Web. Search aggregators bring up blogs with the topic I’m looking for, and I don’t want a blog. Instead, I’m beginning to search the Simpson library’s databases to research, but I can only access those sources if I’m logged onto a network computer. If I weren’t a student, I’d have to pay for the databases. In order to make users pay more to use the Internet, will users eventually be forced to pay for credible information and be left with social, biased commentary?

On a side note, is there a blogging school where I can apply?  

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