Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I heard about someone (I won’t name) who tries to make money from blogging. Therefore he uses a completely different approach than just to start writing about somthing he cares much about or is very familliar with. No, its just a bunch of different blogs, specialised to certain up-to-date themes that you don’t necessary need to know much about, but that hit the vibe.

The idea in this is to place blogs on the web that satisfy a certain niche, that may get big soon, or are underrepresented in the web. Just pick a nice, suiting theme for a blogging-system of your choice and put some general pages up … get your info from WikiPedia, Google and other blogs. Get yourself some specific feeds on the topic. Keep posting news from the sector or random thoughts you come across in that topic. Crosslink the blogs and use the multitudes of web-directories for all blogs that you set up. Use a Twitter-Plugin and a follower-unfollow-script to gain followers. Watch the stats. The higher the stats, the more effort is to be put into the blog. Try to get advertisment for good blogs or use services like Trigami or AdSense to generate money.

Don’t be fooled: Using this method, you sure can make money on the web through blogging, BUT its a full time job and it will take a couple of months or maybe even years to get something out of it. If I could write good content in a well-written manner with a speed of 10 posts in two hours I’d for sure be a money-blogger … but I can’t. And I don’t think its the golden money source, as you’d need a lot of time to build up PageRank, reputation and readers using this method - especially if you’re not really apt with the topic you’re writing about.

Personally, I don’t gain much from watching such a blog and it won’t land in my feedreader. The Admarkets is flooded anyways, and I wouldn’t advise anyone to go down this route. If you really want to make a blog, then for chrissakes write about something you care about or just write about yourself and your experiences.

And one final note: Too many people on Twitter and in different blogs scream into the world how to make money with blogs and “online-marketing” - as too many computerkids out there dream about money from doing basically nothing - and I hate it. Its only blogged about to draw pageviews onto their sites, and as you’re reading this, you also might be a victim of the blogging-to-money-lie. Good content surely don’t come from nowhere. You need to be a very good writer to do this. And even if you have good content and if you can keep up the good work for a very long time that it will take for your word to spread, can you be sure that you’ll love to do it for a living? Can you be sure that its enough money compared to a random job? Do you feel challenged by this?

A second final note: Yes everyone can open blogs this way. We’ve got a lot of good CMS that make it possible. Don’t you think the commercial market will die out even more with even more people doing this sort of “work”? Did you hear about AdBlock Plus? Roughly half of your visitors won’t even see your ads.

A third, but final note: I got a lot of feeds from people who really blog good stuff. I love good blogs and good content, and I really think this is worth good money. But I also believe that this money isn’t earned because it was the purpose of this blog to make money but because the writer is just talented or has a lot to talk about. So please give up on the “get-rich-blogging-lie”. Thanks for listening.

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Its long till you heard from me as I was finishing on my Diploma till now. I finally did it. Well, spelling correction and some reader response still needs to be incorporated, but after all its just finished.

It about an online-rich-text-editor with support for RDFa (as lately support was announced by Google for RDFa, it should be pretty interesting for some out there). This means that I took WYMeditor, put it into a blogging platform, connected it with Freebase, added some RDF-Parsing and there you go with annotating your HTML sourcecode with semantic RDFa-markup.

You can add resources from Freebase without knowing anything about RDF, RDFa or Ontologies, you can use some static concepts like the Google review-stuff and some FOAF-concepts and you can even generate RDF-triples, that means semantic statments that machines can interpret. I mainly focussed on usability as I imaginged that most of the worlds documents don’t get created by too technical-adept people but others who’s knowlegde focusses on another area - and who use rich-text-editors to place content online.

I also had a pretty good idea for a sematic twitter service that could revolutionize the semantic web - but as I really need some experience in the free enterprise world, I can’t really start a startup now … or can I? Well, there are more buisiness ideas in my head, so maybe someone else should do the sematic twitter stuff. Well, I’ll maybe just put it online after its approved, we’ll see.

But what now? Another three year of science? No, after all, I need a job now. As I’d like to stay in Oldenburg (Germany, near Bremen), I need something in about half an hour range from here. I like web-technology, am into Java because its the “educational standard language”, but would really like to get to know some more. I worked with Struts2, JavaScript, jQuery, XML, JSON, AJAX, PHP, RDF, OWL, HTML, CSS, SVN, … I’m interested in iPhone-Applications, Social Media, Scrum Project-Management, Usability Engineering, Semantic Web (+more stuff) and would love to find a job to learn more and do something producive with my skills.

Some big companies still don’t want new people as the financial crisis makes bureocrats feel more important now, and some just don’t think they should get to know you if you didn’t send a copy of your diploma with the letter of application - and they don’t really read the letter, as I clearly say that I need to wait about two more month till I get it.

Well, its not that I don’t know what to do and learn in my free time. But where shall I begin? Learning .NET and Visual Studio? Delving into Flash or Silverlight? Try to make an iPhone App (got some useful ideas for that)? Work on business ideas? Finish reading the latest Design Patterns- or Scrum-book? Try out Hibernate? Blog some more? Many questions, no answers. Perhaps I’ll just write my next dozen of application-letters. After all I’ll need some money to buy a nice server machine ;-)