onfocus

I got hired (by http://mediamatters.org )thanks to my blog. The person I submitted my resume to was a reader of my blog, so he already knew a lot about me. They had an idea of what I knew and what I could contribute already, essentially it seems they just wanted to meet me in person before offering me the job to confirm that a) I was real and b) that I wasn't an a-hole.

Oliver: How did you convince him of b?

Actually Paul, I would prefer to learn about people who became indecently, oops, intensely, oops, indolently, oops, independently wealthy via their blogs. (Spellcheckers.) Who wants to work for anyone?

Hope

Hope, you may be imagining the circa 2002 3-part business model for weblogs: 1.) start a weblog. 2.) ??? 3.) Profit! It's now 2005 and no one has figured out step 2 yet. Even when you're self-employed you're working for someone. Even if you write for a living, you're working with editors, and for an audience. I haven't figured out how to earn money in a vacuum, anyway, and that's why weblogs work for connecting with people.

I dunno, I'm watching Glenn Fleischman on stage at this conference right now, and he does ok with his independent blogging. And I guess Matt does okay. But essentially, yeah, most people can't pull that off.

Hi, Paul. Yep, I read a few months that even Wonkette makes only around $20,000 a year from her blog. Andrew Sullivan probably is in that range.

Remember all the news sites? They were going to bring down the media colossi and in the end scrambled to survive long enough to be acquired but couldn???t even manage that in most case.

Reading in general is declining. I recently got multipage begging letters from the print magazines The New Republic and Commentary asking for my financial support. Subscribing isn???t good enough anymore.

Web logs certainly do require a lot of care and feeding. I have only about 15 readers and maintaining that tiny readership takes all night.

It will be interesting to see who writes the first hardback bestseller based on material straight from a blog.

Who is Matt?

Hope

Matt = http://a.wholelottanothing.org/

I've gotten a few design/programming gigs as a result of blogging. More importantly, I've been contacted by a few long-long relatives, old friends, and a few musicians whose work I admire, all because google brought them to my site (based on hitting text in my blog). So, some definate good has come from it.

I wouldn't say my blog "got" me my current job but since I put the URL on my resume, my employers read it and when I was being interviewed, they commented favourably on it. I think it helped them get to know me a bit before and after the actual "interview".

About my current job: the person who hired me runs a weblog, so the job offer was a blog post on which I was one of the commenters replying to the offer. It just happens that the job offer specified "experience with blogging is a strong plus".
Then later, when I was desperately searching for a place to live in Paris, I got pointed to a flat sharing proposal on a blog, and commented there, and since then I'm living with this flatmate.

So I got hired by a blogger and share a flat with a blogger.

I wasn't hired because of my blog, but my work in blogging (and knowledge of several blogging systems) absolutely helped me have the skillset to get hired.