It seems there are three motivations for information exchange in the niche of blogging media:

1. Entertainment
2. Planning
3. To Generate More Information

Blogs serve the purpose of entertaining, this includes all the jokes and humor, updates about the next gadget, horror stories about failed companies, gossip, or even just news about local events. This is information that we consume for our own sake. It doesn’t get past a few conversations or an internal emotional response.

Blogs serve the purpose of informing so that people can plan. This includes product releases, events and announcements, technology reviews, etc. Information that people use to get things done. About how to plan a vacation, a day, a career, an education, a business.

Blogs serve the purpose of generating moreblogs. Weird. Blogging serves bloggers, as well as other media outlets. Blogging is viral and information is consumed for the purpose of regurgitation, editorials, or adding facts. Posts beget posts. Information generates more information.

You need information; news, entertainment, research, or something else. Traditional media has become more corporatized and influenced by advertising dollars and politics. The web is following suit with major players bubbling to the top, advertisers directing content, and search empires telling us where to go. Blogs have been touted as the grassroots solution for free and unfiltered information. Is it true?

Unfortunately, I don’t think blogs are as grassroots as we think. The blogosphere is not set up to be egalitarian, it is set up for competition. The blogosphere is a competitive landscape between publishers, viewers, and advertisers. These elements are common with traditional media; media many consider corrupted. And it’s these common elements that will lead to the corruption of the blogosphere. And it’s already begun.

A few of the problems:

• Blog searches use voting systems of pingbacks just like PageRank. These systems cause certain sites to bubble to the top and stay there.
• Pay per post services. These services pay people to write content and to link to other pages.
• Advertisers paying for product reviews. Self explanatory.
• Advertisers driving content, indirectly. Write the correct content, key words and key phrases and you’ll get popular ads on your sites.
• Search Engine Marketing. Again, write the correct key words and key phrases and you’ll get better search engine placement.
• Advertising networks that have sprung up to join blogs under a single banner.

Hi everyone, happy new year! Well, this will be the first post of many about a new venture that I’m putting together. The focus of the offering (no, I’m not going to announce it yet) is optimized online advertising. Today, Google and other behemoths have made their money by operating ad networks that optimize advertising. Advertising is the primary monetization method of the web. Online advertising is a rapidly growing market. There are opportunities to be found here.

The better the advertisement optimization the better for everyone. Advertisers get a better bang for their buck. Publishers see higher revenue streams. And the advertising network sees greater click-through revenues.

This new venture I’m working on focuses on that segment, advertising optimization… but in a new and unique way. Yeah, just like everything else, I know. Today advertising is optimized by contextual placement, pattern recognition, social activity, and recommender systems.

Well, I think I have a new way to optimize advertisements that compliments existing methods. Today the team, technology, and financing is coming together to execute it.

Stay tuned, this is the CEO’s blog and I’ll be keeping you informed about the goings one here.

I just started a grassroots political activism web site at http://www.ownpolitics.org that I am trying to get out there. It’s a non profit group and it has a different twist. Not only is it about demanding change from the government like every other group. But it’s also about humanizing all those statistics we read.

It’s about taking all those tragedies that are summed up in a simple number, making them personal, and sending those stories in mass by fax, email, or any other way to government, activist groups, corporate execs, celebs, and anyone else of influence. It’s not that “18,000 die every year from lack of health insurance” it’s about the 18,000+ stories of family members and friends and the *real people* behind that cold, simple number.
 
Here’s a paragraph that sums it up: “Josef Stalin had a quote, “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” This seems to sum up politics today: 47 million people are uninsured 1, 10 million children are uninsured2, there are 18,000 deaths a year from lack of health insurance3, and on, and on. Ownpolitics.org is a place to make the statistics human, to bring awareness to the tragedies, and to demand change.”
 
Please take a look, the web site is at http://www.ownpolitics.org. Please help us make a difference! I hope you find the concept interesting and you sign a petition and find ways to get involved; it’s all pretty to do. If you have any questions or feedback, please get in touch.

As you may or may not know, this year I left my position with Spectre Gaming to pursue new ventures. During that time, my significant other, Moniece, and I have been working on a socially conscious project called The Human Known Project. The goal of our efforts is to create a place that is open to the world to share, read, and connect over real-life human stories and experiences. We are building a resource and infrastructure to advance personal knowledge, education, research, the humanities, and communities.

We have a lot of work to do yet, but some people have found the site already even though it’s not officially been publicized. Here’s a few very interesting stories that you should read:

• An Entire Year Alone – This year alone is unique.  It is our first deployment of the Iraq war, having spent the first three years of the conflict in Recruiting.  Before that, the war didn’t exist and there were no fears of separations besides the short term schooling he was to attend.  Our world shifted slightly when the war started…
• The San Diego Firestorm, Staying Behind to Protect Home and Community – On Sunday we first saw… and smelled smoke. It’s O.K. to see smoke, but when you smell it in the wind driven conditions… it is coming at you. On went the TV… and the monitoring began…
• The Heirloom Duck Lamp – While I was growing up, everywhere we moved we had this lamp, my parents had received it as a wedding present. A carved wooden duck as the base, an oval lampshade, and three metal-and-wood cattails “growing” up from the base and visible above the top of the lampshade. If we ran or stomped past the lamp, sometimes the cattails would rattle against the metal parts concealed by the shade. When Mom and Dad got divorced, they both loved that lamp, so they found a solution…

Thank you to everyone that’s been helping with the project and everyone that has come across our site and shared an experience. This resource is about all of us, including you. Please contribute to the effort and make yourself known at The Human Known Project.