I have been wondering about your following page / blogroll lately. I looked into Colin Walker's plugin, but really did not want to rewrite all my links.

I have also been looking into archive page templates and assume that just as an archive can be incorporated into a widget or within a template, you have done the same thing with your 'blogroll', therefore when you add somebody new (seemingly weekly, if not daily) then your page automatically updates?

Maybe the idea of a 'long run' is a better way of appreciating big B blogging?

I like the way that MN does inline annotations within his comments section. I don't often see this, but it's relatively well done, and certainly manually at that.

What about the lurkers?

Earning Dollars From Content Writing Content Writing Takes a Special Set of Skills   A growing number of entrepreneurs hope to make money with Web sites. But these sites need content, which is where freelance content writers come in. Writers who scour the Web will discover a host of sites covering everything from retro martini glasses to high-tech window tinting. These sites all have one thing in common: They constantly need fresh content to boost their rankings among search engines.

Without this content, these sites won't claim visitors. And without visitors, the owners of these sites won't get any of the ad revenue they crave.

That's why so many Web site owners are hiring freelance writers today. They need professionals to fill their Web sites with content.

This is an opportunity for freelance essay writers. But it's also an area of writing that writers should approach cautiously: Content writers who aren't careful may end up spending long hours writing tedious stories for little money.

The Content Writing Business Content-writing jobs aren't always the most fulfilling. Writers may be called upon to write a package of five 350-word stories on food compressors or juicers. They may be hired to write 10 articles on golf laser rangefinders.

The good news for writers is that they can complete these assignments without having to conduct interviews or do much research. The bad news is that the people hiring content writers often want to pay them notoriously low wages.

Freelance writers who visit job-bidding sites may be surprised to find Web site owners hoping to pay writers $1 for every 400-word story they can churn out. This kind of work can quickly wear writers out.

Good Content Writing Jobs are Available This doesn't mean that writers can't earn solid extra money by writing content stories. In fact, there are plenty of good content-writing opportunities to be found. Writers just have to exercise the same caution they'd show when applying for any type of freelance-writing job.

The key to making decent money as a content writer is for freelancers to only accept assignments on topics about which they already know. This allows writers to hash out a story quickly. In content writing, the more writers can write, and the faster in which they can do it, the more dollars they'll earn.

It's also important to set a baseline. Writers should determine the lowest possible per-word amount for which they are willing to write. They should then refrain from taking on assignments that fall below that threshold.

To find content-writing jobs, writers can search the Web's most popular job boards, places like Freelance Writing Gigs and About Freelance Writing. These sites routinely list content and SEO writing jobs. Writers can also find content jobs at craigslist.org.

Be Realistic The secret to succeeding at online content writing is for writers to have realistic expectations. They shouldn't expect to make a fortune writing short articles about classic cars or weightlifting.

Writers also shouldn't expect to make a full-time writing income from their content work. Many writers actually rely on content writing to provide a boost to their traditional freelance-writing income.

EDTECH connection

• audience consensus: little discussion necessary about whether blogs should have DOIs, concrete implementations needed
• manual DOI registration possible, but of little use
• API call better, but integration from blogging software necessary
• SEO also requires exposing metadata => interests align
• schema.org/BlogPosting suggested
• https://blog.datacite.org/ uses JSON-LD
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/schema/
• sitemap needed so that indexer can find the posts to then extract metadata
• beta testers from institutions that already register DOIs welcome

I agree. It is not that blog is dead, or that blogging is no longer an activity worth doing outside Facebooking, Instagramming and Tweeting, or that bloggers are no longer exist. I would say that blog, blogging and blogger are expanding. They just exist in different platform (like Facebook and Pinterest), with different method (people who rant on Facebook .. isn't that blogging?) and as different people (Instagrammers, Facebookers, etc).

According to a 2015 report by Incapsula, 48.5% of all web traffic are by bots.

...

The majority of bots are "bad bots" - scrapers that are harvesting emails and looking for content to steal, DDoS bots, hacking tools that are scanning websites for security vulnerabilities, spammers trying to sell the latest diet pill, ad bots that are clicking on your advertisements, etc.

...

Content on websites such as dev.to are reposted elsewhere, word-for-word, by scrapers programmed by Black Hat SEO specialists.

...

However, a new breed of scrapers exist - intelligent scrapers. They can search websites for sentences containing certain keywords, and then rewrite those sentences using "article spinning" techniques.

In high school I was an avid reader of a few lifestyle blogs and over time the bloggers would follow me back after gaining a relationship through comments and still follow each other today

Krause, Steven D. 2004. “When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Email Lists, Discussion, and Interaction.” Kairos 9 (1).

Ellison, Nicole B., and Yuehua Wu. 2008. “Blogging in the Classroom: A Preliminary Exploration of Student Attitudes and Impact on Comprehension.” Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 17 (1): 99–122.

Reasons Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have dominated the Web over blogs and independent sites:

• People prefer a single interface that makes it easy to flip or scroll through the new stuff. They don't like visiting a dozen different sites with different interfaces.
• Most people don't want to deal with site structure or complex editors, let alone markup languages or servers.
• Facebook quickly became a friends-and-family network, which pulled in more of the same.
• Following and unfollowing should only require a single click.
• Retweets and mentions introduce new people to follow, even if you aren't looking for them.
• Reposting should be easy, include obvious attribution, and comments should be attached.
• RSS readers had the potential to offer these things, but standard ways of using it were not widely adopted. Then Google Reader pushed out other readers, but was nevertheless shut down.

Let go of the idea of people reading your stuff on your site, and develop or support interfaces that put your readers in control of how they view the web instead of giving the control to the people with the servers.

Huge follower counts on YouTube and social media DO NOT easily translate to income. And those followers expect you to be "real" -- so they are hostile to advertising and sponsored content.

Do you own a business? It might pay to offer a salary to the producers of a YouTube channel that reaches your target audience -- in exchange for low-profile "brought to you by" links and mentions that won't offend that audience.

https://twitter.com/JBUshow<br> https://twitter.com/gabydunn

Blog differences

A very interesting point, especially considering the fact that in my own research of science bloggers (#MySciBlog research at LSU), this seems to be a common approach to blogging by scientists/scholars. A scientist/scholarly blogger often starts a blog post with an idea, nugget or concept that they are curious about or interested in learning more about. Many 'intellectuals' also say that blogging helps them collect and clarify their thoughts on a topic or question. The natural result for those engaged in scholarship is for some blogged topics/questions to blossom into larger and more complex ideas and even research questions. I know for myself, several of my blog posts - and especially my some of my freelance science journalism work - has prompted me to pursue complimentary research in my role as a science communication PhD student.

As an added bonus of being public on the web, the 'blogged' content can elicit feedback from readers and scholars that further pushes the blogger's own ideas and scholarship in new directions.

I want to study how Jake integrates IPython notebooks into his blogging. I'll be writing a lot in IPython notebook for my teaching.