Lately I have been doing quite some consulting for small local bands looking to improve their online presence and take it further than the compulsory Myspace page. I have resumed the basic principles of what small (or every) music artist should do to build their brand online.

I had the occasion to guest lecture to Computer Science students at the University of Central Lancashire about the importance of blogging.

The main focus of the lecture was the importance of blogging for computer scientists for their future career. I briefly touched the history of the modern internet and blogging, mentioned the difficulty of making money with blogs online before pointing out the importance of a blog for programmers, developers and designers.
I decided not to release the podcast but publish a slightly more in-depth entry instead

There is an easy formula for doing it wrong: publish attention-getting bullshit and pull stunts to generate mindless traffic. The entire quote-unquote “pro blogging” industry — which exists as the sort of pimply teenage brother to the shirt-and-tie SEO industry — is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient.

John Gruber on blogging.

So Dan Lyons, from Fake Steve Jobs fame, is quitting blogging because the financial reward hasn’t been big enough.
Moneyquote:

On the About page of this blog I quote Paul Boutin and hint at a disbelief in blogs as a medium for individuals.
Although at a certain I have been a so-called blowhard blogger, my background is different and I originate from the CMS⁽¹⁾. A scene where you slap lots of content on a site, have extensive link lists, maybe even run regularly news, linking to blogs, and try to build a community, most of the time in some kind of forum.

To be entirely honest, I never really liked the blogs as a platform option.

1. Obviously blogs are CMS too, but I mean the *complete* packages [↩]