The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence; at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself!”

“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

“I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar.

“I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied, very politely, “for I can’t understand it myself, to begin with; and being so many different sizes a day is very confusing.”

“It isn’t,” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,” said Alice; ‘”but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel a little queer, won’t you?”

“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,” said Alice; “all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.”

“You!” said the Caterpillar contemptuously. “Who are you?”

– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

THE ELEVATOR PITCH

That’s the assignment: write an elevator pitch for your blog.

Assignment, yes. Darren Rowse at Problogger is hosting his biennial 31 Days to a Better Blog challenge, which combines theory and homework, and I’ve joined.

I signed up because I’ve been feeling a little disconnected from my blog and I thought that having a reason to reflect on it daily would be a good way to get back on track. I didn’t foresee that the first assignment would expose the main reason I’ve been drifting away from my blog.

I don’t know what my blog is about.

How technology is changing our our lives? Personal branding? What people are doing around the web? Traveling? Relationships? All of the above? Where do I fit into all of this?

“If you’re fuzzy on what your blog is about it’s unlikely than anyone else will have much of an idea either,” Rowse writes in his first post.

We all keep blogs for different reasons, but most of us want to be read, want to share, and a great many of us would like to give our careers, and maybe even our incomes, a boost through it. Having a focus is smart business. It enables you to connect with a specific audience and develop a community, it gives you visibility and credibility in your field, it allows you to effectively implement advertising and helps attract sponsors.

“I started out with a personal blog that covered everything from spirituality and church to photography to blogging (and more),” writes Rowse in his book ProBlogger: Secrets to Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. “And though the blog did become quite popular, after 18 months of running it, I began to notice a number of things that made me consider a new approach: some readers became disillusioned with the blog. My blog had a number of main themes and different readers resonated differently with each one… when I focused on a topic they were not interested in, they either ignored the post or, at times, pushed back… I began to feel guilty about blogging on certain topics.”

Rowse decided to break his blog into different, well-focused niche blogs.

“The result was a more natural blogging experience for me and a more useful one for my readers,” Rowse recalls.

REBRANDING SMUT

In 2004, my friend and fellow writer Laura Roberts turned me on to her newest endeavor: Black Heart Magazine, an independent webzine featuring “the dirtiest minds in literature.”

My career as a blogger started in high school, centered around the wonders of dating and sex. Before there were blogs, there bulletin boards and I was on there, pushing the pixels into elaborate recreations of my adventures and experiences. By the time Laura and I connected, blogs had taken off and we each had a nice crowd of readers who were eager for more.

And more we gave them. Even as we continued to evolve, wrapped up the college years, hit the workforce, got into more and more serious relationships, we continued to write about sex—how we liked it, how we had it, how it played into our everyday lives. We were driven by desire and desire would always enjoy an audience.

Or so I thought.

Last month, Laura sent me a direct message on Twitter asking what I thought about changing the tagline of the magazine to shift the focus from smut to literature.

“That will change the whole direction of Black Heart, won’t it?” I asked her.

Yes, it would. And that’s essentially what she wanted to do.

“Rather than cater to the sex crowd, when I find myself increasingly bored with erotica, I am looking to bring my love and lust for literature to a new format,” she elaborated on a Facebook note. “Black Heart will be moving in a new direction as a result of this, focusing more on the literature side of ‘literate smut’ … I’m looking for people who are passionate about reading and writing, who love literature in a slightly dirty way … interviewers, authors, book lovers, book snobs, lit pimps, booksellers, book publishers, book readers, book reviewers, academics, writers, dilettantes, anybody who considers themselves a writer of poetry, prose, journalism or blogs/rants/whatever pops into their head.”

I didn’t comment because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t understand what I felt about it.

The next time I stop by Black Heart Magazine, I notice the banner has changed from “the dirtiest minds in literature” to “sex, love, literature.” The featured story is “Poetry for the People.”

I don’t click.

Mind you, I love literature. But my relationship with my books was never what Black Heart Magazine was for me. Black Heart, for me, was about the ever-evolving process of sexual discovery. I don’t want to read that April is poetry month unless—pardon my boldness—the poetry in question is being written on my back in cum.

That’s the reaction Rowse was talking about—that’s the reader pushing back. In this case, it’s not that the blog has gone off-course. Laura has carefully navigated where she wants to go after some careful deliberation and discussion with her contributors. She has done everything right.

Still, here I am, staring at the main page of Black Heart Magazine and feeling, though I’m sitting in an office wall-to-wall with classic literature, that I no longer belong.

WHEN YOU TURN INTO A CHRYSALIS—YOU WILL SOMEDAY, YOU KNOW

Blogs are not static because people are not static. The reasons for choosing a blog with a specific focus have been enumerated here and elsewhere. But just as they give you a solid framework within which to work, they also serve to restrain you.

“I would really like to be one of those bloggers who is comfortable with being all ‘niche,’ all ‘industry-specific,’” my friend Atherton Bartelby remarks in a post regarding the elevator pitch assignment. “I would love to be termed a ‘design blogger’ or a ‘media blogger’ or a ‘gay relationship blogger.’ But neither I, nor my blog, will ever be just any one of those things, because one’s life is not single-faceted like that; one’s life, and certainly mine, is multi-faceted: the professional and the personal, the good and the bad, the specific, and the all-encompassing.”

WHO ARE YOU?

After thinking about my blog for several hours, I decided to let it speak for itself.

Since the inception of this blog, I have put out seven interviews, 11 news items and 26 essays relating to blogging, web culture, social media, old media versus new media, oversharing, cruelty on the internet, branding, marketing, gender, relationships and, on two occasions, travel.

As more and more of my relationship discussions move over my column at BlogHer and as more of us begin to settle into the world of new media to the point where it’s no longer appropriate to call it “new,” the content that initially made this blog an adventure in discovering how technology is affecting the way we interact with one another is becoming scarce.

Further, as I continue to attend events and meet people working on web-based projects around Southern California and elsewhere, the focus is shifting to them and their endeavors. Four of the seven interviews conducted on the blog happened after 2009 kicked off, and I have quite a few more in the works.

So what are you, blog? Or should I say, what are you becoming in that chrysalis?

A reflection on the web—the people in it, the things we’re doing, the customs we’re adopting, and the things we’re leaving behind as we venture forth into this uncharted territory of trial-and-error, where more and more, the digital is colliding with the analog.

And I hope you, dear reader, will stick around to see the wings that surface from this chrysalis and the many, many rabbit holes thereafter.

I will never forget his response. There was nothing moral in it, just logic: “if you saw someone walking down the street in a police uniform, would you assume they were a police officer or would you think they were just expressing themselves?”

It reminds me of a saying my mother says to this day: haste fama y échate a la cama, which translated from the Spanish means, “make your fame and lay in bed.”

(It’s a little like the saying “you’ve made your bed, now lie in it,” but it goes further because in this case you don’t have to actually make the bed, you just have to give the impression that you have in order to have to lie in it.)

You can imagine how irritating an adolescent focused on her self-expression and unconcerned with the repercussions of her actions or demeanor found such a saying. If I didn’t learn the lesson well enough then, I am certainly am now: in social media, image is everything. We shape this image by what we say and what we do, but, perhaps more importantly, by how people perceive these things.

Recently, I wrote about Chris Brogan and how the public received his work for Kmart through IZEA. More than what he said or how, the fact that he was working with IZEA for Kmart did a lot to shape the public’s view of who he is.

Image matters. How other people perceive you is as important as what you’re actually doing.

BRAND! BRAND! BRAND!

We’re all brands now, whether we like it or not, and everything we do and say affects the image of this brand. Suddenly, we’re not really making choices based only on the immediate satisfaction of our desires or return on investment, but in terms of how this decision is going to be seen by others.

Recently, at a party with a lot of people in the Los Angeles tech scene, I remember thinking I could use the opportunity to get some fodder for a column I’m writing for BlogHer about how improve one’s sex life in 2009.

Despite being a fun, laid back crowd, a lot of the people I spoke with told me they would be glad to share suggestions on the condition that I did not reveal who they were because discussing sex—anything about it—was not something that they wanted associated with their personal brand.

More recently, my friend and Mashable contributor Atherton Bartelby found that someone had made a fake Twitter account using his first name and photo. It was supposed to be a joke made by a mutual follower, but Bartelby took it very seriously. He didn’t think that the content was conducive to maintaining the sort of image he wants to have online. Fortunately, the person who made that account understood the situation and took it down immediately. But there are people who don’t have such respect for people’s image or reputation.

A case in point are the recent hacks on Twitter. Last weekend, 33 high profile accounts on Twitter were hacked. The Fox News Twitter feed announced that Bill O’Reilly was gay, Barrack Obama’s account had a fake contest with US$500-worth of gasoline as a prize, and Britney Spears’s account updated her 14,075 followers on the size of her vagina.

In regard to the breach, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told Wired over e-mail that the company is addressing the security issues that allowed the breach, and doing “a full security review on all access points to Twitter. More immediately, we’re strengthening the security surrounding sign-in. We’re also further restricting access to the support tools for added security.”

As Problogger and Twitip founder Darren Rowse points out, “Twitter is increasingly being targeted by malicious attacks and should serve as a warning to those using Twitter to expect the unexpected… Twitter does seem to be moving towards a more secure system with an beta test of OAuth scheduled for later this month, but until it goes live (and even after it) be a little more alert than normal.”

Security issues on Twitter may be resolved, but the incident raises red flags: in a world where we’re investing so much time and energy building ourselves, what’s worse than the idea that our personal brands can be so easily compromised?

“Branding is experience in time, and the brand becomes a series of interrelated behaviors,” writes Jonathan Baskin in Branding Only Works on Cattle.

YOUR BRAND IS STICKING OUT

Ages ago, sometime after I started becoming more active on Twitter, I partook in a chat with Laura Fitton’s tribe. I don’t recall exactly what we were talking about, but at one point, I remember Fitton saying to me, “you’re fabulous. I can tell that’s your brand.”

I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about, but I took it as a compliment—who doesn’t want to be fabulous?

I thought about this comment again during a conversation about personal brands with social media maven Damien Basile. He commented on how dichotomous I was, pointing out that if someone found me through my blog, they’d be likely to assume I was one more social media commentator, whereas if they looked at my Twitter stream, they’d think I was more focused on relationships and lifestyle.

“You’re a conundrum!” he exclaimed. A fabulous conundrum?

Whereas people are multifaceted, brands that are associated with a clear mission have proved time and time again to have more success than those who don’t. So instead of sitting around looking for resolutions to kick off the year, I decided to do something a little different: write my mission and values and address my personal brand from there.

LABEL ME

“The mission announces exactly where you are going, and the values describe the behaviors that will get you there,” wrote Jack Welch in Winning.

I must have stared at the screen for two hours. Finally—and perhaps more out of exasperation than real inspiration or vision—I typed out the following: “My mission is to become a top commentator on how the internet is shaping our lives. I plan to do this by regularly providing information that is accessible and thought-provoking to readers, despite their level of involvement in web culture.”

The statement is likely to change as I refine it, but that’s OK. The idea is to create something solid on which you can stand, then building on top of that.

What’s your mission? Does your “brand” reflect it?

Further Reading:
5 Steps for Planning the Direction of Your Blog in 2009 by Darren Rowse.
The Thing About Goals by Seth Godin

The comment came via Twitter direct message from Adele McAlear in reference to Adjix, the URL shortener I use to fit long URLs into Twitter’s notoriously concise 140 character-long messages.

Adjix is an ad network that pays you to shorten links, which is essentially “a cross between Tinyurl and Google Adwords.” When a reader clicks on an Adjix-shortened link, they are redirected to the URL you input, with an Adjix-generated ad at the top of the page (example).

People who use this shortener earn $0.10 per 1,000 unique link views and $0.20 for each click-through on an ad displayed with their link.

Since I started using Adjix in August of this year, I’ve posted 90 links and made $0.70. It’s been a fun experiment for me, both in terms of tracking click-throughs, which the service does for you, and in terms of learning how to generate some extra cash on Twitter. Its main appeal for me is that I don’t have to pimp anything I wouldn’t normally put out there, I’m essentially getting something back for doing what I usually do: sharing interesting things.

What I never considered is how my followers on Twitter felt about this.

A BLOGGER’S GOTTA EAT!

Blogging can be one of the most thankless things to which a person can devote himself. Whether you’re chronicling your adventures or imparting information within your industry, you’re a person who has to eat and pay bills.

As someone who loves what I read on your blog, I feel it’s my moral obligation to support you. If that means taking 2.5 seconds to scan the ads on your blog after reading your post and commenting, I’ll do it. And I’ll click, too, if something catches my eye. It’s how I say “thank you.”

I didn’t think finding creative ways to make money blogging was a revolutionary concept until this weekend when my stream on Twitter exploded with a controversy over a sponsored post by Chris Brogan, the respected social media adviser.

FULL DISCLOSURE

Brogan writes about how businesses and bloggers can forge strong ties by creating valuable content on social networks. He’s basically the go-to guy when it comes to anything relating to new media.

He’s also on the advisory board for IZEA, a company in next-generation marketing. Per the IZEA blog, bloggers that sign on with IZEA do not receive payment, but they do have options in the company.

Working through IZEA for Kmart, Brogan received a $500 gift card to shop ’til he dropped and blog all about it, as well as another $500 gift card to offer readers who participated in a contest at Dad-o-Matic, where this sponsored post appeared.

Writing for IZEA requires disclosure, meaning that bloggers who are pimping a brand for them have to say up front that they got something out of the deal. Brogan’s piece at Dad-o-Matic (titled, “Sponsored Post-Kmart Holiday Shopping Dad Style”) opened with the following statement: “This post is a sponsored post on behalf of Kmart via Izea. The opinions are mine.”

Simple enough, right? Wrong.

LET THEM EAT CHEESECAKE!

“Bloggers should be able to make money and find synchronous opportunities that work for them. What was off-putting is that Chris benefits by writing an overall favorable review and a prominent one at that,” Damien Basile wrote in response to a post by Geoff Livingston, CEO of Livingston Communications, which puts out The Buzz Bin, a blog about marketing, buzz and PR.

Basile has long respected Brogan’s work and position in the industry, but he had beef with how Brogan handled his part for the Kmart campaign and was very vocal about it. I chased him down earlier tonight to get a handle on why he’d become such an active detractor.

“It was never about how much he profits,” Basile told me on Gtalk. “What is up for discussion is the perception that he may be in a position of conflict and that is enough for me to question it.”

Basile doesn’t feel Brogan’s initial disclosure is sufficient. He thinks Brogan’s ties to IZEA should have been mentioned right on that post, in the event readers did not know he was on their blogger advisory board and held options with IZEA.

“Maybe it was a misnomer to call him a journalist,” Basile reflected. “I do recant that later, but my point was bringing up integrity. Integrity is for everyone. Just because we’re in new media doesn’t mean there are new standards. Truth is truth. Everyone deserves to know the full truth.”

I’m with Livingston and Brogan in disagreeing with Basile that a blogger is a journalist. We could learn a thing or two from them, yes. I’m not a reporter any longer, but I have the Society for Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics up on my wall and it’s never too far out of mind when I blog: 1. Seek the truth and report it, 2. Minimize harm, 3. Act independently, 4. Be accountable.

A blogger may employ these tenets, but a blogger is not a journalist. Journalists have fact-checkers, ombudsmen, editors and publishers, those mighty gatekeepers of information. Journalists are expected to be unbiased. Perhaps most importantly, newsrooms and advertising departments are separated.

A blogger, on the other hand, is often a one-man show. I write the content for my blog, I fact-check, I edit, I publish. You know that saying: a writer who edits her own work has a fool for an editor. Quite right.

That’s not to say a blogger has no responsibility. A blogger has a big responsibility to his community: to provide valuable, quality content.

“How do you think Brogan should have done it?” I asked Basile. “Put up front: ‘Chris Brogan is a member of the IZEA advisory board and has options in IZEA’?”

“The word ‘via’ is very vague,” Basile responded. “It just tells me ‘its way of’ and the link to IZEA was to their main site [as opposed to information about Brogan’s association with the company].”

“How should it have been phrased?” I asked again.

Because this isn’t really about Chris Brogan or IZEA, you see, and to zero-in on that would be to make this a witch-hunt and what have witch-hunts ever gotten us? Nothing. No, this is bigger than that. This is the internet doing what it does best: self-correcting. Let’s not tear down, let’s build. Don’t like how someone does something? Tell me how to do it better.

Finally, Basile replied: “‘This post is sponsored by Kmart for IZEA. I am on the board of IZEA and receive equity options for being on it.’”

There is a valuable lesson here and it goes further than well-worded disclosures, debates about what makes one a journalist, or whether money invariably destroys a blogger’s credibility. As I said before, a blogger has a responsibility to his community. Mob mentality or not, I’m ultimately in accord with Basile: it’s about perception. The perception of your readers matters.

It doesn’t matter if your community thinks you did one thing when you really did another. It’s folly to stand by and call them stupid. They might be stupid, but perception is reality.

WHY SHOULD I CARE?

We should care because social media is about community. Brogan addressed several of the issues raised by his post in comments on blogs as well as in his own blog. That goes a long way.

It may not be enough for others who are disillusioned by the fact he is working with IZEA, but it’s responsible and in the end, all you can do is listen, address concerns as you best can and learn from the experience.

I CAN SEE RIGHT THROUGH YOU

Darren Rowse, my one-man resource when it comes to making money blogging had a series a couple of years ago about credibility and blogging. His series closed with transparency:

I don’t mind bloggers getting something for themselves out of blogging but what does bother me is when I see bloggers attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of their readers by not being honest about their true motivations. Credibility comes when people trust that what you are saying is truth and when there is a lack of truth the consequences for a blogger can be significant.

Transparency also comes into play when you make a mistake or need to apologize for something you’ve done or written. The way bloggers admit to mistakes and rectify them says a lot about their character.

In taking on Adjix, I was experimenting. But I never disclosed the details of my experiment. In fact, very little on my blog speaks about what I’m doing here and why. This needs immediate rectification, which I vow to undertake.

For now, the short of it is: I make some money via another experiment, this one with Google Adwords, but outside of that, no one pays me for any content, including the features. However, my blog does serve me indirectly in that through it I have landed gigs contributing to other web publications and ghost-blogging.

HOW MUCH IS INTEGRITY WORTH?

I found myself asking this question earlier this evening as I chatted with Adele McAlear, head of McAlear Marketing, who’d first objected to my use of Adjix.

“My real problem is not that I have to look at a banner or text ad, or that you’re making money from it,” McAlear told me over Gtalk. “It’s that the URL doesn’t show the true URL of the page you’ve sent me to and this makes linking a pain. It makes me not want to link to you at all, or re-tweet, etc.”

This was a definite downside to the use of Adjix, as retweets are the currency of Twitter. I explained to McAlear that in the Adjix banners, there’s an arrow on the far right that you can click to reveal the true URL.

“I didn’t know that about the arrow,” McAlear told me. “I don’t click on anything that looks like an ad because I never know what I’ll get and where I’m going to be taken.”

Coming from a web-savvy woman, that said a lot. How many other readers didn’t know how to get rid of the banner? Was I short-changing myself for the promise of a quick dime?

“Aside from linking, there’s perception,” McAlear went on. “I think you are a great writer, you have a great handle on social media, marketing, and how all of this works but, yet, this type of URL shortener reminds me of spam. To me, it kind of cheapens your personal brand.”

There it was. She’d said the key word: perception.

“It comes down to balance,” she said. “What your readers and followers on Twitter expect versus what Adjix gives you. I have no issues with anyone making money but there are different ways to do it.”

Integrity versus $0.70. Sure, I could make more if I devoted myself to better employing Adjix. But is it worth it?

Do you make money blogging? Is a disclosure enough to keep yourself from losing credibility? Have you ever unsubscribed from someone’s blogs because they wrote a sponsored post? Your opinion matters whether you’re a webcock or just a reader. We’re all the web. Tell me how you really feel.

UPDATE

December 16, 2007, 5:28PM: In an excellent display of what tuning in to user perspective is all about, Joe Moreno, President of Adjix contacted Adele McAlear after reading this post to let her know that based on her feedback, Adjix has changed the arrow on banners to a simple hyperlink that says, “Remove ad.”

Kudos, Adjix. This is what the web is all about.

Of possible interest:

• Earning Money Through Blogging: The Paid Posting Debate with Ted Murphy, the CEO of IZEA, Lucretia Pruitt of Walmart’s 11 Moms, Allen Stern of Centernetworks, and Chris Brogan at Social Mediasphere on Blog Talk Radio
• Understanding Izea’s Sponsored Blogging Service by Jeremiah Owyang
• What is Your Time Worth? What’s Worth Your Time? by Lucretia M. Pruitt
• The Sanctity of Social Media? by Amber Naslund
• The fallacy of pay-per-post or “o-pay-nions” at This Is Herd
• Being Human: Chris Brogan by Rich Becker
• Code of Ethics for Professional Communicators from the International Association of Business Communitcations (via @richbecker)

The magical thing about Twitter is that if enough users block an account or notify Twitter that they’re being spammed, the account in question gets suspended.

A lot of times, though, what appears to be a spammer is a well-intentioned user who is so new, that he or she doesn’t understand how the community works and whose only crime is the desire to have their site visited.

This was the case with @lollydaskal. I saw her multiple tweets with the same link in her stream and was about to hit block when I saw her newest one: “new at twitter ….not sure i am doing it right.” I shot her a direct message. “Send me your e-mail address and I’ll help you.”

She did. In the next few minutes, I threw together as many resources and thoughts about how to get a business started on Twitter (her objective) as I could think of and shot her an e-mail.

One of the most important things about using Twitter for business is learning to step out of the old marketing model where you just throw out information about your product into the masses. In today’s world of social media, the relationship between a company and consumers is no longer a one-stop information destination. Web 2.0 is all about the conversation and building a community.

I linked some classics: Chris Brogan’s Twitter for Business, Ogilvy’s Best Practices and Warren Whitlock and Deborah Micek’s Twitter Handbook.

Since she reached out to the community for suggestions on improving her approach on Halloween, @lollydaskal’s gathered a following of 232 people and I am glad to count myself among them.

I remember thinking at the time how wonderful it would be to have all the how-tos in a single place, a catch-basin of quick, easy-to-digest information about how to make the best of Twitter, whether you’re a business or a casual user.

So today, when Laura Fitton, head of Pistachio Consulting, announced she’d signed a contract to write Twitter for Dummies, I was thrilled. Like everything related to the micro-blogging platform, this is a community project. Fitton’s already invited her 8,494 followers to contribute their ideas.

Equally exciting is the recent launch of Twitip by Darren Rowse, of ProBlogger fame.

“TwiTip is about capturing some of the lessons that I’ve been learning about Twitter and how to use it more effectively,” Rowse writes in the blog’s about page. “It will cover Twitter Tips of all varieties including Writing for Twitter, Branding, Growing a Following, Corporate Tweeting and a lot more.”

These two are invaluable resources for the beginner—maybe even the seasoned user.

For example, one of the newer posts on Twitip, by Hugh Briss of Twitter Image, goes into detail about the importance of a Twitter background in establishing brand identity (some great examples of this are available at Mike Smith’s blog—with my friend Atherton Bartelby among them!).

It’s true that space we’re given for bios on Twitter is limited—only 160 characters!—and it’s been the practice for some time now for users to put much of their bios and contact details right on their pages by incorporating them into their background images. While many great people I follow do this, it’s not until now, reading Briss’s post on the topic, that I’ve begun to give it more serious consideration.

But it’s not all brand and business. And another recent post on Twitip touches on how to avoid making your followers feel like they’re overhearing one side of a conversation–I’m quite guilty of it and while for me Twitter is all self-expression, I don’t want to leave anyone out if I can include them in the fun.

As more companies jump on the Twitter wagon, the wave of resistance from casual users grows. Not everyone is happy to see all work and no play in their Twitter streams. Just today, blogger Jay Hathaway posted about his displeasure about the wave of business users that Twitter for Dummies would bring about:

Predictably, the book on Twitter isn’t being written by someone funny or entertaining. It’s being written by someone who posts 100 times on a slow day, and talks about things like conversations and communities and branding and … I don’t know, money? This doesn’t seem sustainable to me. Marketers can market to marketers and make friends with marketers and talk about marketing all day, and it’s not particularly interesting to regular people.

So don’t read it, right? I don’t. But a whole lot of other people do, because they’re climbing on top of each other to associate themselves with the people who have the most marketers reading them, so that they can market themselves to still more marketers, and become what I can only guess is called Market King of the Market.

That’s the audience for this book. I’m sure a lot of people will buy it, and it will make some money for the publisher. Good for them! Also, possibly good for the future of Twitter as a business, so that it can continue to exist as a place where I’m allowed to have chuckles and make friends. Fair enough. It’s just sad that a lot more people will be on Twitter, working. No time for dick jokes, ladies, I can’t rest now that I’m in The Market. Got to rack up some more followers, and some of them might even have Secrets of Success!

He’s not alone in that, either. There seems to be a bit of tension between people who use Twitter to further themselves in their industry and those who use Twitter for fun. I have been told a few times by people that they like my blog and wish my tweets were a little more industry-focused: the amount of oversharing and, yes, dick jokes, just isn’t conducive to achieving their goals on Twitter.

I’m not offended–Twitter is all about pulling people around you whose ideas are useful or amusing. Tastes vary and I come with a disclaimer. Just as some choose to further their business on Twitter, some of us choose to have fun and be ourselves in explosions of 140 characters. I do have another account on Twitter (@omgomgomfg), which I, admittedly, greedily grabbed to protect my brand, and which I intend to develop as a catch-basin for more of the web stuff that interests me and many of the readers of this blog. Now and always, my Twitter stream at @avflox is where I let it all hang out.

Regardless of whether Twitter is play or work, it’s never too late to analyze what you’re doing and whether it fits into your goals for social networking. Could you put this magical tool to even better use?

There is always room for improvement, whether you’re looking to get your product out there or pick up a date. And with this in mind, it’s not hard to see how Twitip and even the more rudimentary Twitter for Dummies are going to be valuable resources for many.

The best part is that we can build this together. No matter what our focus, we are the Twitter culture. There is value in what we know and think and this platform allows for us to share it, to reach out to people we may never otherwise have met and connect in a mutually-beneficial way.

So here’s to growth—in terms of reach, yes, but most importantly, in terms of community.

This article was redrafted at 8:15PM MST to include Hathaway’s thoughts on Twitter for Dummies and my personal thoughts on play vs. work. Million thanks to Atherton Bartelby for pointing out the importance of its inclusion in this discussion.

“I don’t want to scare them off,” he said.

It’s easy to forget that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the acronym OMG (often translated from web lingo to mean, “oh my G-d”) is basically a direct violation of the third commandment and that the F in OMFG, the last acronym, is largely considered to stand for an expletive.

I find it interesting that in the race to save time, internet culture has largely rid itself of many unsavory words and phrases by abbreviating them and that these abbreviations have taken a life of their own. Today, I hear as many people in regular conversation saying “oh em gee,” as I hear them saying “oh my G-d,” or “oh my gosh.”

Still, for many, abbreviation or not, OMG still means “oh my G-d,” and runs counter to their belief systems and notions of propriety.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try something new in terms of advertising on my site and applied to join the BlogHer Ad Network.

Their guidelines clearly state that any blog that is submitted must be “without profanity in the title and/or URL.” I’d read these before submitting but thought nothing of it–after all, I wasn’t actually cussing. Or was I?

———- Original message ———-
From: Jenny Lauck
To: AVF
Date: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 4:45PM
Subject: Your BlogHerAds application

Hi, AV!

I’m so sorry for the long delay in reviewing your application. We’ve got a policy that prevents us from accepting blogs that use swear words, the names of deities or abbreviated forms of phrases that include either – I’ve been hounding our co-founders to change this policy so that we can accept wonderful blogs like yours, and I am really sorry to say that they cannot change the policy at this time – however, should they change their minds, I will e-mail you right away.

Wishing you all the best,
Jenny

Not only was the abbreviation not enough to get by–apparently the mention of a deity was also inappropriate!

An ex in a fit of rage once told me that my drama should be a franchise. “If drama was a natural resource, you’d outperform the Middle East and Russia combined in terms of exports.”

It’s a mean thing to say, though not entirely untrue, as I do, admittedly, have an amazing tendency to get myself into the most ridiculous situations. One of my dearest friends likes to joke that if she ever received a phone call from me that didn’t kick off with “O-M-G. O! M! G! OMFG!” she’d know I’d been sequestered and that she was speaking with an impostor.

As a joke, I looked up the domain name OMGOMGOMFG.com. At the time, I didn’t think I would ever have a self-hosted blog–but in a world where domains are the new real estate, why not own it?

Later, when I did decide to launch my own blog, I wondered about whether I should get a blog with my regular username online. I remember thinking, “what’s easier to convey and remember: avflox.com or OMGOMGOMFG.com?” It’s partly about recognition, but it’s also about who you are. I don’t take myself so seriously–I write because I know no other way to be. Writing is the only way I know to process ideas about topics that matter to me, yes, but mostly, I do it because it’s fun.

And if you can give your host a laugh with your domain name, well, that’s something, too.

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger is one of the best resources for anyone wishing to get started making money by publishing online. At the end of the summer, he ran an article titled 8 Reasons Why Your Blog Might Not Be Accepted Into an Ad Network that had some helpful information for people trying to get into ad networks like BlogHer.

Rowse listed the most important elements of a blog when being considered, among them: design (does it look good?), content (is the content well-written, informed, original, focused, etc.?), focus (is it personal or does it fit a niche?), hosting (is it self-hosted?), and traffic.

“Each network also has its own standards on adult content, use of language (swearing) and other topics that they may or may not cover,” Rowse added.

His book Problogger: Secrets For Blogging Your Way To A Six-Figure Income, co-authored with Chris Garrett, lays the ground rules and topics worth considering for those wishing to start income-generating blogs. Chapter 3 deals with the set-up, including choosing a domain name:

For a start, if you want to build credibility and a sense of professionalism around your blog, a domain name can help. Similarly, a carefully selected domain name has the ability to enhance the branding and memorability of a product, service business, or even person… Many discussions on domain name decisions talk about a choice between choosing a domain name with keywords in it to domain names that are more brandable or generic. It’s worth stating up front that it is possible to achieve both, but I would prioritize memorability and branding over keywords.

At the beginning of the year, Rowse expanded a little on this topic at Problogger.

“When choosing domain names do you get a keyword rich or more brandable name?” he asked.

Keyword-based domains use words about topics you’re discussing in them. Rowse listed TheMovieBlog.com and SimsGamer.com as examples.

“Firstly it communicates something to your readers very quickly with regards to what your blog is about,” Rowse wrote about these keyword-based domain names. “The other positive is that search engines take a good look at the words in your domain name when deciding what your blog is about and how to rank it.”

Brandable domains, on the other hand, may relate to the topic, but they’re largely about creating a brand identity.

“These blogs would be suited ideally to developing a blog that is aiming to build a community of loyal readers,” Rowse said. “Of course these blogs can also do very well in search engines but this is usually for other reasons (keywords in URLs are just one of many factors). Blogs that have these types of domains include Boing Boing, Gizmodo and Dooce. In fact if you look at Technorati’s Top 100 blogs, you’ll see that most of them have brandable names and not keyword-based ones.”

Problogger.net is an excellent example of a keyword-based and brandable domain name.

“It’s not always possible to get both,” Rowse wrote, adding, “in fact, it’s getting harder and harder and many bloggers are faced with the choice of one or the other.”

“Remember when putting ads on your blog was a travesty?” I asked my friend Atherton Bartelby during our usual midday coffee break. “Now I go to blogs and go out of my way to scan ads after reading posts in order to see if there is anything I want to click to help support the bloggers I like.”

“Oh! I do that, too,” Atherton replied, laughing. “A blogger has to eat, right?”

“Absolutely,” I responded. “Though it’s very interesting to see what monetization is doing to a lot of blogs as well. Very few ad networks want put up with a lot of the content that defines a lot of blogs.”

“Totally,” Atherton agreed. “It’s like, hey, I would write a piece about this tonight but my BLOG AD NETWORK wants me to rewrite Hansel and Gretel!”

“Except in my version,” I said going along with him, “the ad network doesn’t want me to talk about the witch being cooked alive. I can either have the children scare her away with a broomstick or convince her to go vegan because that’s better for her health, the common good and the environment anyway. They’re pushing for the latter!”

We burst into a fit of hysterical giggles. At the same time, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much blogging was suddenly starting to feel like working in a newsroom. Sure newspapers keep their advertising departments out of the newsroom, but anyone who’s been in one knows how that works sometimes. You just don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

There are two kinds of bloggers: the ones who rush in and the ones who plan every minute detail.

“A number of people regret spending too much time thinking about blogging and not actually blogging,” Rowse wrote in a reflection on a series at Problogger about all the things successful bloggers today wish they’d known when they started blogging.

Of course, “some regretted that they didn’t put a little more thought into their blogging before they started. Too much planning can kill a blog (or at least can kill the opportunity for your blog to become established as first and can kill your passion for a topic) while not enough planning can lead to a blog that doesn’t reach its potential because its foundations are shaky.”

It’s a careful balance we’re striking between profitability and continued growth and self-expression.

“The domain name and platform you choose are just two elements of many that go into making a blog successful,” Rowse says in the What We Wish We Knew series. “They are important–but if you get it wrong you are not dead in the water.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t get into BlogHer,” Atherton told me later in the day. “Are you having second thoughts about your domain name?”

“Not in the slightest.”

It’s true. The internet and the culture developing herein is a wild new world and if that’s not enough to make you go “OMG!”, I don’t know what is.