racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

Here’s a great income opportunity for individuals or teams looking for work. I’m looking for dedicated, reliable people whom I can assign blogs on various topics that include (among others): real estate, insurance, health, beauty, entertainment, technology, and others.

I don’t need too much expertise in English, but what I need are people who are reliable, dependable and who can write well. Familiarity with WordPress and blogging will be an advantage.

You should be able to work reasonably fast, and with minimal supervision. You will not be required attendance at any office, as this is writing work, and you are only required to submit/upload works regularly. However, I will usually follow up on deadlines, whenever necessary.

How to apply: send me an email at jangelo (at) gmail (dot) com, and include in the subject line “Application for blogging assignments”. Introduce yourself, and write a bit about why I should hire you. Do add links to your existing blogs or other written material (you can attach files, if you wish).

Include your contact numbers so I can also interview you by phone.

Do you have an interview policy? Some people adhere to no-interview or limited-interview policies, and it makes sense. Whenever you hold interviews, there is always the tendency for you to be misquoted, taken out of context, or worse, for the publication to put words into your mouth, so to speak. Sometimes you say something, and when the interview gets published or aired, it seems you’re saying a different thing altogether.

You also can’t blame writers for injecting their own perspectives on interview content. They have their own agendas, and they have their own views, too. Whether the interview is for a feature article, news-oriented, or research, there is still the tendency for your words to be minced, cut, ground, mixed, and matched until it comes out as a different meatloaf altogether. You’re simply a resource person after all, unless the feature is actually about you. Of course, you also cannot blame a reporter or talk show host for reading what’s on the idiot board.

Thoughts on the Mel & Joey interview

For example, when I was interviewed as a resource person on problogging by GMA 7’s Mel & Joey talk show (video here) the segment producer and I chatted for about two hours about how I started with problogging, how to earn from blogging, and why problogging could be an ideal way to earn for Filipinos. The end result was only about a minute’s worth of footage, out of about three and a half minutes for the entire segment. You would think that my message would have been cut down, but in fact, in some ways, the segment actually took my words out of context.

At least that was kept to a minimum, in my case. Apparently, another interviewee, fellow Filipino problogger Abe Olandres had it worse. The show seemed to have blown things out of proportion. Abe tells me that the show had mis-quoted him for saying he earns $5,000 a month from pro-blogging, when his explanation was that out of a survey he made, pro-bloggers could make anywhere from x amount up to $5,000 per month, and that he earns from a lot of different things aside from blogging.

Problogging sensationalized and dummified for TV

The way the segment presented problogging, it sort of sensationalized and dummified problogging and other online means of earning, such that it seemed to me as misleading even. Here are some points.

The segment seems to have been stuck in the stone age in their concept of blogging, in that blogs were defined as online diaries. Blogging has evolved. I can define blogging as anything from writing online journals/diaries, to sharing expert views and opinion, to viral marketing, to personal publication of news and opinion. The way blogs were presented as being online diaries might give the wrong impression that you can earn big bucks simply from writing about your personal life. Yes, it could happen, and it has happened, but I can say this is the rare exception rather than the rule.

The segment called problogging a raket, which in the vernacular pertains to something that a person does as a sideline, or when someone is moonlighting, or some means of living that is not really taken seriously. It’s a diminuitive term. Closest English term I can think of is doing odd jobs or running a fly-by-night business operation. Sadly, this is something that people from this culture of ours regard entrepreneurial actvities, especially grassroots ones. If you treat any business or profession as a raket you aren’t taking it seriously, and it you won’t reap the benefits. Do any undertaking with passion, and you’ll be sure to reap the rewards soon enough, whether it be monetary or otherwise.

Prof. Jaime Jacob was quoted as saying this business is ideal for the underemployed, unemployed and retired. OMFG! You mean to say problogging is not a good means of earning for those gainfully employed? I beg to differ. When I was working in the corporate world, part of my responsibilities was to blog, and to develop our blogging platform. Most prominent probloggers I know are not really earning full-time from problogging, but they get the respect from their audience by being prominent professionals in their respective fields, too.

Frankly, I don’t think you can count on problogging to make ends meet if you’re not gainfully employed (or if you don’t at least have an alternative stream of income). One needs to invest time, effort, and even money to start in this business or profession. I’m sure Prof. Jacob didn’t mean it to come out this way; perhaps he has been mis-quoted as well.

The segment highlighted that blogging can be a good means of earning for the 33 million unemployed population of the Philippines. I can say that only a very small minority of this 33 million has access to equipment needed to start and maintain a blog, and even a smaller subset of this would be able to have the skill, patience, and connections to successfully earn well from blogging. Wouldn’t you think so, too? As Abe mentions, it could take you up to two years to start reaping the benefits of blogging, money-wise.

Sure, you can always apply for writing positions on blog networks (and I can help you with that), but it’s just like applying for any job, where you do have to meet the expectations in terms of the skills and reliability as a writer. And if you intend to launch your own blog for purposes of earning income, you have to treat it as a business. You really need to invest time, effort and money, and you’re not even assured you would break even (a failed business venture it would be).

There seems to be a notion that blogging is a good fall-back, say if your job or business can’t give you enough resources. To the contrary, it is when you’re blogging for income that you need a fall-back, just in case you need extra funds for, say, those times the ad revenue isn’t that good, or the network writing assignments aren’t that numerous.

Of course, I can understand that the point behind the Mel & Joey segment on problogging (and the entire episode) was to inspire people by showing them that there are many ways to make a living aside from working the regular white- or blue-collar grind. However, what I’m trying to point out is that it’s not child’s play. It’s also like any job or any business—you need good foundations and the right attitude in order to meet your expected returns and rewards.

What’s a good interview policy, then?

I’ve basically ranted about the interview not coming out as expected. But at least from my perspective, it’s a better interview than others I’ve had before (such as the father’s day interview in 2006 where I was called a yaya; no offense to caregivers, but I’m my kids’ father, so don’t you think it’s stupid to call me their yaya too?).

I think a good interview policy would be this: to insist that whenever you give an interview, it has to be shown or published in full, and that you can also post or publish the interview on your own blog or site in full. This would be to avoid being misquoted or being taken out of context. Of course, this may not always be possible in television shows, and in this case, it would be a good idea to ask the interviewers to give you a copy of the entire recording, so you can publish it yourself (maybe after the television airing). If it’s an email interview, insist that the entire question and answer exchange be published. If the writer were to construct an article out of your responses, insist that you see the draft first before the writer submits or publishes it.

This way you could minimize those instances where you can be misquoted or taken out of context.

I also have something in mind about quoting policies, too, but that’s for another post. I’ve rambled on long enough here.

I’ve been a Mac user for more than two years now, but it’s only now that I’ve started to appreciate Safari. I just recently started moving away from from FireFox—at least on the Mac.

I’ve been reading raves about how Safari was lightning fast, and how Camino was quickly catching up to FireFox in terms of features, plugins, and all that. But I have been using Firefox for the longest time (the full Mozilla suite before that), and I wasn’t just about to switch away. Ultimately, it was the performance issue that made me start using Safari instead as my main browser.

FireFox is just too resource-hungry. I’ve got a (relatively) slow Mac, and I’m not just going to give all my resources to FireFox!

Also, there’s the workflow issue. I’ve been so used to FireFox’s tabbed browsing interface that I usually run it with 20 or more tabs per window, and this has both cluttered my workflow and bogged down my system. While Safari and Camino also have tabbed browsing, it’s not as easy to maintain dozens of tabs open because (1) you will run off the tab bar and have to work with a dropdown list after a certain number of tabs, and (2) you cannot rearrange tabs.

I just started this a couple of days ago, and here are some of my observations.

• Safari is definitely faster than Camino, and both are definitely faster than Firefox.
• Camino renders pages better than Safari. I guess Safari is just too standards-compliant that the least mistake in XHTML encoding breaks things up! (And we know not all sites out there have good markup.)
• I’ve grown more comfortable to the interface of Camino, which is like FireFox in many respects (it’s made by the Mozilla team, after all).
• Still, there are many differences. For one, Camino doesn’t allow you to reorganize tabs. Camino also doesn’t have session restore (which I don’t use anyway). And Camino doesn’t have those subtle refinements in the latest version of FireFox, like returning to the original tab after closing a recently-launched tab.
• I’ve come to appreciate the fact that the tabbed browsing experience is more limited in both Camino and Safari. At least I don’t have tabs cluttered all over. And I’ve learned to better appreciate working on multiple windows. Hey, that’s what Exposé is for!
• Camino doesn’t come bundled with a spell checker. And for some reason the OS X built-in spell checker doesn’t work on input entry boxes in Camino. This is a bummer especially for one who makes a living writing on blogs.
• Safari doesn’t (by default) warn you when closing windows with multiple tabs. In fact, I just pressed CMD-Q while writing this blog post and everything disappeared. Yes, all my Safari windows. Good thing WordPress has auto-save. (I’ll be looking for a plugin for that soon.) Update: I changed Safari’s Close Safari keyboard shortcut in the Keyboard Shortcuts preference to something not as easy to press.
• Safari doesn’t offer full-screen browsing by default (I guess this is against Apple’s UI philosophy, huh?).
• I miss the plugins, like FF’s drag-and-drop file attachment plugin.
• Passwords, passwords, passwords. FireFox on my PCs and the Mac have a cache of my latest passwords. Now I’ll have to key them all in again in Safari and Camino whenever I need to log in to my blogs/web apps. At least FireFox lets me take a peek at saved passwords, so I have a reference whenever I forget, when logging in via different browsers.
• I just notice TAB works better in Safari and Camino. With FireFox, you cannot tab to form buttons and dropdown menus, so you have to use the mouse to navigate. But with Camino and Safari, you can use tab and arrow keys to navigate form submit buttons and dropdown menus.

Just recently, I’ve been preferring Safari over Camino, because it’s just so darned fast, and it doesn’t take up as much of the computer’s resources.

I’m a person who would rather bear with adapting to my environment instead of having my environment adapt to my needs, whenever necessary. And given the resource constraints, I think I’m adjusting rather well to not using the browser I’m most used to. All those plugins might have been bogging down my system anyway.

Turned Off Twitter Updates

On another note, I just turned off the automatic publishing of twitter daily summaries. I’ve decided to turn those off for several reasons.

• While Twitter updates can make for substitute content in lieu of my regular blogging, I usually find myself incoherently rambling on Twitter, so that doesn’t make for good content, anyway.
• Too many Twitter updates, and too few regular posts in between makes my blog look like a link blog instead of a blog supposedly focusing on good content.
• Several of my readers have expressed their dislike of the Twitter updates (and Twitter itself, actually).

If you’re interested in what I babble about on Twitter, there’s always my Twitter status page at http://twitter.com/jangelo and the update feed at the bottom bar of this blog. BTW, here are a few posts about Twitter I recently wrote on JOAB:

• What makes Twitter so cool
• The argument against Twitter
• Do you use Twitter to chat?

So it’s back to quality programming, then!

I’ll be launching a big blog soon, and it will cover a lot of sections/niches, including technology, business, lifestyle, food/cooking, entertainment, gadgets, fitness, travel, parenting, problogging, blogging tutorials, and the like. If you’re a writer looking into publish online, or a problogger looking into expanding your portfolio, you might just be the right person for the job.

This is mostly part-time blogging, and the compensation is a mix of a monthly base plus revenue share, and also with incentives for selling direct ad space on the blog. It’s also an excellent space for cross-promoting your own blogs or publications, if you have them.

Please get in touch with me if you’re interested. Do indicate the niche/topic you want to write about, and some links to your blog or other existing body of work.

AhmedF says bloggers tend to ramble a lot, and oftentimes it’s easier to go on rambling instead of going back to edit your material to make sure it’s organized and sensible.

Blogging can be very narcissistic. Classic narcissm involved people who loved to ‘hear themselves speak’. The blog world replaces that with ‘love to write excessive text.’ 90% bloat comes free.

Of course his point is that more words = lazy blogging. Good writing involves a lot of editing. Free flow of information is great, sure. But then for your writing to be effective, your point must reach your intended audience in the most efficient way possible. Sometimes, less is better—less words, that is.

If you need X words instead of Y words (where X < Y), only lazy people go with Y.

(That discounts creative writing, of course.)