I’m pro-internet (after 20 years in print) and love the opportunities it allows writers – even if that does mean levelling my income from that source or the mass ‘amateurisation’ of the form (I don’t mean that in a bad way, btw, there’s much to love about non-journalistic content).

I’ve done a couple of articles for free but I’m now at the point where I’d rather do that on my own blog as a labour of love. (I’m currently having fun playing with travel journalism on Tourist Vs Traveller, writing hometown tourism articles, publishing source material, revealing process, experimenting with web2.0 tools, etc.)

@Jenny said: “The little red warning light blinks for me especially on these “Ten Best This and That” because I know they’re often largely put together by PRs and are complete space-fillers…”

Funnily enough, I’ve just done one of these (paid for, thankfully) but I thought I’d open up where the source material is from, and how the piece was put together on my own travel blog. Why? Because it makes it as transparent as noting that one ‘travelled as a guest of…’ in the factbox.

Any sane person should take ‘top tens’ with a pinch of salt but it doesn’t mean the content can’t be interesting – or that travel journalists can’t print the other 99 ideas that didn’t make the finished piece.

The internet is also opening up forms of travel journalism and has the ability to expose exactly what is a PR job and what is not – and that can only be a good thing for the reader and journalism.

Would also recommend digital journalism academic Brad King’s blog, which looks at ‘storytelling and technology… and the disconnect between the ways we used to tell stories and the ways we can tell stories now.’

I didn’t see your last comment to me when I wrote my response.

To be clear, this is what I advised Jeremy:

“Well it’s on typepad, you don’t update often enough (once a week or more would be better) and you need a new design. If you networked a bit with other bloggers, then you’d start building a loyal and rabid following.”

Switch platforms, get a new design and network a bit with other bloggers. Not a word about social networking or any promotion. So before you tell me AGAIN that I’m advocating for the use of social media as a form of spamming, please read what I wrote.

That being said, if you think using Twitter, marketing yourself at all, being savvy about Stumbleupon or Digg or understanding basic SEO principles are spamming, then TNOOZ is a spammer. LA Times Travel is a spammer. Planet Eye and Suite101 are spammers. National Geographic’s online blog is a spammer.

Your definition is so broad, it loses all meaning.

I see you also used to work for PlanetEye. I almost had a contract with them too after they merged with B5Media’s Travel Channel. I know that they pay by traffic volumes, but their rates are really low. That’s why I didn’t sign.

Working for sites like PlanetEye or Suite101, they can give you the impression that the way bloggers who make money online do it is by spamming. It can be frustrating because you write much better content and yet you’re not getting rewarded with high traffic.

It’s easy to assume that bloggers who are happy and confident in the medium are some how cheating. After all, you’re the real talent and they are hacks.

I say assume, because I know you’ve never seen anything I’ve written advocating commenting on other sites. The fact is, if I was a blogging spammer, commenting would be the last thing I would do. Do you know how many people clicked on my URL from this post?

5.

For the effort I’ve put into this conversation, do you think I have a blog with healthy traffic because I’m commenting and spending all this time at blogs for 5 clicks?

That’s okay.

I get it.

This isn’t really about me or any of the other bloggers. You’re annoyed that some people are doing it and you’re not. If I can offer you some advice:

-Build your own site. I have higher traffic than the planet eye traveler site (where I found your profile). When you write for these one-off sites, it is a quick buck that that’s it. When it’s your site, you’re building a backlist, much like a career novelist does. It’s not the individual posts, but the volume over time that gives you the revenue.

-It’s not about spamming people, that doesn’t work. The top 150 travel bloggers– none of them spam. A way to tell when people spam is that they have a high amount of traffic but no comments and low subscribers. For travel blogging it’s about relationships. Three’s a big community out there and you’re not a part of it. We’ll lift you up. Just be nice. Then return the favor.

Anyway, I understand the frustration. I think you’re inadvertently speaking to how many journalists feel about bloggers. It just doesn’t make sense that we’re writing content people like and that’s it. We must be cheating, because look, you know good writing, and blogging ain’t it. I’d argue the point you’re missing is that it’s the medium, not the writer. If you continue to write online as if you can just copy and paste your “for print” articles into a blog post, you’ll continue to be frustrated.

Or maybe I’m making too much of a leap. I’m piecing this together from your online work, which all seems to be you trying to make money, but working for the lowest paying gigs out there. Maybe it’s none of these things and you’re just trolling for a fight. I hope not.

You may very well be a blogger, but the methods by which you also seem to advocate making blogs “successful” involve spamming strategies. You can call them other things like social networking, but they’re just a glorified spamming activity in a slightly disguised format. Like I said, some people are interested, others are not. Some online content simply doesn’t depend on the contributor doing anything more than contributing. Jeremy Head isn’t really interested. Neither am I and many another. Carlton Reid can pay who he wants and if he wants – it does take two to make a contractual agreement. Have a nice day driving your traffic.

No apologies to you either. Guess with your one-off made-up name, we won’t be seeing where or how you spam, but since you enjoy imagining you’re calling anyone out in the least, just FYI: those mass content sites like Ste101, Examiner, etc. are all out there and it’s NO big news. They’re a place where some of us can park bits of old content to earn a few extra dollars — that’s how you use them. And, more importantly, I wasn’t using the word “spam” in regards to websites, I was using the word “spam” in terms of the strategy of posting endlessly on blogs and sites with the underlying purpose of driving viewers to your own site. Which is exactly the strategy that Ms. Gilbert and others go on and on advocating. Sorry JoeBlow, you fail.

The irony of this conversation is that for apparent professional writers and/or commentators, some of you are sailing pretty close to the wind when it comes to the laws of libel and defamation.

Keep it straight, guys.