Poor Bloggers

Note to bloggers seeking fame and fortune: According to Daniel Gross on slate.com, "as businesses, blogs may have peaked." Gross sees several signs: gushing coverage from the mainstream media, the smart guys cashing out, and gullible latecomers rushing in to try to make money.

So far, Arch Words has yet to turn a profit. In fact, if you calculated my blogging based on my freelancing hourly rate, I've probably lost more than $2000 since I started blogging last August. But that's just silly; I'm blogging for fun, not funds. I choose to blog because it's a different kind of writing than PR, literary analysis, fiction, or poetry. If someone offered to pay me for it (Arch Words the book, anyone?), I certainly wouldn't turn them down--but at the same time, I'm not including ads or following some get-rich-quick scheme.

At least I'm not looking for a job in academia. According to a different article on Slate, academics who blog can risk hurting their career prospects; blogging can be seen as frivolous writing that detracts from more serious articles in peer-reviewed journals.