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Blogging news stories as they unfold is one of the most

exciting and controversial applications of technology

that bloggers have discovered. One thing that makes the

blogosphere so active is the fact that it is possible to

update a blog instantaneously, so the news on blogs

tends to be more current than the news in the paper, or

on television. Unlike news delivered by these other

media, news that appears on blogs does not have to

travel through a series of editors and administrators

before it reaches the public eye. This has some

advantages, and some distinct disadvantages.

One of the most notable cases of news hitting a blog

before appearing in other media took place in July 2005

when terrorism struck London. As passengers were

evacuated from a subway car near an explosion, one

man took several photographs of the scene with his

cellular phone, and within an hour these images were

posted online. First-person accounts of the catastrophe

began appearing on blogs soon after these photos

appeared, and people all over the world learned about

the events in London by reading the words and seeing

the photos posted by bloggers.

The fact that these stories and images were being spread

directly by individuals operating without the added

filter of a reporter helped to make the crisis feel very

immediate to people across the globe. When it comes to

blogging, news often appears in a very personal context.

This has the potential to be the beginning of an exciting

new era of reporting, one that takes “New Journalism”

to it’s logical next step by putting the power to shape

how the news is written and read directly into the hands

of the public.

Many bloggers and cultural commentators who are champions

of the weblog movement feel that this growing trend of ind-

ividuals who are getting their news from blogs is a good thing, because it makes the flow of information more democratic. By decentralizing the control of news, blogs allow more voices to enter the field of debate about important current events.

However, many people are adamantly opposed to the use of

blogs as news outlets, and there are plenty of good arguments

on this side of the debate. Unlike newspapers or tv stations,

few blogs have fact-checkers, and there is little attention paid

to journalistic accountability on many blogs. This can lead to

the rapid spread of misinformation, and more than one false

report has taken the blogosphere by storm. The questions

about whether blogging news as it happens is ethical or not

are very complicated, but no matter where you stand on the

topic of current events blogs you are almost sure to agree

that this movement has the potential to revolutionize how

modern people get their news.

Blogging for Profit Begins With a Long Term Plan

Many people dream of blogging for profit, and this goal is not far beyond the reach of someone with average intelligence, a willingness to work hard, and a basic grasp of blogging tech. However, very few people manage to reap the profits they want from their own blogs. Most people who attempt to make money with their blogs do not succeed for two reasons.

Often, bloggers have unrealistic expectations of how fast their

readership will grow and how much money they will make, and when these expectations are not met the disappointment can crush the desire to continue blogging. The other trap that many bloggers fall into has to do with lack of planning. If you want to turn a profit as a blogger, the key to success is to make a real

life plan and stick with it.

To succeed at blogging for profit, the main thing that you will

need is a large readership. The higher your traffic, the more advertisers will agree to pay you.

However, cultivating the regular visitors that you will need in

order to make a profit isn’t easy. As more and more blogs

each day, having a great idea or a wonderful writing style is

no longer enough to get attention. You need to be able to

market your blog effectively.

Too many bloggers spend all of their time writing posts and

almost no time marketing their project. To be certain, updating

as often as you can is a great way to keep your blog high on

blogrolls and high in blog search engines like technorati,

and once your readers know that you update frequently they

will return to your site on a regular basis.

However, it does not matter how often you update if nobody

is reading your page, so don’t skimp on the time that you

spend drawing visitors to your site. To make your dreams

of blogging for profit a reality, try decreasing your number

of posts and using some of that time to draw new visitors

by setting up link exchanges with other bloggers, making

contacts in the blog community, and following other

established modes of winning traffic.

Of course, even if you are a marketing genius or have a really

great idea for a blog, success is not going to happen overnight.

Building the kind of readership that blogging for profit requires

takes a lot of time, and in all likelihood it will be at least several

months before you are able to turn much of a profit. Try to stay

committed to your blogging project during this initial rough

period. To stay motivated, set goals for how often you will update and how many readers you want to attract, and then reward yourself for sticking with your plan.

If you are like me, you probably have been hit hard by this financial crisis.

There is a lot of uncertainty in the air.

Conventional wisdom is not working any more.

Many are seeking to understand this turmoil and are wondering what they should be doing to not only survive, but thrive, during these turbulent economic times.

I recently published an article where I introduce a framework, called the 5Es, as a way to understand the magnitude and drivers of the change underway in the global economic landscape.  These changes are causing stress and anxiety for all of us along with the feeling that a financial rip tide is sweeping us out to sea.

As Steve Forbes likes to say, increasing our financial education and the resulting empowerment from this improved financial literacy are the keys to a recovery from this financial crisis.

In that spirit, I am going to describe one the 5Es, “the transfer of power and money from the West to the East” … use this description as a way to understand a key driver of the turmoil being experienced by many in the West and as a way to have your eyes open to the new alternatives that can be used to create wealth.

Let me start by providing an excerpt straight from my previous article … “from west to East … there is a transfer of wealth and power underway to the Asia Pacific region, especially China.  The USA is currently the world’s largest economy however it is estimated that China will be the world’s largest economy by the middle of this decade.  A lot of churn and turmoil is associated with this change.”

Some examples of this transfer follow.

From an auto market perspective, China and India caught and passed the US, the European Union, and Japan in 2008 as the world’s largest auto market.  And, the gap has even widened during this recession … while the heads of the US auto makers were in Washington pleading with the US Gov’t for a bail out

Cars don’t run in a vacuum.  They need roads, gasoline stations, and gasoline … all of this requires a lot of building materials and oil.  Just think about oil for a minute (as a reminder, Energy is another one the 5Es in the evaluation framework).

The U.S. consumes up about 25 barrels of oil per person per year. The oil consumption in China and India is tiny compared with the consumption in the US. China is at 1.5 barrels of oil per capita annually. And India barely registers.

So one can only imagine that as these economies grow and take up more of a share of the global economy, their oil consumption will rise exponentially.

Although China already has more than 160 cities, with each having a population of greater than one million (the U.S. has nine, the U.K has two), it still consumers half of all the world’s cement as it strives to build 97 new airports, 500 additional coal fired plants, and 30 nuclear plants in the next decade.

As a result of this build-out, just imagine what it takes to house, feed, and cater to the needs of China’s 1.3 billion people … it is no small task.

Commodities that are in demand in China, yet in short supply in China, include agricultural commodities like soybeans and potash, copper, natural gas, uranium, bauxite (important in making aluminum), chromium (a steel additive) and manganese (important for making stainless steel).

As far as keeping your eyes open to alternative wealth creating strategies, it boils down to investing in what these economies need, but don’t have.

In previous articles, I wrote that many of us are evaluating alternative wealth creating strategies outside of the US Dollar … outside of dollar-denominated assets … perhaps emerging markets … perhaps energy assets that are inherently useful like oil rigs, hydropower, or methanol plants … perhaps precious metals, water rights, oil, natural gas, potash mines, or gold mines … things hard to build, difficult to replace, and costly to substitute … definitely not financial stocks, definitely not retail stocks, definitely not commercial property.

I trust this article provides a little more insight as to why emerging markets with a demand for things that are in short supply (such as oil, food, water, precious metals, and potash mines) represent alternative wealth creating strategies.

In addition, a good book to read would be “Asia Rising” by Jim Rohwer.  This book provides a good read as to the economic success of the East and Southeast Asian countries and some insight as to lessons the West can learn from this prosperity in terms of breaking the paralysis of special-interest politics.

The world is changing dramatically and the emerging markets will potentially provide some light at the end of the tunnel.

I will continue to build upon the “transfer of wealth and power from the West to the East” theme of “the 5 E’s” framework, and the other Es in the framework (these are Energy, decline of (USA) Empire, Experiment with paper money, and Economic cycle) in future articles and updates at my blog which is at http://aspenIbiz.blogspot.com . 

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Lobbying by London Mayor Boris Johnson has paid off once more – and put the city further forward in the open data stakes

Tube train, on time. Photo by fabbio on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Want to get the bus and underground timetables, in a zippy XML format? You can, right now, via the London Datastore.

As the page explains, “The data available in the attached zip file consists of almost 800 xml files, with each relating to a particular service i.e. one per tube line, bus route, riverboat route, dlr route etc. Each xml file contains the following data elements: StopPoints; RouteSections; Routes; JourneyPatternSections; Operators; Services; VehicleJourneys.”

Getting this data out hasn’t been a trivial task – and my understanding is that it’s been down to persistent lobbying from the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, himself.

This is another significant tranche of data to come out of TfL – an organisation that for years has been seen by developers and some within the Greater London Assembly as something of a black box; as one person put it to me, “you pour money in at one end and you get transport out at the other, but you’re not allowed to see inside it.” Previously, TfL released data about locations of bus stops, and then some real-time data about movements of tube trains – which led, you’ll recall, to Matthew Somerville’s live tube train map. (Unfortunately, the API for that has been suspended: it couldn’t cope with 10m hits per week, and hasn’t come back since June. Ahem, ahem, TfL.)

You can see all the London transport-related datasets via the London Datastore. With Johnson pushing it, though, light is starting to shine inside TfL.

By far the most successful demonstration of the power of making data free though has come from the London Cycle Hire scheme – where you can now get real-time information about availability of bicycles for hire, by location, in apps for Android and iPhone.

But if we can now add information about bus and tubes to apps like that, we’re getting closer to the point where TfL really is being run for the citizens of London, rather than (as many bureaucracies are) for its staff. The distinction is a fine one – most organisations think of themselves as having their users’ best interests at heart; the difference is that when you can get feedback, then the organisation may discover things about their users that they never knew.

There’s still some way to go with TfL: for example, it collects data about how many cars pass particular points (using induction loops in the road) which is used for traffic light timing; that’s data that many developers would love to get their hands, or processors, on. You never know: if the pressure continues, it might come too.

You might think that Boris Johnson’s presence pushing this along is just a bit of grandstanding, but that wouldn’t be correct. He’s actually been in the vanguard of politicians introducing open data. If you have a long memory for public data-related stories, you’ll recall that he did a rather neat end-run around the Labour administration’s Home Office in 2008, when as part of his manifesto while running for the office of London mayor he declared that he would publish crime maps.

We were a little sceptical on the Free Our Data blog, although the blocking attitude of the police and the Information Commissioner’s Office did nudge us towards Johnson’s side.

Johnson did go on to publish them, and London has been in the forefront of cities which have tried to do innovative things with the data that its local government and authorities collect. First came the London Datastore, launched in January. Then came the datasets. And that brings us to the present day. For the many who don’t live in London, this might all seem academic – but really the Datastore, and the political impetus behind it, are examples for the rest of the country that making data open and reusable actually can have a benefit. Would the Bike Scheme be as useful if you couldn’t find out availability easily? Probably not. And once the TfL timetables have been processed, someone is sure to have a smart use for them.

Can’t wait, personally. Overall, 2010 has already been a fantastic year – possibly the best ever – for making data free: first the London Datastore, then the Ordnance Survey OpenData release in April, and now the drive by central government to get both central and local government to publish data (soon to include the text of contracts) about spending. Results don’t come much better than that.

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