The Life & Times of Sooz

As an update to my entry the other day about organizing an Event Group Blogging outing for OLLY'S PRISON in Harvard Square, I've got tickets for tomorrow night's performance at 7:30 PM at the Zero Arrow Theater. It's a bit last minute notice but I wanted to squeeze this in before Michael and I left on our road trip this weekend. If you're a blogger and you'd like to join us tomorrow night, let me know. I have four tickets (out of six) currently available.

When I signed Exploit Boston! up as a new publisher to sell advertising space via Blogads a few weeks ago, I don't think I had to fill out the pre-qualifer form that is on the site today. It's interesting that they now (?) only want sites that have 1,000 or more daily visitors and a "laser sharp focus." (Do they mean razor sharp focus?)

I don't think you need a site with a minimum of 1,000 daily visitors to make it appealing to advertisers. Even a site with just a couple hundred visitors could be useful as long as there is relevance between the advertiser and the blog publisher.

Update: It's not new. Nevermind. Have I mentioned yet I'm going on a much needed road trip/vacation in a few weeks.

One of my personal resolutions for 2005 is to keep negative and personal stuff off of sooz.com for the most part. It looks like last week was a banner week for not following this plan. (Afterall, I've got a Live Journal account for the personal blather.) And of course the irony is that today I've been sending out emails to a few New England bloggers who write about arts/entertainment/media related topics to try to entice them to join the New England Arts, Entertainment and Media mini-network I'm curating at Blogads. Hopefully the Blogads mini-network concept will evolve. It'd be nice if curators received some sort of incentive for the legwork of recruitment, etc.

Poking around Craig's List I came across this ad from a company called Niner Niner looking for Boston webloggers who want to write on specific topics and get paid. They seem seem to be setting up something that resembles the Gawker Media and Weblogsinc networks. I have no idea who Nine Niner is. Anybody know anything about them?

I just checked the whois record for their domain name and it appears the company is based in St. Louis and they've been around since September 2004.

I'm curating a new mininetwork in the Blogads network for arts and entertainment related weblogs in New England. Henry Copeland of Blogads wrote about the new tool a couple weeks ago including the first mininetwork that Amy Langfield is curating for New York City.

I decided to focus on arts and entertainment related weblogs and not just a general purpose New England network because I think it will help us reach advertisers who better match our blogs. Currently the following sites are in the mininetwork: This Modern World, Hacking Netflix, Exploit Boston!, Boston Sports Media Watch, pc4media and WestPortNow.com. If you're interested in possibly being selected for the mininetwork, sign up with Blogads.

Last night's Boston Blog Meetup was at Christopher's in Porter Square. A freelance writer for the Globe surprised us with a visit, too. I posted the list of attendees over at BostonBlogs.com.

tags: Boston Blogs, Meetup

Nick Finck at Digital Web Magazine has an excellent collection of notes while attending the Business Blogging Summmit 05 in Seattle.

• BBS 05 Keynote
• BBS 05: Blog Business Models: What Strategies Make Money
• BBS 05: Building Traffic: Posting isn't Enough!
• BBS 05: The Entrepreneurial Blog: Monetizing Your Interests
• BBS 05: Picking a Platform: Blogging Engines Compared
• BBS: True Voice: The Art and Science of Blog Writing
• BBS 05: Good Blog Design: Speed, Accessibility, Transparency, and Clarity
• BBS 05: Corporate Blogging: Strategy and Policy
• BBS 05: Marketing Strategies and Tactics: PR and Beyond
• BBS 05: Dealing with Bloggers: Partnering and Defense Strategies
• BBS 05: Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More

The Nearest Neighbor News Network is a collaborative filtering RSS aggregator recently created by Jacob Lee and Ben Hodes, students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I submitted my feedburner feed for my site but it's noted as invalid in the NNNN system. Looks like that might be a bug to send their way. They've got a development blog documenting their adventure. [via SearchViews]

UPDATE: I tried to fill out a comment on their development blog but it didn't go through. I guess I'll try a trackback and then old fashioned email. This is a screen shot of the problem I had adding three feeds.