A Blogger’s Summit: Is There Money In This?

I’m sitting in a room at the Renaissance hotel in Hollywood, it’s a session on blogging, led by a woman from Singapore named Siew Hoon Yeoh who writes a blog there and who told us about the Burmese blogger who went to jail and other horror stories. There is a distinguished panel at the table up front–a man from London is speaking now, next to him is a writer from USA Today, and also up there are other big-time travel bloggers.

One point the Londoner made is how wild it once was to be publishing blogs that link off the newspapers own site to their competitor’s sites. But now its accepted. Alicia Whalen owns a company called A Coupla Chicks, she does blogging for her company to promote their travel marketing efforts.

For some reason, I am unable to open Twitter that would allow me to post my minute-to-minute thoughts. Maybe there are too many people on twitter at the same time in here. A man named Stephen Joyce, the founder of Rezgo.com did get a chance to get on Twitter, and now he’s speaking about using it on his phone. Frustrating to me that I can’t put in my two cents on Twitter now.

The moderator asked people to raise their hands if they made a living from their blogs. The USA Today guy sort of sheepishly admitted that yes, he did, and I nodded over at Jen Leo, who writes a blog for the LA Times (she didn’t seem to want to admit it) and then a guy behind me piped up with a much more powerful reason…he said he didn’t make a living off his blog but it gave him a powerful resume that had landed him a great job with Orbitz in Australia. It isn’t a living but it sure helps us do better in many of our careers, like a constantly updated resume of sorts.