Pride is rarely something appropriate to show in public, but tonight in particular and here on my personal blog – I think it’s ok. Yesterday I wrote a blog post that became the 500th story I’ve written over the last 3 years to be featured as a headline on Techmeme. I’m quite proud of that.

If you’re unfamiliar with Techmeme, it’s a mostly-automated “meme tracker” that captures the most discussed blog posts in the tech blogosphere. More than 8,000 authors have made an appearance on Techmeme, but only 4 have made more appearances than I have.

Headline #500 was Sunlight Foundation Receives $4m For Obama Era Data Visualization. I’m glad that was the topic.

The Techmeme leader-board is maintained by robots on Crunchbase. Henry Work and Mark McGranaghan of TechCrunch gave birth to those robots. Thanks guys.

You can click on the image to see the full list, in context.

I contributed a tutorial session to the BlogOn Expo Summer 2008 last week that I thought could be of interest to readers here. It’s titled “Tracking the Margins of Your Blogosphere and it’s all about a method I use to keep an eye on the most important news from sectors I am marginally interested in. The whole Expo should be worth some of your time, the last one was quite good.

I feel conflicted about the decision I have learned that the Expo has made to do a publicity deal with Izea/PayPerPost, who are scumbags. I can understand why the Expo would do so and I can understand why armies of beginning bloggers would work with Izea. However, I do not like the idea of advertisers paying for blog coverage and I do not believe them when they say disclosure is required. See image below, click for full size.

Why did I contribute to the BlogOnExpo? I didn’t know about the Izea partnership until after I already had and I’m not sure how big a deal it is. I do want to be clear though that I am in no way in support of Izea.

That said, I hope you like the content that I and a number of other bloggers contributed to the Expo.

I’m making two exciting announcements tonight.

Personal

Most important, I’m getting married to my partner Mikalina! Many of my work contacts here on the blog haven’t met Mikalina but many of you have. She’s wonderful and I love her very much. We’ve been together for more than 4 years already and she’s studying to be an environmental engineer. Or a ceramicist – she’s a rock star in both and hasn’t decided what to do about it yet.

We’re looking to get married pretty darned soon, I proposed to her last weekend when we were vacationing on the Oregon Coast.

Yay!

Work Changes

Readers here may or may not have known that I have only been working roughly half time at ReadWriteWeb since I came on board there in September. That’s now going to change.

The other 30 hours each week has been spent doing consulting, for more companies than I can count right now.

I absolutely love consulting – but ReadWriteWeb is growing fast and site editor Richard MacManus has offered me a great full time position as his VP of Content Development. I’ll be working there full time on a number of initiatives that we’ll be rolling out in the coming months. For now we’re saying that I’m going to be working on premium content, publishing systems and all-around magic, some of which will be behind the scenes. I’ll also continue working in my capacity as lead writer there, so you can expect roughly the same output from me as well.

I am really excited about getting to bring some of my other ideas to fruition with a team of good people and Richard’s support, though. I’m very proud to have been part of the team at RWW that helped the site move from being the 27th most linked-to blog on the web up to #9 today. (Take that Mashable! And look out, ICanHasCheezburger, we’re coming to get you next! I kid, kind of.)

Consulting

I’m really going to miss the rush of consulting, but in order to stay fresh and in touch with the market, I will continue offering one 1 hour consulting session per week. Those sessions are fast paced and a lot of fun, so let me know if you’re interested in scheduling one. Feedback from past associates and clients can be found here.

Did I Mention That I’m Getting Married?

Thanks for all the interest and support that friends have offered here and privately. I’m very excited to be moving into new stages in the two most important parts of my life. I think many of you will really like what you see us come up with over at ReadWriteWeb. The joy that will come from the transition in my personal life will be much less public but I thought I’d let readers here know about it too.

One of the things I’ve been advising clients to do a lot lately is consider hiring a full or part-time community manager to communicate closely with their users online. I thought I’d write a post about why community managers are good to have, but then I thought that instead I’d ask it as a question. Do startups need community managers? If not, I’ll stop suggesting that so many of them make that type of hire!

That’s how I phrased a deliberately vague question on Twitter, and it got some great replies by email and on FriendFeed! Twenty people replied, many of whom are community managers, others of whom have hired community managers and a couple of others are cautionary or cynical. It’s a great discussion!

Most of these thoughts are unique and very worth considering – even if they don’t all agree. I’m going to turn these replies into a coherent (and weighty) post on ReadWriteWeb in the morning but I thought I would post them online first and let people knock them around a bit more first. Would you like to respond to any of these arguments in the finished post? If so, please leave a comment here and make sure you tell me where to link your name to.

The final post has been put up here, thanks to all who participated.

I was planning on putting these up on a wiki first and encouraging people to go over there and make edits for replies – I’ve done that before – but then I thought that sounded like a missed opportunity. So here’s a discussion that will turn into a blog post – your thoughts are formally requested…big thanks to the people who have already joined in. I’ll include my own thoughts in the final post.

PS. Big congrats to Drew Olanoff, who was just named Community Manager and Evangelist for Strands.com today!

I do think that startups need community managers, but that being said it depends on the community and what needs to be managed. A lot of what I do at CubeSpace is function as a startup community management, but that is very different than the work that Dawn does. I think it depends on the style and distractability of the folks in the startup and how they like to collaborate with peers as well as how they define their peers. I am not trying to be cryptic, I have just worked with a range of startups who need different kind of support and community management.

I would be happy to have a longer conversation with you about this if you are interested. It might also be a good session for http://www.sideprojecttostartup.com/.

-Eva

Eva Sari Schweber
Chief Cat Herder
CubeSpace, Your WorkSpace Community

Read on for the rest of the discussion
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I just got a very nice email from someone who found my blog and is interested in moving into consulting as well. I sent them the following thoughts that I think could be of interest to more people than just that one aspiring consultant.

The keys in my mind to being a good and employed new media consultant are:

1. Learn how to do cool new things and blog (well) about them.
2. Let people know that you are a consultant.
3. Make sure you deliver clear value to clients that extends beyond your time with them. Search engine optimization and pageviews are the most common things that consultants try to deliver to clients, but I prefer aiming for education, excitement, comfort with new tools and a sense that they can now be full fledged actors in the social media market themselves. My past clients are now happily reading OPML files I built for them, they see the value of and aren’t afraid of Twitter and they have more skills to use in their own work than they did before we worked together. (They are also doing more complicated things like this, in some cases.) I always aim to over-deliver and I don’t worry about giving clients almost everything I know – this market is too new and too big to worry about teaching yourself out of a job.
4. Stay visible by consistently sharing valuable information with other people. I don’t do that so much on my personal blog these days, but I do it on Twitter, on ReadWriteWeb.com and in face to face conversations.

That’s what’s worked well for me so far. Do other consultants reading here have other high-level points that they think are important to communicate?

I didn’t mention it in that conversation – but I do provide training and advising to other consultants sometimes. (As well as working on projects with clients together.) If you’re a consultant interested in some training on the particular things that I’m good at teaching – feel free to drop me a line.

One of my fantasies for awhile has been to hire other consultants for an hour of their training in whatever they do best. I think it would be awesome to do that once a month. Maybe a trade would be good. Oh, the possibilities are nearly endless. It’s an exciting time to be learning about the internet.

How useful can social media be for work? This afternoon I had a wonderful time writing a post over at ReadWriteWeb called Toward a Value-Added User Data Economy with the help of probably 15 people around the world, in real time. I started up a live video broadcast on UStream over EVDO from a cafe in downtown Portland, started writing the post on a publicly available wiki and then Twittered both URLs inviting people to join me. Over the next two hours a got all kinds of help, feedback and semi-related conversation to help round out what I think became a very good post. At one point I sent out a message over Twitter requesting that anyone with a background in the philosophy of economics call me to discuss a question I had. Two qualified and helpful new friends called me on the phone and are quoted in the post. Here’s the last 10 minutes of putting the post live.
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I had an opportunity to comment today on the question of how a company ought to respond to bloggers who have damaged their reputation. Below are my thoughts. I’d love to read yours, too.

The best thing that companies can do in response to bloggers who have done their reputation harm is to take the bloggers’ complaints as seriously as is appropriate. Readers will determine the validity of blogger criticism for themselves, but if the criticism is valid then there’s no hiding from it any more. It’s best to be publicly responsive, on the critical blogs and on a blog of your own if you’re that concerned about it. You may need to change your practices, just like you’d have to if a journalist in the traditional press criticized you in a way that you take seriously.

You may have to just agree to disagree. That’s ok. It’s good to presume that all parties involved are adults.

One way or the other, if you can engage and win over bloggers with honest communication then you’ll become the darling of the blogosphere among your competitors and you’ll be in a better place than you were before any of it ever happened. Imagine it’s the dawn of cable TV and a young CNN criticizes you publicly. Are you going to say that no one consumes that media so it’s not significant or are you going to try to trick CNN into believing you’ve changed your practices when you haven’t? Probably not. You can act with the benefit of hindsight today since this isn’t the first time that media has expanded dramatically to include new voices.