<-- click picture for extra.A Day In The Life Of A Small Time Technology Blogger
Here's the day in the life of a small scale blogger. In case you were wondering. Which you weren't.
Step 1: Thanks to confidential sources and confirmed, leaked internal documents, break a major national technology story in May, and then today get final confirmation on it hours before everyone else. Post your story. Well ain't you somethin'.
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Step 2: Watch the technology news website Techmeme and enjoy how other smaller scale blogging outfits give you credit for your work, something that's generally considered good form among bloggers. Some smaller outfits even quote you. Great! Groupies, here we come.
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Step 3: Watch as the bigger news outlets read your story and reconstitute it without linking back to you in order to pretend they're an originating source. This despite the fact that spending five seconds on Techmeme, Google News, or any other aggregation system clearly shows where stories first originated. Subsequently watch your digg, Slashdot and Reddit traffic (sometimes tens of thousands of viewers worth of ad revenue) go to them instead of you.
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Step 4: Watch the Associated Press ignore everyone and report on the issue as if it hadn't been discussed online for the past twelve hours in far greater detail by countless other news organizations. Note the AP even reference how the story first showed up in May AND makes reference to information that came exclusively from your source and your keyboard (in this case the potential for charging overage fees), but omits or muddles (in this case they claim Comcast announced it, which isn't true) mentioning where or how it obtained this information.
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Notice by this point, despite breaking the story, tracking it for four months, and being the first person on the Internet to report on it -- you've all but disappeared from the news time line.
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Step 5: Rejoice! You've hit the small time!
Its all about wordsoup.