In the years since, I’ve gotten more and more cynical about politics and especially about politicians. It’s a media game, and the winner is the corporation (because that’s what candidates for the big positions are these days) with the bet media campaign, not the best political campaign.

I’ve barely taken an interest in this year’s presidential campaign. I’m not a Democrat, so I didn’t caucus — but I have no strong feelings about any of the candidates, except I’d rather it wasn’t Hilary Clinton. (Aside: Clinton was the first female member of the board of directors at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has a long history of abuses on both the labor front and the gender front. Either Clinton didn’t care, or she wasn’t able to effect any real change — either way, that’s bad news for a presidency.) But basically I feel that it’s impossible to tell anything about a candidate from their campaign — like any product, the campaign highlights their best features, exaggerates them, and shuts down entirely any negative reactions. Given the huge amount of corporate and lobbyist wealth that’s necessary to mount a bid for the presidency, how could anyone get so far as the primaries without already being deeply compromised?

All that said, this video gave me chills:

For the first time, I’m starting to feel like there’s a real person, a Mensch in Yiddish, running for office. Obama’s record isn’t spotless, and he’s definitely reaching for the center which hardly bodes well for a progressive like me, but there’s something authentic and genuine there that these singers and musicians (admittedly, they’re pros) have tapped into.

At this point, the only thing I hope is that another Republican doesn’t get to the White House. The Republican Party has become so detached from reality, I don’t even know how they can manage to get through the day, let alone exercise real power. I’m resigned as always to the fact that I’m going to disagree with whoever gets elected, that there will be plenty of call for active opposition to the policies of whoever is the next President.

But I wouldn’t mind feeling inspired a little, too — to feel as if, whatever our differences, there was a President who felt a little hopeful, a little compassionate, and a little bit driven in the White House.

I guess that’s an endorsement of Obama, for whatever that’s worth.

Update: Here’s the roiginal unaltered speech (the part highlighted in the video above starts at about 10:50):

The question is, am I better off starting a new blog devoted solely to that niche or to start integrating that content into this site?

The advantage to posting it here is that I already have a decent amount of traffic, I have a good position in Google, and I wouldn’t be splitting my attention and time off to yet another project.

The advantage of doing it as its own site is that all the material on the site would be focused on the same topic, so readers interested in the latest writing software wouldn’t have to read about my research interests or political positions or random musings on what goes on in Amazon boardroom when they name e-readers. Also, the tone of the new content is much more straight-forward and serious than here (which isn’t to say it’s not personal — it’s the same voice, but different tone and focus) so their wouldn’t be any dissonance as I jump from practical advice to joking around. Also, any ads or sponsorships could be much more tightly focused.

Any advice?

But I’m stalled in teaching. I’ve made some great big financial mistakes that mean I’m probably never going to get my PhD; nobody at my university even knows who I am anymore. I’ve chugged along at my dissertation for years, but for the last year or so it’s gotten harder and harder to motivate myself to work on it because, to be honest, neither my heart nor my soul is in it any more.

That should be sad, but it’s not, because I don’t think I ever really wanted to be a professor; I think I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. What’s the difference, you ask? Well, a professor does research, writes books, gives presentations — and occasionally, when everything else is done, teaches a class. A teacher, on the other hand, teaches — whether in a classroom, on a website, in a book, whatever.

The reality of the academic market is, I’m not going to be a professor at a “top school”, even with a PhD, because I care too much about teaching. Which is fine, except I have a family to feed and a life to live, and I can’t do that on an adjunct’s salary.

In my other career, I’m a writer. I’m pretty good at it, I think — I’ve gotten my fair share of diggs and trackbacks and thankful comments on my writing on the web, and my off-line writing gets a pretty good response. At lifehack.org alone, I have upwards of a million readers a month. And I have a good understanding of the marketing and relationship-building strategies that matter for writers in the new media. More and more I think this is where I should be focusing my efforts.

Especially since BlogWorld Expo in November. There I saw an entire professional world unfolding before my eyes, and a little glimpse of what the future holds. I mean, I’ve been blogging since 2000, but it wasn’t until BlogWorld that I really saw that one could build a career on the Internet without being a coder or a designer.

So now Affiliate Summit West is heading to town. That’s one of the nice things about living in Las Vegas — conferences come right to your doorstep! Of course, the downside is, you need a lot of money to go to them — Affiliate Summit is $1449 for the whole conference, and a couple hundred just to have a look around.

But John Chow is giving away a free full pass and a couple of free floor passes, so all of a sudden it’s worth thinking about going. I have to admit, I have a really hard time wrapping my head around affiliate marketing. Not the concept itself, which is pretty straightforward — you link to products your audience would enjoy, and if they click through and spend money, you get a piece. But few sites do this well, and from the outside, doing it well seems to be such a large job that it would eclipse the actual writing that’s supposed to be the star of the show.

I’ve made a goal for this year: By the fall semester, I plan to cut my teaching load in half. And I plan to do that not just by replacing the pay those classes bring in but by doubling it. That means, effectively, I have to hit $25000 in non-teaching income by September, which is very doable. (I’ve already accounted for about 1/3 of that with existing work, actually).

Which means that the time is now to figure out how this stuff all works — affiliate marketing, social networking, contextual advertising, all of it. If I want to write for a living, I have to figure out how to live by writing. BlogWorld was a step in the right direction — it gave me a real big push towards bringing this all together. Something like Affiliate Summit West would be a great next step!

The funny thing is that there wasn’t really any blogging software back then, so the pages were hand-coded. I can’t imagine what I would have done once I had dozens of posts to keep up with, but I wort of fell out of blogging for a while and didn’t come back until 2002, and by then there was Blogger.

While I was working on the site, I also added a a disclaimer to protect myself from legal woes. Have a look, and don’t say you weren’t warned about this site! (Note: reading this will be more fun than it sounds.)

Finally, I noticed that all the comments here are being posted anonymously, and when I did some snooping I realized that’s because I hadn’t set up the comments right. I always look at the site being logged in as the administrator; I just found out why it’s helpful to logout now and again and see how your site looks from a visitor’s perspective.

I wish I could steal John Hodgman’s line and sign off my posts: THAT IS ALL.

Thursday I had class until 2:00, then dashed over to the Expo only a few blocks from the university. Parking was $10.00! On the other hand, there was plenty of parking, which isn’t always the case at the LV Convention Center. A sign of how small BlogWorld was — the parking attendant told me attendance was only about 3,000, when I asked if I’d have any trouble getting parking on Friday. Compare that with the 200,000 that come for CES or the 50-100,000 that come for a lot of trade shows at the convention center.

Once I registered and got my pass, I headed over to my first session, called something like “Building Community on the Web”, but it wasn’t about that really, it was about comments, and most of the questions people seemed to want answered were about dealing with negative comments. I was hoping for something more along the lines of how to write to inspire discussion, or more generally, how to create a sense of community around your site. I mean, you enable comments and put up a forum or wiki; then what?

So I left that session pretty early and hit the exhibition hall. I talked to a lot of people about their products, services, and sites. The ad stuff doesn’t impress me, although I’ve nothing against ads per se. Half of the industry seems to be focusing on ways to sneak ad content in front of web users in the guise of “services”, while the other half features a proliferation of ever-smaller affiliate and performance marketing companies doing the same thing as all the other ones. Frankly, what we need aren’t more ad sources but help understanding how to use and place ads — and how to promote their sales with our sites without losing our editorial independence.

I thought this would be picked up more in my Friday session on affiliate marketing, but it wasn’t, and I blame this on the panel make-up. While the speakers were really interesting and engaging, they spoke as industry insiders, and I really would have liked to see a panel with a range of bloggers — small niche bloggers, A-list bloggers, maybe someone from a blog network — talking about their strategies for making affiliate ads work. The presenters did give one example, a site that posts video reviews of products they have affiliate relationships with, which is fine, but that’s a whole site built around their advertising. I want to know how to better fit advertising in a site where the editorial content is *not* ad-based.

Friday morning was Leo Laporte’s keynote, which was fantastic — of course, I already knew Leo was a engaging speaker. (I didn’t expect him to wear such ugly pants, though!) His talk was on new media and basically said that bloggers should be doing text, audio, and video to reach our audiences on three different levels: the cerebral (written word), the intimate and personal (audio), and the “monkey mind”, the part that goes “look, pretty pictures!” (video). Maybe we could call that the gratification-oriented level. I kind of disagree with him about the innate intimacy of audio, though — while I have no doubts that Leo’s radio and podcast listeners find him very approachable and see him as an “old friend” rather than as a “celebrity”, that’s a persona that Leo has spent a long time developing an perfecting. I don’t think that other radio hosts — say Rush Limbaugh –have the same personal relationship with their fans. I could be wrong, of course.

I had wanted to meet Leo, but after the keynote he was swarmed, and I had to go try to change my session, since as it happened I wasn’t going to be at the conference for my early afternoon session. I wanted to cancel my 1:30 session and replace it with a 10:15 am session, but the computer wouldn’t let me, and I had to talk to a half-dozen staffers in four different places before someone told me that my registration status didn’t allow me to attend the Friday morning sessions.

As it happened, I finished right about the time Leo was heading from the keynote hall to his next session, and passed not 5 feet from me, and I froze. I’m not really good at approaching people, and in the context of a random hallway encounter, I couldn’t think of anything to say fast enough to get his attention. Stupid me.

So I went back to the exhibition hall and ended up talking for a long time with a woman from BlogTalkRadio. They have an amazing system that allows you to create live audio webcasts, with integrated chats and callers, all in the browser. There’s no special download to record or listen to the show, and the player can be embedded anywhere. It’s really slick and they’re really nice. I’m going to be thinking of ways to use this for all my web projects.

At 11:00, I had to leave for a field trip at a local museum, that I had scheduled without realizing I had the conference that day. The field trip went really well — 15 students showed up (out of something like 33 in the class) and brought 4 friends, so we were a really large group. The Barrick Museum at UNLV has an amazing collection of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican art, from the collection of Mannetta Braunstein who has volunteered to lead my anthropology students through the galleries for the last three semesters now. If you’re in Vegas, you should definitely check out the Barrick!

With the field trip over, I headed back to the conference, hit the late afternoon session I talked about above, and then headed to Mark Cuban’s closing keynote. I have to admit, I didn’t really care much about Cuban — aside from making a huge business deal with a company that had no idea what it was doing (his billion-dollar sale of broadcast.com to Yahoo), what did he have to do with any off this? Why was he worth listening to? And for the first 15 minutes or so, I kept thinking this. “Be honest,” he said. It didn’t take a billion dollars to qualify him to say that — every blogger in the room knows that. “Be careful about ads.” Again, we know — many of us are attending sessions about ads precisely because we want to figure out how to deal with the pressures of advertising on our independent editorial voices. And so on — there was nothing that a Blogging 101 class wouldn’t cover in the first session.

But I enjoyed the keynote, and ended up staying even when it went over time, because a) as it happens, Cuban is a pretty engaging speaker, and b) it’s a different perspective. So many of us were there because of our passion for writing and a desire to make at least part of a living doing what we love, but Cuban isn’t really a writer, he’s someone in the public eye who found he had some things he needed to say. I think a lot of bloggers are in the same boat — they don’t care about writing, they care about telling their stories, and blogging, podcasting, making videos and uploading them to YouTube, Twittering, and all these other social media we’ve invented in the last few years offer them ways to do that. In the past, even someone with the clout of Mark Cuban would have had to, say, issue a press release or hold a press conference if he had something to say, and hope the media covered it fairly, if at all. Blogging gives Cuban some degree of control over how his stories are told — and some degree of feedback.

And along the way, I think he’s discovered, it’s fun, too.

So that was BlogWorld. I have a stack of business cards I need to go through and sites I need to look at and evaluate and see if they’re useful to me. I got some pretty good schwag, most of which has been distributed among my step-children already. I didn’t network too much, which is a shame — I’m not particularly good at it, but I’d hoped to meet at least a few fellow-minded bloggers. It’s a funny thing, though — I could have sat next to my favorite bloggers in the world and not known it, since I don’t know their faces and my eyes aren’t good enough to make out their names and sites on their badges without being painfully obvious. They oughtta print the site name HUGE so it can be seen quickly when people walk by! One other thing I noticed is that the conference was strongly conservative. There was a sub-conference of religious bloggers and another of milbloggers, which definitely shaped the overall feel of the event. In any case, I had fun and learned some things, and I’m looking forward to next year’s Expo.