Fred Wilson used a cross-country flight to write a 30-item blog-post. He says most of the points could have been Twittered, but many of them are over 140 characters, so he’s wrong. (Fred is a VC and investor in Twitter.)

I think several of the points are wonderful and some even are a window into who Fred is (#3), but I think #20 is my favorite as it has what I believe is an important insight into one of the hidden values of blogging, even if you have a readership of 12, like this one had for years.

“The simple act of writing every day, even when you think you have nothing to say, is essential to becoming a confident writer.”

Fred may not know it, but his advice echos some found in what I consider one of the best books ever written on the topic of writing, Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.” Her book is not about “how to write,” and it’s certainly not about “how to get published.” It’s about becoming a better writer. What you do with that better writing is up to you.

Fred’s blog is one of my favorites because after reading it for as long as I have, I think I know him — and I like and admire him greatly — even though we’ve never met.

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough business-oriented bloggers who have the writing skills (or the confidence) — to pull off what Fred does. There are lots of business-oriented bloggers who do a tremendous job covering their topics. And there are lots of business bloggers who let you know more than enough about their personal lives. But there are very, very few who have mastered the balancing act of doing both, without going too far with either. He’s the best.

Technorati Tags: blogging

New broadcast session:

Mike Sechrist and Michael Rosenblum discussing “VJ” concept and Mike recaps some of the WKRN. “No viewer ever called to say the video is not good,” when reporters started shooting video. Rosemblum now working with the Travel Channel to train “TJs” at Travel Channel Academy. They charge people to attend. Then the channel will pay for content from their trips that airs on the network.

Folks are trying to figure out how Brian Conley of Alive in Baghdad can make money when none of the big media companies want to form alliances with them.

Geez. This session is being broadcast live at groundreport.tv.

Technorati Tags: netj

Tag tracking Networked Journalism Summit event I’m attending today: netj. I won’t be ‘live-blogging’ the event, but will be posting some random snips from sessions and will (I’m guessing) be tweeting some from it.

Random snips from Local Pioneers session:

BostonNow - BostonNow.com uses the incentive of getting into print as motivation for bloggers. So “fame” is an incentive. Also, driving traffic to ones blog.

“Reverse publish” is a term being used to publish content from bloggers in print.

Observation from Rex: “Reverse publish” is not a good term.

Random snips from Revenue session:

My Football Writer. Great story of a sports-writer and advertising guy who were laid off from a local newspaper. Decided to join forces, start a website and sell advertising old school — pitch local advertisers in person. Now their former employer is among the advertisers on their site. Makes no money from national ad networks. Selling ads the local way. “People want to see their local ads.” They have an auction model site for local ads in Norwich.

Stephen Smyth of Reuters says Reuters is “exploring the idea of creating an advertising network” for bloggers that will also provide bloggers (in addition to revenue) more information about demographics of their audience.

Henry Copeland of BlogAds. “We’ve written tens of millions of dollars of checks to bloggers” in the past ten years. Today is “late in the game” to get into the advertising network business.

Random snips from International session:

Robbin Hamman of the BBC says they used to invite people to email in photos of a breaking news event and they’d use only 1/2 or 1%, so now they are asking people to post on Flickr and add to a specific pool, or to blog about something and use certain tags. “These are the tools they are using…it’s more honest with people who want to share the things they create.” Also, it’s hard to go through 50,000 emails to find the photos that aren’t fluffy kittens.

Technorati Tags: netj