Home & Small Office Computer Guide

If you haven’t tried Wikepedia before then before you do perhaps you should take heed of what the co-founder - Jimmy Wales - is now admitting.

He now freely admits that there are real quality problems with the online project.

Well I would have thought that was always going to be a very real and almost unavoidable danger.

If you don’t know about Wikepedia let me give you an analogy so that you can understand the scope of the project and the looming problems.

Think of it as an enormous online encyclopedia - with parts of it written by anyone who wants to. There doesn’t seem to be any requirement for them to have any knowledge of what they are writing about. The general idea is that someone who does know what they’re talking about will come along and correct the misinformation that others have added.

Perhaps I am being a litte unfair but it is only and analogy.

In case you didn’t realise it what you are reading here is a blog. Of course if you want to get really technical it’s actually called a web log but whatever you choose to call it what you’re looking at on this particular blog are my thoughts and experiences on anything that might be related to computers and thi internet.

And blogs are a growing part of the Net. They’re such a growing part of the Net that it’s estimated that a new blog is started every second of every day. Of course most of them don’t last all that long; the quickly fade when the author suddenly realises one or all of three things:

Blogs might look easy but maintaining a regular posting schedule can be very hard

There is money to be made from advertising - but it takes a long time to begin to see a return for all the hard work

Finding something to talk about day after day can be hard and many people soon run out of things to say

But for those who really work at it there is good money to be made. After several years of very hard work at least one guy here in Australia is now making over $100k a year from advertising on his blogs and there is at least one person in America who makes over a million dollars a year from advertising on his blogs.

You will note that I used the plural and that’s the case. If you want to make money then you need to have several blogs or even a network of blogs.

Only then are you likely to make the really big money that so many people wish they could be making.

Perhaps one of the biggest blog networks out there is a group known as Weblogs Inc and rumour has it that AOL have just made an offer to purchase Weblogs Inc for a figure said to be somewhere between $25 and $30 million.

I’m sure that if the sale goes ahead we’ll be seeing a lot more blogs started every second.