I recently relaunched the far too long neglected blog, This Business of Blogging, as a Twitter stream:
twitter.com/thisbloggingbiz
It's for people interested in the business of blogging beyond chasing pageviews and Google Ad clicks. There are lots of resources at that level but not so many at the next.
I finally started using Klout and it's kind of a fun game. Did so just in time to get included in Michael Brandvold's Most Influential Music Marketing Experts list on Klout.
I guess that means I need to step up my game and do something worthy of inclusion. Or more of you could just start following me on Twitter and save me extra work in my climb to the top!
I recently relaunched a project from back in my ProHipHop days called Music Biz Blogs.
It features a selection of mixed RSS/Atom feeds from 50+ music industry blogs plus a search engine to search those blogs.
It also has a sidebar featuring tweets from my Music Biz Linkmasters list plus a Flickr strip that displays the most recent Flickr pics tagged either musicindustry or musicbusiness. I switch between the two searches when one gets slow.
You can subscribe to the Music Business Blogstream via an RSS feed or by daily email. I tried to set up a Twitter account as well but it's just not working due to issues with the feeds.
When I created it a number of years ago, many of these tools were new and I was experimenting with lightweight information sites for the web. Most of them never really took off beyond a certain core audience but now that I'm writing for Hypebot, I thought it would be worth reviving.
Just letting people know that I'm again posting at All World Dance where I write about dance for a popular audience across genres including cool videos and pics.
All World Dance has been my most successful indie project in 2011 so it's high time I dug back in!
All this talk of shopping that comes with the holiday season reminds me that I shop when I want, where I want for reasons of my own.
But I did try to participate in a positive way to Record Store Day one time and it was a first and last for me for both Record Store Day and for writing for Yahoo's Associated Content:
I've been posting periodically at This Business of Blogging and here are some recent posts:
How Blogging Helped Save The Roxy
Industry Blogging Your Way Out of Unemployment
A View From The Cave Blogger on How Blogging Helped Build His Career
Food Blogging as a Business: Will Write For Food, Nourished Kitchen,
The Amateur Gourmet
Bon appetit!
In late 2004, I founded the first hip hop business blog called ProHipHop. I eventually sold it in and fully exited by late 2010. I originally wrote the following hip hop business essays for ProHipHop and have since archived them at Hip Hop Logic where I still, on rare occasions, blog about hip hop.
At ProHipHop I planned a regular series of business interviews to be called Talking Hip Hop Business but only completed one, an interview with Tahir titled:
The Revolutionary Heart of the Dirty South: Tahir on Hood Economics
I also wrote a handful of hip hop business essays for a Canadian publication, Pound Magazine, in a series called All In The Game, that were intended to address misconceptions about hip hop and business:
How Much Longer Can Hip Hop Claim Outsider Status?
Since Flux Research is intended, in part, to be a place to connect my diverse writing activities, I thought I'd mention that you can find an archive of some of my academic writing at Cultural Research. Topics include study of a dance conservatory well-known for abusive treatment of students, gender studies and curriculum design.
Most of this was written while earning my MA in Dance Studies at UNC-Greensboro followed by a PhD in Cultural Studies at Ohio State University in the final decade of the 20th Century.
I was fairly prolific with numerous peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations as well as a few book chapters. I took full advantage of academia's blind review system which features peer review without identifying the author of the submitted research. On the web, nobody knows you're a dog. In academia, blind peer review means nobody knows you're a grad student!
Sadly, I was one of those who did not end up with a teaching position in higher ed. But, if things go the way I'd like them to, it may all work out just fine.
I am highly critical of higher education in many respects but I'll save that for another day. Also, I intend to return to certain research topics but with writing for a popular audience. That, too, is for another day.
I'm experimenting a bit with This Business of Blogging which was actually a precursor to Flux Research. I'm mostly going to be posting small news items and then digging in when it seems appropriate. I thought about doing those posts here but I'm realizing that some of them would be off-topic.
If it seems like I'm having trouble focusing, well, yeah. I am!
Basically I launched All World Dance earlier this year. It has great potential but once I started writing for Hypebot I found myself pulled between two major topics with little crossover. I then put AWD on hold while I sorted out music-related news sources and, once I dug in deeply, I realized I could start writing more about music startups at Flux Research and eventually would be able to hold my own with anybody covering that topic that I've seen to date.
But it became clear that focusing on music startups at FR would conflict with what I'm doing at Hypebot so I had to let that go. Though not everything I would write would be in conflict, having to second guess myself really kills my flow so I'm regrouping.
Blogging is a big part of what I do. I've been doing it for almost 10 years and shifts in blogging as a business have greatly informed my take on web business models.
So we'll see where this next step in my blogging career will take me!
When I first began blogging about hip hop business and marketing back in 2005, I wrote a series of posts at Blogcritics with a bonus look at Ashlee Simpson! Here they are:
McDonald's Hip Hop Uniform Redesign Sparks Discussion
Hip Hop Advertising: Pepsi & DJS, Reebok & 50 Cent
Suge Knight and the Hip Hop Press
Flux Research is a Freelance
Writing Hub for Clyde Smith.
Clyde can be contacted via:
LinkedIn ~ Twitter ~ Facebook
clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com
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