This is part one of a duet that Kaila and I will be singing for you.

I will give my male perspective on being a full-time blogger, and then Kaila will share her feminine wiles -I mean views- with us. (Sorry!)

Full disclosure: This is based on my experiences only, and no one else’s.

As I considered my life as a male blogger, I ended up with these four broad categories:

Lifestyle,  Money,  Fame,  and  Sex. 

I don’t think male bloggers generally get beyond those categories. 

A.  Lifestyle issues

1.  Food, dress, hygiene.  Many small time bloggers like me can work just fine at home, and I think many do.  That means that one peek at your emails in the morning can mean that the shower ends up being delayed, sometimes for hours.  And the kitchen and coffee pot are oh-so-nearby!  Commute time, fresh air, real lunch breaks?  Bah! None of those for me.  Without a web cam, you don’t know how I look, and the rest is “too much information.”  But isn’t Dilbert so funny because it’s so close to the truth?

2.  Sleep.  This should be clear to everyone.  The sun never sets on the blogosphere.  Someone is making news or emailing me 24/7.  If I spend 1/2 hour with my wife before bed, get 8 hours of sleep from 10:30pm - 6:30am, then shower and dress for 30 minutes, that’s 9 solid hours off-line, and that’s unacceptable.

Do you know what would happen if a story broke and I didn’t see it for nine hours?  It would be launched, reviewed, dugg and done before I even opened my Netvibes page.  I might as well look for another job.  And what if someone emailed me with an urgent question and I read it nine hours later?  Mostly likely the crisis, both the good and bad ones, would have passed.

I have gotten up at 2am to use the bathroom, and stopped in the office to check my email, and my wife thought that was odd!  Richard at Read/WriteWeb emails me when he is awake in New Zealand (as is Kaila) and I am asleep in the USA.  And when I email him, he is asleep.  What’s the solution?  Why, to email them both in the evening.  Of course Laura has just come home from a hard day…

3.  Health.  I just passed one of the first milestones of a great blogger, I had to go to a Hand Clinic to see a specialist about numbness in my “mouse arm.”  I don’t have carpool tunnel ;-) yet - but rather a pinched nerve from leaning against my desk for hours at a time.   As for exercise,  until keyboarding becomes an Olympic sport, I think we can safely skip this topic for most male bloggers.  Hey, how ’bout that fantasy football league!

4.  Get a life! (or a wife)

a. Single.  I don’t know what it’s like to be a single male blogger, except that I see the changes that come over me when, like today, my wife, Laura, is out of town.  Even being a “single male blogger” for a long weekend is so corrupting that I’m reluctant to be honest here.  Suffice it to say that old TV shows, very late night emails, a lot of cereal, laundry and dirty dishes all factor into it.

b. Married.  A close friend told me the other day, “You can have a great blog and a bad marriage, or a good blog and a great marriage.  It’s your choice.”  Ouch!  A home office has got to be one of the most effective marriage killers ever devised.  When Laura comes home from a long, hard, day, do I a) leave the office, greet her at the door, ask her about her day and then share a nice dinner before watching a relaxing movie and snuggling in bed or b) do I yell “hi” without looking up, eat dinner at my desk and finish another post while she does - I dunno - in the living room?  I’ll give you four guesses, and the first three don’t count. 

But seriously, we do have rules.  Dinners together, sharing the PC at night, date nights, Saturday chores, Sundays off, etc.  (Wait, today is Sunday…) But sadly a good rule turns into a bad conversation once it is broken.  I’m trying to think of a rule that I haven’t broken yet, because “the blog needs me,” but I can’t.

B. Money.  How does a blogger like me make money?  Well, if you look around this page, you’ll see my sponsors, some random ads, and a Job Board tab.  That’s it, folks!  And while I am fortunate to have sponsors who truly want AltSearchEngines to succeed, on a regular blog it would just be:

Page Views = $.  And how do you get more page views?  Good content.  And how do you get good content?  Have new posts whenever someone - in every time zone- looks at your blog.  Be the first to post breaking news (see “sleep” above).  Leave comments on other blogs.  Keep reading and keep typing. 

If you stop, your stats plummet and so does your income. 

You must not, you cannot, stop blogging if you’re serious about approaching advertisers.

C.  Fame.  Ah, the ego of the male blogger!  Is there anything like it?  Are you on the Digg homepage often?  Have your posts been Stumbled lately?  How many contacts do you have on LinkedIn, or friends on FaceBook?  How do you rank on the Techmeme Leaderboard?  What’s your Alexa ranking, and what page does your name appear on Google?  In the blogosphere, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a statistical measurement of your worth as a blogger.  Trust me,  if you’re ranked #12 in the world in your category, you probably are obsessing about the 11 blogs ahead of you.  If you aren’t, how did you ever get to #12?  No, you’re obsessing or you’re lying, imho.

D. Sex

1.  Pornography.  I don’t care if your name is John Paul or Ron Paul, if you’re a male blogger, every other spam email says something like “Jennifer Aniston Nude Photos!”  Of course I’m too smart to click on those.  But as Kaila pointed out some time ago, many video search engines tempt the male blogger with little video boxes of cleavage and a “play” icon.  That “click” is approx. 1/16th of an inch with your mouse finger away.

I wouldn’t want my Pastor to see my click-stream, or my wife.  This is why AltSearchEngines will never feature a search engine that has adult content promoted on the home page.  Yes, I can search for literally anything,  and there is no employer or office mate peering over my shoulder, but in my mind that is all the more reason why the search engine should bear the responsibility of filtering out adult content from their index.

Oh, and toggles that say “turn adult content filtering on/off” are a joke, of course.

2. Virtual Adultery.  Here’s a weird story my friend told me last week.  Bob and Alice had two laptops at home, and as they worked in the evening, they would keep open a chat room and chat with their mutual friends online.  One night, Alice noticed that Bob’s fingers were hitting the keys, but he wasn’t showing up in the chat room….He was actually in a second chat room carrying on a side conversation with his virtual girlfriend!  A divorce soon followed.

When I have to work late to finish a post, my wife, being a normal person, goes to bed.  But then an email comes in from a female blogger.  It goes something like this - in email or chat:

“Hey, did you see my post on New Guinea search engines today?” (Me)

“Yes, it was great!  You rock!”  (That feels good.)

“Thanks, my wife doesn’t want to talk about Search every night.”  (Poor me!)

“Well, I love your blog.  I read it every day.”  (Naturally, this is what we have in common.)  “Hey, how about we do a joint post?”  (That makes sense.  Of course it will require more emails and ego stroking…)

Over time, a virtual relationship develops with another person who shares my interests, who is professionally interested in my work, and who “talks” to me late at night when Laura is sleeping. 

Is this potentially dangerous?  Ask Laura - one of her patients just left her husband for a guy she met on MySpace.  That never really happens, right?  Uh, it’s time to wake up if that’s what you believe.  Virtual friendships are almost by definition made up of shared interests, good (real?) pictures, clever comments (lol!) and delightfully vague emoticons.

Note:  If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, don’t you worry.  Kaila and I have managed to avoid these pitfalls and have a truly platonic male/female blogger relationship!

As I look at successful male bloggers, I think that it is possible to eventually grow out of a lot of these issues.  If you are fortunate enough to be one of the few with a real office, a staff, an exercise regime, and an assertive spouse, you may become just another successful businessman.  Maybe that’s where I’ll be in a few years, just like Richard.  I wonder if he’s ever been through any of these issues…

But what about you?  Are you a full-time male blogger?  Are you willing to share a piece of your life in the comments section - or something that happened to “your friend?”  Come on, I was honest with you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Guest Authors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Sphere: Related Content