Blogging Interview Questions and Answers

1 :: Can you imagine a time when weblogs have too much influence or too much power? Will this be any different than having five or six companies controlling the media, like we have today?

Web blogs having too much influence or too much power? Hmm... that's a tough one - you're talking to a guy who drinks blogging Kool-aid for breakfast.

I think blogs provide a healthy balance to the recent consolidation in the media industry. All that consolidation has caused an enormous drop in the diversity of voices in the media. But with the rise of personal publishing, I don't think it's fair to say that "five or six companies [control] the media" anymore... at least, if you broaden the definition of media to include blogs.

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2 :: The blogosphere is a dimension of the media. What do you think about the people behind the scenes? What types of people are driven to run weblogs? What is the payoff and what does that mean for the health of the blogosphere?

Who are the people behind the scenes... the bloggers? the blog tool creators?

As someone who falls into both categories, I guess I have a soft spot for people who are passionate. Providing tools that let people express that passion... well as an atheist, that's as close to God's work as I can come.

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3 :: What is dangerous about the blogosphere? What should people worry about?

Blogging can be like pouring gasoline on the fire of someone's ego.

That's bad enough, but then take a couple people like that and let them cross-blog across the Blogosphere... it can get ugly.

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4 :: Are there good times and bad times to post a story so that it enters the blogosphere rapidly? Are there good days and bad days too?

It depends on what your goal is, I guess.

If you want to hit #1 on Blogdex or Daypop, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are good days to post something. Weekends tend to be very low traffic. If you publish on a Saturday night, your post gets linked to on Sunday and you'll be #1 on Monday, which can be a high traffic day.

That's probably not the healthiest reason to be blogging. And as of right now, Blogdex doesn't really drive a lot of traffic. Just post whenever you want. I like to finish my articles over the weekends and publish on a Sunday. It's probably not the best day to publish (lots of stuff comes out on Sunday night), but if you worry about your ratings too much you'll get sucked into the crazy world of web traffic counters and server logs.

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5 :: Weblogs have increased the speed of reporting news. Has the quality of news increased, decreased, or remained about the same? Why?

My personal take is that weblogs have two roles here:

* They help break stories with their own grassroots reporting
* They help fact check and filter stories that have come out

Any individual blog post may have factual errors. But the Blogosphere as a whole is actually quite robust. I trust the Blogosphere to keep Journalists honest... and to give me a range of opinions on any given article. So in terms of my experience, I'd say that the quality of my news experience has increased.

I think the quality of news in general though, has stayed about the same. No futher comment there.

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