Would you be brave enough to give up your day job to become a professional blogger? That’s what Tom Foremski did two years ago.
He followed his gut instinct and gave up a six figure salary and six weeks paid holiday as an FT reporter to do so. His Silicon Valley Watcher weblog is now regarded as one of the most influential blogs in the US.
He was the first mainstream media journalist to leave one of the world’s top newspapers to try to become a professional journalist blogger. Life was tough, some days he couldn’t even afford to pay rent and he also had his electricity cut off. Then his prayers were answered when two sponsors came along. He says:
“The support from my sponsors came in the nick of time, otherwise I’d now be blogging from a friend’s couch and sneaking bandwidth from tolerant neighbors, and maybe even pocketing food from press events for my kids…
“I might be poorer but I am incredibly richer for the experience of the last two years. I have met and connected with an amazing number of fascinating people and I feel part of a community. I’m incredibly happy to be involved in the emergence of this new media, and in the innovation that is happening within a rapidly transforming media sector.”
Thanks to Geoff for bringing this to my attention. By the way, can someone please tell me what bandwidth is?
Brave guy.
Ellee, imagine information flowing through the Internet into your home as a pipe with flowing water.
The bigger the pipe the more water. Bandwidth is the term for the size of the Internet pipe. “Stealing bandwidth” is usually related to wireless Internet connections, if your neighbour has an open wireless network (not password protected) you can use their Internet service for free.
If everyone (or a decent sized critical mass) had open wireless connections you could set up your laptop or ipaq wherever and hook up to the Internet.
Geeky utopia.
Ah, now I know, it’s a bit sneaky isn’t it. Thanks James.
pedant alert!
Bandwidth is not simply the size of an internet pipe. It is the width of the range (or band) of frequencies that an electronic signal uses on a given transmission medium. Sometimes – for simplicities sake – this is expressed in terms of data transfer rate in bits per second (bps). However, because the Internet is made up of interconnected network points (some using transfer nmethods that are measured in cell rate not bits just to add confusion) their are multiple bandwidth capabilities.
I think I’ll shut up now unless of course you want me to start talking about single hop specific ATM virtual pathing?
Does it show that I’ve been working in the Internet industry for nearly ten years? 🙂
damn I put “their” instead of “there” in that reply. How embarassing.
A good defintion is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth
James is a good analogy its the diameter of the pipe (you will hear people who are on ‘fat pipes’) That is T1 leased lines very fast and equal speeds uploading to internet as the download speeds. You have a ADSL line the A is for Asynchronous that is you have a faster connection into your house than when you are uploading to internet. The DSL is Digital Subscriber Line, your phone is analog and thats why it comes with a funny white box that seperates the analog-voice and digital-computer bits out.
In techie land you have high bandwidth people (who can suck in vast amounts of info quickly) = Bill Gates to low bandwidth people = normal people.
Also thats why my favourite expression at Reboot8 by Ben Hammersley was:-
IT people are plumbers and they shouldnt forget that!
Hi Ellee did you see Tom has replied to this post here http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2006/06/why_is_there_no.php
Thanks for bringing it to my attention Geoff. I have written an updated post about it.