For whatever reason, I've come across a lot of posts lately about blogging for money--either for it or against it. I already expressed my thoughts about it; namely that for me, personally, blogging is about my passion for writing. Well, that and being able to share my strong opinions about things that I find fascinating but most people I know couldn't care less about and therefore aren't interested in hearing me talk about.
But I digress. Today, in the course of just a few minutes, I came across two more articles about blogging for money--each the polar opposite of the other. The first was a Wall Street Journal article America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire. The WSJ article starts off "In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers." As you can guess, the article goes on to call blogging "America's Newest Profession."
Then I jumped to Penelope Trunk's blog post for today, Reality check: You're not going to make money from your blog. Obviously there's no guess-work involved in figuring out what her take on the blogging for profit issue is.
The bottom line is that the whole debate may soon become a much more moot point, as the Federal Trade Commission is currently evaluating whether bloggers for hire are violating advertising laws. For all anyone knows, a blogger who is making a living off "America's Newest Profession" today may be having to shell out money for a lawyer tomorrow.
As attractive an idea getting free stuff in exchange for blogging about it is, it's definitely not worth going to jail over.
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