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Patrick McDonald let me know he has started a new blog, PHM3. The subtitle is “Information, Libraries, and Provocative Ideas,” and the first one is a doozy: The Google Proposition - Challenging our Identity, Furthering Our Mission?

“Imagine this: Google, whose mission is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, realizes it’s too expensive or just not worth it to fight the fight to scan and make copyrighted books available online. Instead they acquire one or more publishing houses (who perhaps can be had for a reasonable price because their major media parents are disappointed with their contributions to the corporate bottom line) with the intention of providing unlimited simultaneous, free access to texts online while ‘monetizing’ that access via advertising in the same way they have very successfully monetized search results. Then being as resource rich as they are, Google attracts writers and book producers by offering better compensation in exchange for the right make their to-be-published works immediately and ‘universally accessible’ online. In addition to monetizing book access, Google claims it is doing ‘good’ by making this information ‘universally accessible and useful’ free of charge to readers….

Would we protest, perhaps out of a short-sighted desire to preserve ourselves as an institution as we have traditionally existed?

OR

Would we embark on some kind of ‘transformational change’ (as many before me have called it), satisfied our mission of providing freely available information is substantially (if not perfectly acheived - perhaps negotiating electronic and hard copy fail safes to maintain access in case Google and others become ‘evil’) and reorient and redevote ourselves using freed up resources to address other community needs - hosting cultural and/or social centers, focusing on instructing and becoming ‘People’s Universities’, navigating the available information etc….”

Could Google redefine copyright (digital fair use rights really) through behavior rather than law? As Anil Dash notes, “If YouTube has created something fantastic, and it required copyright violation to do so, then copyright law should be changed to make it legal. Laws are ours, people — they’re not carved on stone tablets.” What would digital fair use rights look like in this model? You can remix and re-use content, as long as you keep the ads? Do the ads become part of the copyrighted work?

Provocative indeed - leave your thoughts over on Paul’s blog, and then subscribe to his feed to find out how he tops this post.

Publishing models have shifted dramatically, but don't let that crazy situation guide your writing career. 

Read this article if you don't believe me. The Economist makes the shopworn point that print publications are in trouble while making the not-so-shopworn point that magazine advertising rates are holding steady.

What does this mean for us? Keep pitching magazines. They pay better, people read them, and they will survive this publishing earthquake, in one form or the other.

The article makes this winning point:

"Whereas newspapers have concentrated on transferring print journalism to the internet, magazines offer people useful, fun services online—Lagardère's Car and Driver website, for instance, offers virtual test drives, and Better Homes and Gardens online has a 3D planning tool to help people redesign their homes."

Notice that the quote lacks hyperlinks to the sites it mentions. When you follow my advice and end up writing for print/online magazine hybrid products someday, teach everybody how to code a HTML hyperlink, especially when highlighting a good example of web savvy publications. That's the second thing I learned from The Economist.

The Internets have been buzzing about Dave Eggers all week, applauding and booing his $250,000 grant from the Heinz Foundation--an award going straight to Eggers' non-profit writing center, 826 Valencia.

No matter what you think, you should listen to the man's advice about writing. The Guardian has an interview about his "literary philanthropy," and the article had a few lessons for fledgling writers about how magazines and other publications will function in this new media world.

The sky is falling in the writing industry, and things will look much different in ten years. Eggers models the ideal writer: somebody comfortable with small staffs, extracurricular work, and multi-tasking. Dig it: 

"With The Believer (www.believermag.com) the question was how to put together a publication without ads and without raising any money. How do you keep the staff lean? You design a template simple enough that one person can maintain it - the copy-editing, photos, layout, everything, even at 65,000 words ... I just know it works for us: small, agile, adaptable, and the centres are as self-reliant as possible."

People love to make fun of bloggers. They call us pajama-heads, wanabe journalists, and opinion surfers. All these debates and funny names will seem quaint in ten years. Soon we will realize that bloggers are one thing, and one thing only.

Bloggers are writers who use blog software to publish their work on the web.

Nothing else matters. Ten years from now most of writing will be published on the web, and you don't want to be one of the sad suckers who can't use the technology.

Bookseller Chick and novelist Kevin Radthorne agree with me, and just published a landmark survey of her readers, answering the fundamental question "Why blog?" with some expert advice. Here's a taste:

"Blogging, with all its informality and immediacy, creates a sense of closeness between author and reader that you can foster with the tone or voice that you use for each post. By assuming an approachable style, you invite the reader to put aside their shyness and interact."

Sorry for the lax posting the last two days, I've been swamped with work at my various writing jobs. Which brings me to today's point.

Are we heroes or victims of the online revolution? 

I constantly fret that online publishing will shackle writers to pulp fiction production schedules. I'm scared that ten years from now, thousands of frenzied writers writing millions of disposable blog posts, all of us earning Depression-era salaries. 

But you know what cheers me up? Reading people like Orante Churm, who are cheering on our new generation of web-based writers, telling us to keep on writing. Dig his essay for Inside Higher Ed, a bit of encouragement for all us bloggers, journalists, writers, or whatever you want to call us, toiling in the the digital trenches.

Check it out: 

"Bérubé added, however, that he felt blogging was not a form of publishing (at least not one worthy for the c.v.), that it was 'marginal in the best sense of the word.' My writing here is not academic, nor was meant to be, and often it’s not even about the academy, but it’s of publishable quality and worthy of my c.v. That’s why I took an interest in the recent Ithaka Report, which says 'the boundaries between formal and informal publication will blur.' (Also, I always do what IHE resident intellectual Scott McLemee says to do.)"

(Thanks, Maud!) 

"Hey all - sorry about this hiatus I'm taking, I have to crack out the next book mighty quick, and it's like chewing tacks in the sweltering sun while having someone serenade you with fingernails on chalkboards."

That's a little slice of the writing life straight from the MySpace blog of novelist Heather McElhatton. She just finished her choose-your-own adventure book for adults, Pretty Little Mistakes, and she's already being hounded by the publishers for another.

McElhatton keeps close tabs on her readers on the blog, asking for research help, sharing stories, and generally just sharing with her growing readership.

She's our special guest this week, and today she explains how blogging and online promotions helped her writing career.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing. 

Jason Boog:

You have a webpage, Myspace page, and some interesting web promotions for your book. How did you establish these links to your readers, and how to you keep them interacting with you? What are the websites/web resources you like to read, and why?

Heather McElhatton:

I like maintaining my own webpage and Myspace page because I get a better feeling for the people reading my book. Continue reading...

Sponsored Review

There are many writers looking to cash in on digital media by creating reading and writing communities, writing for online publishers or by creating independent columns on which to share their craft and artistry. Likewise advertisers are beginning to recognize the power of the blogosphere, and begun seeking to utilize the power of new age opinion leaders.

Sponsored reviews – being paid by a company to write a review about their website, product or service – are a fairly new way to do this, and SponsoredReviews.com seems to have the best model thus far.

Here’s what I like about SponsoredReviews.com:

Two-Way System. SponsoredReviews.com is the only site with a hybrid system that allows advertisers to actively pursue bloggers for specific reviews, or passively wait for the bloggers to find them.

Bidding System. This enables publishers and advertisers a bit more power by allowing them negotiating review prices.

Bi-Weekly Payout. Most sponsored review sites only pay monthly but on SponsoredReviews.com, writers get paid every two weeks! Faster cash is better right? They also have the lowest fee at 35%, which means you get paid more per individual review.

Company Blog. There is even a blog on which SponsoredReviews.com regularly evangelizes about the benefits of writing sponsored reviews. It started out as a resource guide for blogging. Check it out…

Visit the site and read the FAQs for more details, but it really is that simple.

Everybody loves to argue about what will happen to newspapers in ten years. We have a much more pressing problem: what will become of the journalists and writers employed by newspapers?

Ed Champion cheered me up last week, discussing that very problem. Check it out: "[I]t’s just like the early days of newspapers, with multiple newspapers competing for a city’s reading attention. Except the competitive model has now shifted to a micro-level, with individuals or collectives conducting this new journalism. Perhaps former journalists, many of them downsized because of recent newspaper firings, will initiate blogs of their own."

I think the future of writing lies in the "micro-level," with readers looking to specific voices and specific reporting beats. There simply aren't enough readers and ad revenues to support three general newspapers in every American city. Nimble writers are building smaller, in-depth projects.

Check out these examples: A few political journalists opened the online site The Politico this year; my day-job is at the nimble legal journalism site Judicial Reports; and Smith Magazine has built a lean, mean literary magazine on the web. What other beats can we follow?

As long as you are visiting Ed Champion, check out his interview with journalist Jane Ganahl exploring this strange new media world.