News and Observer: A web for your thoughts.

Pilgrim compares making his first blog entry to his first (and only) time skydiving. “It’s very scary,” he says, “to put yourself out there and do it every day.

“There’s a rush that comes from getting a link from a high-profile blogger,” he says, noting that traffic on his blog jumped from a few hundred to about 4,000 page views a day after another blogger linked to a technical article on his site. “It’s a real rush and there’s a real addictive quality to it.”

[links added]

The story behind the story: almost exactly a year ago, I met Joe for lunch after seeing his signature in an discussion board, which mentioned Apex, NC. Turned out he lives on my jogging route. The next month, Sam joined us, and we jokingly referred to our newly founded group as the RTP Bloggers Club.

Fast forward to present day: we have a wiki, a mailing list, and an unknown number of members (of which 13 were at our lunch last month). And reporters sitting in on the whole thing, taking notes, recording it all on tape, and asking us to deconstruct why we do what we do every day.

Pretty soon we’ll have a privacy policy and a mission statement, and it’s all downhill from there.

On a related note, we did convince the reporter to start a blog of her own, the day after we met her. She hasn’t updated it since.

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Five comments here (latest comments)

  1. Sam Ruby (trackback)

  2. Hi Mark
    I saw the N&O article and thought I would ask if you would be interested in reading my new book, entitled “Equal Rights For All. Special Privileges For None: Principles of American Populism.”
    I am looking for a group of folks, not affiliated with a university, to discuss the idea of political reform in America.
    If you are interested in the book and thought that your RTP Bloggers may want to discuss it at one of the monthly meetings, I would be happy to send a free copy, or you can go to any online seller and buy it there.

    Thanks
    Tom Vass

    — tom vass #

  3. Hey Tom, I’d be happy to read and discuss it. I’m fairly well educated on the issue and, given you linked to an investment banking company, I’d guess yours may be an angle I haven’t given much thought to.

    Plus, the color scheme ont he cover would go well with several other books I own. Follow my link and send me an email.

    And Mark, hard to tell from the picture which iMac you have. What flavor?

    — Dan Isaacs #

  4. The Creative Tech Writer (trackback)

  5. The iMac is graphite. The picture online it terrible; my parents (who saw the dead trees edition) says the printed picture is much better.

    — Mark #

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