A Blog Around The Clock

In today’s papers….

Posted by Coturnix on April 27, 2009
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When I woke up this morning and went online while kids were getting up and ready for school, the first this I saw was this tweet by abelpharmboy:

Two articles on @BoraZ in today’s Durham Herald-Sun. Will post links later. Herald-Sun has pain in the ass registration to access site.

So, I went out and got a hardcopy of the paper, and also looked at it online (feel free to use login: coturnixfan and password: boraborabora to see the articles, thanks Bill). The first article starts on the front page of Chapel Hill Herald (I think that if you buy the paper in Durham, Chapel Hill Herald is inside, but if you buy it in Chapel Hill, it becomes the front section) with this picture of me.

Both articles were written by Caroline McMillan, who you may remember as the author of this article (also here) about telecommuting and coworking. She had so much left-over material from the interview with me (as well as coming to ScienceOnline’09) that she pitched – obviously successfully – an additional pair of articles to Durham Herald-Sun: and here they are:

Life as a blogger around the clock:

There’s something different about Bora Zivkovic,………..

………………Or it could be the way he tucks his chin to his chest, showing a head of dark hair peppered with gray, and looks over his round-lens glasses to give you eye contact, smiling with the edges of his mouth turned up — almost like he’s holding a secret.

Or perhaps you haven’t met Bora Zivkovic at all. If you’re one of the 100,000 to 200,000 people per month who view his blog, “A Blog Around the Clock,” you probably know him by his online name, Coturnix…

and

Blogs can come in all shapes, sizes:

With those kind of numbers, there’s obviously some healthy competition in the online community. Zivkovic’s decision to name his site “A Blog Around the Clock” was strategic. It’s no accident that the name starts with the letters “a” and “b.”………

………….”It’s no accident,” he said, smiling. “I am very, very devious.”

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Comments

  1. #1 Dolly13
    April 28, 2009

    So…are you worried about overexposure? ;) You, Michelle Obama, and the dreaded swine flu are everywhere!!!

  2. #2 Coturnix
    April 28, 2009

    LOL! Hey, I got a free mocha at La Vita Dolce after they saw they were mentioned in the article – since we did the follow-up interview there a couple of weeks ago.

  3. #3 arvind
    April 28, 2009

    Congrats! And here I was thinking you were already all over all the places! :-)

  4. #4 Nathaniel Marshall
    April 28, 2009

    Does being interviewed in the MSM mean you’ve lost all credibility with the hard core bloggers now?

  5. #5 Coturnix
    April 28, 2009

    LOL – of course not. This is not the first time, and perhaps not the last.

  6. #6 Coturnix
    July 18, 2009

    Since sufficient time has passed, I think it is OK for me to reprint the entire texts of the articles here, so nobody needs to worry about passwords and the texts become searchable by Google. So, here is the first one:

    Blogs can come in all shapes, sizes

    By Caroline McMillan : The Herald-Sun
    chh@heraldsun.com
    Apr 27, 2009

    CHAPEL HILL — A blog — contraction of the phrase “Web log” — is a Web site regularly maintained by an individual that displays postings in chronological order. Most offer commentary and links to other sites on the Web. Technorati, a blog search engine, catalogs more than 113 million blogs, dividing them into three categories: personal, corporate and professional.

    Corporate bloggers represent an employer full time and account for 12 percent of the total bloggers. Professional bloggers, who unofficially maintain sites about their profession or industry, comprise 46 percent of the total.

    But more than half of the professional and corporate bloggers are also personal bloggers, so they account for 79 percent of all recorded blogs. Chapel Hill resident Bora Zivkovic’s blog is considered personal since it’s about his interests, not his occupation.

    But personal doesn’t mean simple. In fact, the tagline for Zivkovic’s blog is “making strange connections between science, religion, brain, language and sex.” Averaging eight posts a day, Zivkovic even blogs about blogging occasionally. Some of his recent posts concern sleep-deprived pilots, cardiac arrhythmias and ocean literacy.

    With those kind of numbers, there’s obviously some healthy competition in the online community. Zivkovic’s decision to name his site “A Blog Around the Clock” was strategic. It’s no accident that the name starts with the letters “a” and “b.”

    Zivkovic’s blog tops the list of all the 75 blogs with Seed Media group. And if you search “a blog” on Google, you’ll see his blog nabbed the No. 3 spot.

    “It’s no accident,” he said, smiling. “I am very, very devious.”

  7. #7 Coturnix
    July 18, 2009

    Life as a blogger around the clock

    By Caroline McMillan : The Herald-Sun
    chh@heraldsun.com
    Apr 27, 2009

    CHAPEL HILL — There’s something different about Bora Zivkovic, 42, but it’s not his signature N.C. State University sweatshirt that tells you he’s no Tar Heel, born and bred. Trying to pinpoint what makes him unique, though, is like trying to catch a fish with your bare hands.

    Maybe it’s the business card he hands you that’s only 2.5 inches by 1 inch, nearly one-third the size of a standard card.

    Or it could be the way he tucks his chin to his chest, showing a head of dark hair peppered with gray, and looks over his round-lens glasses to give you eye contact, smiling with the edges of his mouth turned up — almost like he’s holding a secret.

    Or perhaps you haven’t met Bora Zivkovic at all. If you’re one of the 100,000 to 200,000 people per month who view his blog, “A Blog Around the Clock,” you probably know him by his online name, Coturnix.

    “It’s the Latin genus name for Japanese quail, the animal I worked on in my grad-school days,” Zivkovic explained.

    Like many bloggers, Zivkovic joined the blogosphere during leading up to the 2004 Democratic Party primaries, in his case in August 2003. First, he contributed to John Edwards’ campaign site and then to the Kerry-Edwards forums. Soon after, he began maintaining several personal blogs that later morphed into “A Blog Around the Clock.”

    Nearly 55 percent of bloggers say they’re better known in their fields because of their blogs, and 26 percent of respondents say they’ve directed potential employers to their sites, according to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report.

    Such was the case for Zivkovic. Getting heavy traffic on his personal blogs put him on the radar of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit headquartered in New York City that’s made up of scientists and physicians who work to make scientific and medical literature available to the public. After following Zivkovic’s personal blog, PLoS hired Zivkovic as a full-time online-discussion expert. While the company doesn’t pay Zivkovic to maintain his personal blog, PLoS includes the duty in his documented marketing and outreach activity.

    To increase his viewers and better legitimize his postings, Zivkovic joined an online blogging community known as ScienceBlogs, which launched in 2006. Owned by Seed Media Group, a private science media communications company, ScienceBlogs has about 75 active bloggers.

    Relative to his site’s traffic, Seed Media group pays Zivkovic several hundred dollars a month — “just enough money for a few meals and coffee with good friends,” he said.

    When he says coffee, he’s referring to his daily fix at La Vita Dolce, a quaint coffee shop in Southern Village that’s less than one mile from his home, where he lives with his wife, Catharine, and their two children, David, 15, and Ruth, 12.

    “They make a super rich, super strong mocha,” he said. “I call it ‘all the way’ because it has all the fat and all the sugar and all the whipped cream they can give me.”

    According to Technorati, nearly half of the active bloggers have made friends online whom they later met with in person.

    “I’m very social, so I have to make an effort to meet with people I meet on various blogs,” Zivkovic said. “You can build a community online, but you really hit things off when you meet in person.”