In today's papers....

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

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.

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

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

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

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."

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."