Wanted to read the article in InformationWeek about Accidental Tech Entrepreneurs Turn Their Hobbies Into Livelihoods  as I’m going in the same direction as are some of the other people I’ve met lately.   I now contribute to three blogs, this one (www.webmetricsguru.com) + SmartMobs (which I contribute to) and now ArtNewYorkCity, which I just started this weekend.  All three blogs are on different blog networks and go after different demographics - and being both a Search Engine Metrics Expert (WebMetricsguru) plus having Mobile Technology and Social Change interests (SmartMobs) and my fine art background as a painter is where I’ll focus on ArtNewYorkCity - as well as the advertising that goes into it.

But getting back to the article in InformationWeek - it’s interesting to see the path that leads to being a blog publisher and making a living off of it.  These entrepreneurs all have IT backgrounds and they were in the right place at the right time, with the right product or service. Timing and luck (intuition - knowing when to go for it - being in the right place at the right time also is crucial - this story will not happen to everyone).  Some of this was termed "Accidential"

"Timing is a critical factor. The Trotts launched their software just as post-9/11 politics were driving blogging into the mainstream. Soon after Digg launched, Paris Hilton’s cell phone was stolen and its address book–filled with juicy celebrity contact info–was hacked. Digg posted links to the story, and Google and Yahoo gave the story prominent play. "

"Accidental entrepreneurs often don’t pay attention to the business side of things–for a while, at least. They focus on their creative visions. "When we started Movable Type, we didn’t have a business model, and we didn’t have a plan," Mena Trott says. "It was all about the product, and we were really motivated about creating a good product. With that, a good business followed."

"To succeed, accidental entrepreneurs need a bit of obsessiveness: "It doesn’t ever go away," Heather Armstrong says. "Some people can walk away from their jobs, but my job follows me into bed at night." (That’s literally true–she occasionally blogs about things that happen in bed at night before going to sleep or in the morning while waking up.)

Blogging Mom Heather Armstrong, 30, is one of the accidentals. Her blog, Dooce, is the chronicle of the roller coaster that is the last five years of her life. Armstrong was single when she started it in 2001, working as a Web designer and writing disparagingly about her overpaid, spoiled employers at a Los Angeles software developer and her life partying and hanging out with her friends. Her employers fired her in 2002 (when they saw what she was writing about them) and since then she’s built up her blog so now it has 27,000+ backlinks.  While the article mentions BlogAds and FM Media - I did not see Dooce.com as an advertiser for BlogAds where I could get the traffic stats on the blog.

From Unemployed To Company President Mena Trott is the 28-year-old president of a hot technology company Six Apart  and which distributes Movable Type blogging software and the LiveJournal, TypePad, and new Vox blogging services.

Joshua Schachter saw his hobby become a business as demand for it took off. Schachter created the del.icio.us service while working in IT for several financial companies; his previous employers included Montgomery Securities, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley.  Del.icio.us grew out of the popular late-’90s blog Memepool, which Schachter authored. That was back when blogs were hand-coded, almost exclusively run by techies, and consisted mainly of daily links and descriptions of interesting Web sites the authors had discovered during the day’s recreational surfing. Memepool–named for the word meme, meaning idea, and a play on the phrase gene pool–takes suggested links from users. When Schachter got behind in posting to the blog, he copied links into a file. After a year or two, the file had grown to 20,000 links–out of control. He quit his job in March 2005 to devote himself to del.icio.us full time and received an undisclosed amount of venture and angel funding later that month. The service had 300,000 users and eight employees when it was acquired by Yahoo in December for an undisclosed purchase price. Schachter now works for Yahoo as director of engineering.

Media Mogul Kevin Rose, co-founder and CTO of online news site Digg.com, sought out his new Web-based career after working in  IT and broadcasting for IBM. At the time he created Digg, Rose was hosting a technology program on TechTV, now known as G4tv.com.  Digg mixes the principles of Slashdot and del.icio.us. Users register to join it, and when they see an interesting technology article anywhere on the Web, they submit the URL, along with a headline and description. Submitted articles appear in a queue, which any registered user can review. If users see articles they like, they click an icon marked "Digg This." Articles receiving the most Diggs, or votes, appear on the home page.

I might add, one of my posts got Digged recently and contributed 4000 visits in the span of two hours to www.Webmetricsguru.com - that happend last Monday when I compared the pageviews of Digg to the New York Times. New Features in Digg 3.0 Preview and V.3 Dugg is not the end of the Story - Updates coming in July (which I wrote later).  Another one of my blog network writers got three times that traffic a couple of days ago.  Digg traffic only lasts a day or two, at most, and most of it happens within a couple of hours.  Here’s how my traffic on Webmetricsguru.com was affected by the Digg story.

The interesting thing about Digg was this statement by Kevin Rose:

"I was sitting around thinking about how this would play out," Rose says. "My background in school is in computer science. I wrote a scoping document to a friend, who is a developer. The friend said it would take two or three weeks to create and cost 700 bucks, so I said, ‘Let’s go for it.’"

Rose launched Digg on a $99-per-month server and built it on open source software–the basic Lamp architecture: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. He put up $700 for development costs, plus $99 per month for Web hosting. "It was something I was willing to take the risk on," he says. "I was planning for success. I decided to go for a dedicated server off the bat."  Digg now has 16 full-time employees. The developer who wrote the initial code for Digg is lead developer at the company. Digg secured $2.8 million in funding in October from sources including Greylock Partners with Omidyar Network, plus angel investors including Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen. Digg is privately held and won’t disclose revenue. It generates sales from Google ads and recently entered into a partnership with Federated Media for ad sales.

The idea is that many of the businesses that are prospering need the Google AdSense to make money.  FM Media has also played into this market business model.

The Lone Developer Tom Davis majored in marketing and advertising in college and worked at an ad agency his senior year. "I really didn’t like advertising, and I kind of freaked out,"  He had an idea for the program that later became his livelihood. Called Zoot, the software helps researchers manage random bits of primarily text-based information, including notes and excerpts from articles. He taught himself to program in Visual Basic and got to work.  When Davis started Zoot Software more than a decade ago, the online world consisted of a couple of hundred thousand people on services such as CompuServe. Advertising was expensive, and marketing consisted of lobbying reviewers in the PC magazines and hoping to get noticed. Now, Google AdSense makes advertising cheap and easy, and bloggers help spread the word about software. Zoot initially was distributed on diskettes through the mail. Now there are hundreds of software libraries on the Internet, and distribution services will, for a small fee, upload a developer’s software to all of them.

I would track all these entrepreneurs on Blogpulse - but I think it would be too hard to get stats on them individually, aside from the companies/blogs they run.