Back in early 2007, a journalist friend in the Midwest emailed me. He saw the impact of the web, changes in the newspaper industry, and he was worried about his newspaper’s–and his own–future. He asked my opinion on all of this. With his permission, this is what I wrote to him back in 2007 with a few minor edits.

Definitely take me with a large grain of salt–I got lucky in joining Google, but I wouldn’t give my opinions any more weight than an average person’s. My personal hunch is that newspapers will have some issues in the years to come. If you think about the fraction of revenue that comes from classified ads, it does seem that revenue will eventually migrate online, and sites like craigslist.org are more likely to capture a big fraction of that traffic compared to individual newspapers or even newspaper syndicates. If a newspaper loses ~30% of classified ad revenue over 5-10 years, that’s really hard to adjust to without structural change.

It’s funny because my Dad basically took a job out of grad school and stayed in the same post until he retired. It seems like the odds of that happening for people like you and me are a lot lower. There’s just not as many companies that are doing things like taking care of their workers for 30 years at a time.

So the first thing I’d recommend is to grab a domain name and work on burnishing your personal reputation online. It’s definitely not the case that everyone needs a blog, but having one place that acts as a face to the world can really help. There’s room for a resume/CV, but also for some writing samples that show off your abilities.

Which takes me to how open-minded [Midwest newspaper] is. I’ve heard newspaper policies ranging from “If you blog, we’ll fire you” to “If you don’t blog, we’ll fire you.” I hope that the paper is pretty open-minded. But they shouldn’t be able to stop you from building up your reputation online in your own time, and even if there’s copyright issues with putting full articles up on your personal site, you could no doubt quote a few excerpts of choice stuff as a part of fair use.

So making the switch to a mental model where you are more like a consultant for any company that you work for, but you look for ways to improve your reputation and learn new skills as you go–that’s a good way to make sure that you’re protected if you unexpectedly end up as a free-agent.

You’ve got a good sense of humor and you’re well-spoken, so the biggest questions to me would be
- what do you love or what are you interested in?
- where do you want to be in 5-10 years?

For example, it would be interesting to know a little bit about your interests. Things like games, gadgets, politics, or technology make great subjects if you want to try some active blogging + something like AdSense to make a little bit of money on the side. But some of the larger issues are things like
- how introverted you are vs. how much you enjoy talking to people.
- what ties do you have to [Midwest city], and do you want to stay around there or are you willing to move?

I’ve noticed that networking and getting to know a few people in an industry can make a big difference. If the tech-field is interesting to you, [Midwest city] is going to be a more limited pool of opportunities compared to something like Silicon Valley/San Francisco or New York. If you like to travel and like meeting new people, it turns out that becoming an expert in a niche and then getting on a conference speaker circuit can be good. You might start out on panels about journalism or media or ethics, but that could quickly lead to consulting gigs, for example.

I do think that the tech industry will be a leading one for the next 10-20 years, and probably biotechnology will start to emerge after that. But I think the service economy will remain strong throughout. Starting to get on a conference speaking circuit is really a way to rebrand yourself as an expert on some topics. That role would let you expand and offer your services/advice in different ways.

I guess the larger issue is that working for a salary is great, but if you can find ways to participate more directly in the success of a company, that can be a faster way to make money. The whole dot com boom demonstrated that there are a lot of dumb start-ups out there, but at the same time, when you’re young is exactly the right time to take risks like that.

Re-reading your email, I guess the smallest step forward would be to find out what you can legally do online that wouldn’t conflict with your employer’s guidelines. Then I’d just try a few experiments. It doesn’t cost much to buy a domain name, so you might consider starting a blog about [Midwest city] or a news site (probably the blog is a little easier to start). Set aside $100 or so (or ask for someone to register a domain for you as a birthday present) and try a few things. Sign up for AdSense and see what sort of articles do well on places like techmeme.com or reddit.com or digg.com. In general, I’ve found that starting with a small niche and building your way up is great practice and teaches you a ton about what sort of things attract attention and good discussion.

Some of that advice has aged well, some less so. I still think that grabbing a domain and experimenting is invaluable. I believe that the entire world is being digitized–from businesses and places to people–and it’s better to be involved in that process than to stand passively and let other people define you online. I believe that participating in the upside of a company is better than only drawing a salary. And I think that most of the time, no one cares about your career ladder or skills development as much as you do. No good company opposes the development of its employees, but ultimately you have to take the initiative and drive your career in the direction you want.

By the way, the title of this post is an allusion to Letters to a Young Journalist, an excellent book by Samuel G. Freedman.

Last week I was on vacation down in Florida and I had a chance to tour Thomas Edison’s winter vacation home. The tour guide told us that Edison wired his house and switched on electrical lighting in 1887. Then the tour guide leaned in and quietly mentioned that it took 11 years to install lights in the rest of the town. Why so long? Because the townspeople were worried that cows would stop giving milk.

For some reason, I was reminded of that anecdote as I read a recent piece in the Washington Post. Rarely do I pause in the middle of reading an article and think to myself, “Wow, I disagree with almost everything that person is saying,” but that’s what I found myself doing. Luckily you don’t need me to marshal counterpoints. Instead, I suggest that you read what Jeff Jarvis wrote, or what Mike Masnick wrote, or what the Markos Moulitsas wrote, or what Danny Sullivan wrote. Or read Timothy Karr’s post about the authors’ undisclosed potential conflicts of interest.

I believe good journalism is critically important to a well-functioning society. I love newspapers, magazines, and the journalists that they support. But I disagree with Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown, and reading their piece reminded me of those townspeople sitting in the dark, afraid to switch on their electric lights.

Here’s the thing: if you have to explain to everyone why you’re not a spammer, you’re doing it wrong. It’s this sort of thing that can give a field a bad name. If everyone is mad at you because you’re abusing the trust within a community, that’s uncool. And if you’re in it for the long-term, it’s better to earn a reputation on your own. That seems easier.

When 96% of your computer time is spent in a browser, that’s living in the cloud.

One snag for me is that The Guardian only recommended two sites for blogging: Bloglines and WordPress. WordPress is great and just came out with a new version. But I haven’t seen as many changes happening in Bloglines compared to Google Reader. So I thought I’d hit FeedBurner to check on my recent RSS reader stats. Here’s are my stats:

My readership data is going to be way-skewed, but I do think Google Reader is more popular than Bloglines these days. What do your FeedBurner or RSS reader stats look like?

P.S. If you haven’t see Lee Odden’s post about it, Lee collected the subscriber numbers for a bunch of search-related blogs a while ago.

As I said a couple years ago:

If you’re not aware of them, GuideStar and Charity Navigator are two good places to start. … Does anyone want to mention specific charities? Or mention other things that might not strictly be charities, but might be “good deeds” that readers would be interested in?

I’ll get the ball rolling with a few suggestions. I believe the Electronic Frontier Foundation does important work. They tackle many fights that need to be fought. I’ve also been impressed with the projects that the Sunlight Foundation has worked on, including Earmark Watch.

On a related note, I’ve been getting interested in how bloggers can be more like journalists in terms of shield law protections, or learning more about defamation, privacy, and copyright. It’s frustrating to me that MIT, Berkeley, Yale and Stanford offer dozens of courses online, but it’s much easier to find Electrical Engineering courses than “Journalism 101″ courses. I’d be interesting in groups that are creating or digitizing such information. Frankly, I’d like to see even a single free online university course in journalism. I’ve looked and haven’t found one.

Internationally, I like what Kiva does with microloans. Several people last year recommended Heifer International. The Child’s Play charity provides games for sick children in hospitals in several countries.

On open-source related items, this page lists a bunch of open-source organizations that may accept an online donation. The Alameda County Computer Resource Center in the California Bay Area will recycle computers or anything that plugs into a power outlet; they also accept charity donations and volunteer work. Personally, I’m a fan of donating to open-source projects that I use and enjoy, from Ubuntu or Synergy or Paint.NET to WordPress or PuTTY.

That’s a few charities and organizations that I’m thinking about. Now it’s your turn — what are the best charities in your opinion?

I’m sure that lots of people will flood Sergey with advice like “Add Google Analytics to that blog!” or suggest how to tweak his blog template or offer him free SEO tips. Personally, I’m just glad that Sergey is blogging. I think it’s a great idea and I hope that he keeps doing it. Sergey, welcome to the blogosphere.

Update: I didn’t even think to check before posting, but Sergey already has Google Analytics installed on his blog. He’s ahead of the game.

<a href=”http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/” target=”_blank”>Matt Cutts</a>

Go on, try it on this link: Matt Cutts

If you wanted to create a bookmarklet to open a new window or tab, you’d do it like this:

javascript:(function(){ window.open(’http://www.cnn.com/’); })();

so the actual bookmarklet link that would appear in your HTML as

<a href=”javascript:(function(){ window.open(’http://www.cnn.com/’); })();”>CNN</a>

and if you want to play with it, here’s the trivial CNN example bookmarklet. On Firefox, you can drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar. On Internet Explorer, you can right-click and select “Add to Favorites…”.

The reason I mention this is that bit.ly is a url shortening service that I like, and they have a bookmarklet, but it replaces the page that you’re shortening. Their bookmarklet looks like this:

javascript:location.href=’http://bit.ly/?url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)

So suppose you find a new page that you want to twitter about or shorten the url for some reason. You want a bookmarklet that opens the bit.ly url in a new window or tab instead of replacing the current page. Combining the two bookmarkets, you’d get

javascript:(function(){ window.open(’http://bit.ly/?url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)); })();

and here is a bookmarklet for bit.ly that opens your bit.ly url in a new window or tab. You can just drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks folder.

That’s enough to get you started with bookmarklets, but you can find more info about bookmarklets by searching or by looking at example bookmarklets around the web. For example, industrial-strength bookmarklets often load JavaScript dynamically from a webserver. That way if you want to upgrade or improve the functionality of the bookmarklet, you can change the code on the webserver instead of asking every user to update their bookmark. On the other end of the spectrum, some quick-and-dirty bookmarklets don’t even bother escaping the url.

I want to open a new tab, not a new window!

Some webmasters want to choose between a link opening a new tab vs. a new window. I believe that you don’t get that choice — it’s up to the user and their web browser. For example, in Firefox a user can select their desired behavior under Tools → Options → Tabs → “New pages should be opened in:” and choose “a new tab”. Or to tweak the setting directly, the user can type “about:config” into the location bar/address bar and then modify the “browser.link.open_newwindow” option to be one of the following values:

1 = open new windows in the existing window
2 = open new windows in a new window
3 = open new windows in a new tab (this is the default in Firefox 2 and Firefox 3)

See this about:config page for more info.

Likewise in Internet Explorer, the user can go into Tools → Internet Options → “Settings” button in the Tabs section and then under “When a pop-up is encountered:” choose “Always open pop-ups in a new tab”.

What’s the story, Twitter/Summize folks? I can’t escape the feeling that I would have found that entry on pre-acquisition Summize. Does anyone know more about when Twitter’s search has gaps?

Ready for another idea? This one is simple. Make an Android or iPhone app for people who need a taxi. Imagine: you’re in another city, and you just learned that from your hotel to dinner is not walkable. You’re standing on a street corner. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO!?

Answer: you fire up “Call me a Cab” on your app-enabled phone. Your phone automatically senses your location and (anywhere in the world) gives you 3-4 suggestions for local cab companies, with phone numbers. That’s the base functionality, but that’s still a huge step forward. When you’re standing on a street corner you don’t often have a page like this in front of you:

Now how would you make the app even better? In some places (like, say, these cities) the app would show you where the closest cab is, call it, and get an “estimated time of arrival” as you watch the cab get closer on a map. Something like this page, but on your phone:

How would you make money? Maybe you sell a premium version of the app that does more (more features, or checks for buses or other public transit nearby). Or maybe taxi/cab companies would be willing to advertise in the app just like they advertise in the yellow pages. Maybe you’re a taxi company and you offer this app for free to make your cabs more efficient or to build a brand (most people think of taxis as a commodity right now). And it doesn’t always have to be about the money, you know. Maybe you do it to build awareness about your software startup and unlock future opportunities down the line.

Once you get GPS + cool sensors + the ability to run an application on a phone, there’s a ton of exciting apps you could write. Sure you could find nearby friends, but why not write a GPS-enabled celebrity spotter? Or an “Am I Speeding Right Now?” app that you can use in your car.

If you need other good ideas, I recommend reading through Paul Graham’s list of suggested start-up ideas. I’m a big fan of #3 (finding “New News”), #13 (online learning), and #28 (fixing email overload). Or for that matter, just think about things around your house or business that are messy or annoying and solve that problem.