Blog From Eric Eldon's Talk In Class

Tonight's class was spent mostly talking about blogging how-to's, do's and don'ts. We were able to have Eric Eldon (pictured) from VentureBeat.com come to class and speak about how he does his blogging and how he has gotten to be successful in the field.

After working for the student newspaper at Stanford University in Palo Alto and graduating with a degree in International Affairs, Eldon was living a life familiar to most twenty-somethings trying to get started after college. Eldon was interested in beginning his own media business that would bring media together online, named - aptly enough -Unimedia.

After receiving only $20,000 for a year (for three guys) he wasn't sure if Unimedia was the direction he was going to go in. Matt Marshall, an ex-bay area journalist, started VentureBeat.com - originally valleybeat.com - and enlisted the help of Eldon to write a technical blog. Eldon's blogs are written about the developing technologies of Google and Yahoo, to name a couple.

His beat now is Facebook/MySpace and other social networks. He also serves as the Editor for the Digital Media division of the company. Although he has been told his work is done well, he knows that writing a technical blog is much different, and collaborative, than some others.

"Technical blogs are usually a conglomerate of bloggers from all different types of fields," Eldon said. He went on to say that technical blogs are becoming a "mix of more traditional trained journalists."

Even though technical blogging may be a team effort with ideas brought together by many different branches of the tree, Eldon did confess that the blogging field is becoming more and more cut throat every day.

Because of the harshness of this budding field, Eldon warned us to be especially wary of the possibility of instant success. That, he says, is most likely not going to happen.

Patience is the strongest virtue a future, successful blogger will have to employ. "To be a professional writer online these days, you have to stay at it for years," Eldon said.