CatalystBlogger has joined the Brazen Careerist network of blogs, which caters to Gen-Y in the workplace. For those of you coming here from Brazen Careerist, let me tell you a little about myself and this blog.

I always wanted to be a novelist. When I was in college, I didn't worry too much about making money; I thought I'd just work at whatever job came along and write on the side. When I graduated, I realized that working full-time and pursuing a dream full-time are not easily compatible. I worked for businesses and nonprofits for about six years--and I couldn't see myself settling anywhere. The lack of control I had over my own schedule made me miserable, and the entry-level jobs I got didn't draw on my writing ability, which I felt was my biggest strength.

Most bloggers that get discouraged and decide to abandon their blogs tend to do so on the first three to six months. Sometimes the traffic is not growing as fast as they would like. Other times they are not happy with the money that they are making.

Personally I think that quitting after such a short period is a mistake.

When you're going to open a store, you decide where to put the store, what to put in the store, and how do you get people to it. Opening a website, regardless of whether or not it's a retail establishment, requires similar strategies:

What's going to be in your website?

Where will your website be?

This post on "flipping' or selling your blog was submitted by Patricia Mayo from the soon to be released ComHacker.org.

image by xdjio

Here's a news flash: blogging is really hard work. You research, you write, you network, you Digg, you Reddit, you Twitter, you… you get the point - every single day - and for what?

A reader who didn't want to named sent in an interesting question about how the web can be used to achieve specific goals offline.

Here's her situation: She's an art major in college and wanted to know how she could establish herself in the field as a power player, preferably in the vocation of an artist/expert critic.

When times are good, buying things is a sport. It's a reward. The story we tell ourselves is that we deserve it, that we want it and why not?

When the mass psychology changes and times are seen as not so good, the story we tell ourselves changes as well. Now, we buy out of defense, to avoid trouble. Or we buy because something will never be as cheap again. Or we buy smaller items for the same sense of reward.

Posted by Jane CoplandI'm actually serious with the title here. This session was great. Honestly, I've been to more informative sessions here at SMX West than I've been to since Pubcon 2006, where I knew nothing about SEO and everything I heard was new. Unraveling URLs & Demystifying Domains had some good speakers who each provided unique information about the subject.

Posted by Danny DoverI like to think that I was born just in time to live through the first truly global revolution. I am a 20 year old student who has watched computers and the internet transform the world. Unlike my predecessors, I rarely watch live TV, never listen to the radio and haven't bought a CD in nearly a decade (last one was Offspring's Americana). Between my fraternity, my campus, my city's wifi initiative and my job I have access to at least one broadband wireless internet connection at any given time. I get excited when I get a single letter of normal mail even though I send more e-mails in a single day than my parents do in a month. My world is different than earlier generations, it is functionally held together by the world wide web.

It would appear that an earthquake was just felt across the UK (hopefully not a major one!). Where did the news first break? Well, we heard about it over Twitter. It's all over the site, including being broken on Twitter-based news organization BreakingNewsOn, which is reporting a 5.3 magnitude earthquake in the UK with minimal damage reported so far. Where didn't we hear about the quake? The mainstream press.

Last night during the first Digg Townhall, we learned that there are an average of 10,000 stories submitted to Digg daily. I pulled out a scratchpad today and while my numbers might vary a bit from you home gamers, the data is very interesting indeed.

Based on the math in my original article about which categories hit Digg the most along with Richard MacManus' post about which sites hit Digg the most in the tech category along with additional research outside of the tech category, here are my findings. Approximately 150 stories make Digg's frontpage per day, not including stories that make it but are subsquently buried.