Blogging, Blogging, and More Blogging
The first decade of the 21st century may be remembeted for many things, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but it will almost certainly be heralded as the decade in which the Internet brought millions of people (almost) together through the technology of blogging. Weblogs were developed in the late 1990s but it wasn't until the early 2000s that bloggers really began to catch the attention of people everywhere. Professional writers, educators, scientists, artists, and business people have joined the ranks of personal bloggers and amateur essayists in the online world of sharing personal thoughts and anecdotes.
Michael practiced his online writing skills by participating in discussions on CompuServe and in the news groups during the 1990s. In 1998 he became a bi-weekly columnist for Suite101, one of several 1st Generation Web resources for professional and semi-professional writers. Suite101 was not a blogging community but the Suite and its competitors helped popularize the idea of building communities of writers.
Michael gradually transferred his online attention to Web forum communities. In 2005 he finally took the plunge and set up a personal blog on Blogger. In early 2006 Michael was invited to contribute weekly posts to the SEOmoz blog. Here is a list of the blogs Michael has managed or contributed to since 2005.
Blogs Michael Has Written For
- The Semi-official Blog of Michael Martinez was Michael's first blog. Although it is now archived, Michael developed a loyal readership over more than 1,000 monthly visitors by sharing his thoughts on everything from Salsa dancing to colonizing space.
- SEOmoz was launched by Rand Fishkin, a Web marketer from the Seattle area. Rand wanted to build a blogging community on the same model as the Mozilla open source coding projects that have produced directories, Web browsers, and other online tools. In early 2006 Rand invited Michael and several other prominent SEO technicians to contribute articles to the SEOmoz site. Although that early writing team has since moved on, SEOmoz has grown its community through the YOUmoz blogging resource which allows anyone to set up a blog. Occasional YOUmoz articles are promoted to the main blog.
- Google Says ... was an SEO concept blog Michael started in late 2006 with the intention of sharing insights into the Google services. However, it soon became clear that there was much more to discuss than just Google's services. Michael discontinued the blog when he joined Visible Technologies as the Director of Search Strategies.
- Michael Martinez at Newsvine is not really a blog but Michael has published a few original posts there.
- SEO Theory became Michael's next blogging project. Starting out on the Blogger service in December 2006, SEO Theory moved to its own domain in February 2007. Over the course of the next two years the blog built up a loyal audience of more than 10,000 monthly visitors and several thousand RSS-feed subscribers. SEO Theory focuses on the science behind search engine optimization and it has been widely recognized as an influential resource for search engine optimization specialists.
- VisInsights is the official corporate blog for Visible Technologies. Michael contributed a number of articles to the blog in 2007 on brand marketing through search.
- Best SEO Blog was launched as the official blog for 1st Query, the SEO Services Team at Visible Technologies. The team's projects kept them too busy to blog so Michael began contributing occasional articles in late 2008. Best SEO Blog is currently the only SEO blog Michael writes for.
- SF Fandom Wordpress Blog is a place where Michael writes about science fiction and fantasy topics.
- SF Fandom Blogger Blog is another science fiction and fantasy blog Michael writes. Both SF-Fandom blogs were launched in December 2008.
- Middle-earth Talk Radio is an occasional podcost co-hosted by Hawke Robinson and Michael Martinez.
Blogs That Have Interviewed or Featured Michael Martinez
Some bloggers have occasionally interviewed Michael or invited him to write guest articles. Here is a small selection of such blog articles.
- Michael Martinez of SEO Theory: An Interview, published by Ms. Danielle, a search marketing blogger in California.
- Michael Martinez - The SEO Interviews - Number Five by Darren McLaughlin, editor of the Sootle Directory.
- A response to “Link-based ranking algorithms” started out as a comment on a post by Professor Mike Thelwall, author of the Link Relationships blog. Mike Thelwall's administrator invited Michael Martinez to expand the comment into a full-length article for a guest-post.
