The Gray Monk

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December 17, 2006

Billy the Blogging Poet

Billy the Blogging Poet is an interesting chap - a former trucker who now earns a living blogging. It is now four years since he started blogging and in his own words he "found himself a success for the first time in his life". He tells me that he is only one unexpected bill away from having to take up regular work again. He runs two blogs, of which The Poet gets 30,000 hits a month! I should be this lucky! He lives in Greensboro, the Blogging Capital of the USA I am told, and has appeared on the local radio station and Fox Television.

One reason I have taken a bit of an interest in this is tha\t I learned that they have used their blogs to raise a very large amount of money for people in need and other charitable causes. "Blogsboro" has become a bit of a model for other bloggers with its own networks covering various aspects of life from politics to the arts. These can be found altmedia, greensboro101 and poetry. The City of Greenboro has televised council and county meetings among the politicians is to ask "What will the bloggers say about this". In fact they are such a political force now that the city has on occassion been forced to reverse policy decisions. If only the UK bloggers could gang up in the same way! Even more interesting is that the bloggers span the political spectrum and often fight among themselves (without actually raining blows on each other!) but then get together for a beer or whatever.

They also hold regular conventions with speakers on topics oif interest to their members - and the politicians take care to visit and be visible!

Billy uses his site to promote people who write or make music - not the mainstream, but those struggling to get recognised. Those who need a boost to get started. As he says, he thinks Eric Clapton is the best musician around, but he also gets more than enough publicity - so Billy promotes those who don't get the support of the record companies. He does this with books as well - again, if you appreciate that there are 2,000 new books a week launched in the US alone, you also get the drift that many of these will simply submerge without trace, swamped under the sheer volume of new works emerging! I sincerely hope that mine is not one of them and so I appreciate the fact that Billy has listed mine on his Blogshoppe site.

Will his site make any of the featured authors and artists rich? Probably not, but it does give them an airing and the support they get from no one else.

Do visit Billy's site. It helps keep him in the "B Listings" and it also helps the charities he is helping suppoprt and promote. A very worthy cause and a very worthy effort on his part.

Posted by The Gray Monk at December 17, 2006 10:39 PM

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Comments

Posted by: beth at December 17, 2006 04:44 PM

Posted by: Billy The Blogging Poet at December 17, 2006 10:18 PM