This weekend’s links are below for your reading pleasure. If you come across any interesting links, then please share them with us in the comments section below. Enjoy!

Get your weekend started right by checking out these links, starting a new Feedly account, and/or adding the blogs above (and JerseySmarts.com, too) to your existing Feedly or other RSS aggregator account. Enjoy!

Well, Google shutdown Google Reader at the beginning of July and a flood of companies have tried to come up with a good replacement for the news aggregation service – which had millions of users. I’ve tried several of the alternatives and the one that is most like Google Reader (though better in some ways) is a website called Feedly. If you’re interested in reading the content from your favorite websites in a custom-built setting (custom-built by you, that is), then you have to give Feedly a shot. And if you already have a news aggregator or would like to follow my blog on Feedly, then you can do so by following our feed (http://www.jerseysmarts.com/feed/) or clicking here if your Feedly account is already set up.

Anyway, as of this writing I follow 74 different news websites and blogs through Feedly (that number grows every week or so). And, as you might imagine, following so many websites creates an incredible amount of news articles and blog posts that I sift through not just on a daily basis, but sometimes three or four times each day. In that sifting, I sometimes come across articles or columns that I think would be fun to share with you all. So I’m writing this post as the beginning of what I hope will be a weekly or bi-weekly (or maybe even monthly) update. The purpose of these updates will be to share with you some of the interesting and noteworthy news articles and blog posts that I come across.

A few years ago, sharing links in this matter used to be “the thing.” There was an informal group called the “Carnival of New Jersey Bloggers” that I was a member of; we shared some top-tier links from group members’ blogs with our readers each week. While I don’t know if this is series will reach that type of interest level, I do hope that some of you will enjoy reading these links and sharing them with your friends. And if you come across any interesting links, then please share them with us in the comments section below. Thanks!

Start the Weekend Right Link Series – Volume #1, Edition #1
What The Holy Father Said, His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan
A big story this week on the religious front was Pope Frances giving an impromptu, 80-minute press conference on his plane as he left Brazil and returned to the Vatican after World Youth Day. The biggest item to come out of that press conference was the Pope saying who was he to judge the heart of a gay person who believes in God. In this blog entry, New York’s Timothy Cardinal Dolan explains how the Pope did not say anything new or change Church doctrine – this has always been the Roman Catholic position.

Main Street Redesign Issue Requires Separate Meeting, Asbury Park Sun
There is some discussion in Asbury Park about taking Main Street from a four lane road (two lanes in either direction) to a two lane road (one in either direction) with one of those turning lanes in the middle. This would allow for bike lanes to be put on both sides of the street.

An Unusual Feat in Congress: Student Loan Bill Breezes On, The New York Times
This article talks about how both Republicans and Democrats came together to quickly pass a bill that changes student loan interest rates. Both sides put their own spin on why the bill passed by wide majorities in both houses of Congress, which is to be expected.

Living Our Values In Our Daily Life, Fraternity Pledge
The Executive Director of my national fraternity (Sigma Pi Fraternity) wrote about what makes our fraternity unique and what it means to live those unique values on a daily basis.

5 Reasons Why I Unbranded My 30 Month Old Blog, CalebWojcik.com
This blog used to be known as PocketChanged.com, but the writer behind the blog recently changed the name of it to CalebWojcik.com (his name). In this blog entry, Caleb lists out the reasons why he made the change. Makes me think – should JerseySmarts.com change to my name instead? Probably not since the JerseySmarts.com name is versatile enough to cover a variety of topics. Although, I do own my name at its own .com… Hmmm…

That’s it for this week. Get your weekend started right by checking out these links, starting a new Feedly account, and/or adding the blogs above (and JerseySmarts.com, too) to your Feedly account. Enjoy!

But aside from all of these books and reports I really like to read blogs written by everyday people who accomplish extraordinary feats. I have a small cadre of such blogs fed into my RSS feeder. Some of these blogs are written by people who have lost tremendous amounts of weight, others are written by people who have gone from a skinny physique or a chubby physique to winning bodybuilding competitions. Some of the blogs are written by guys who were introverted and wound up changing their lives to become social butterflies. Other blogs are written by people who have managed to travel around the world for an incredibly small amount of money before they were a certain age.

I don’t necessarily identify with any of these blogs or their writers because none of them really speak to my direct experience. In other words, at one point I lost 125 pounds so I already know how to accomplish that goal, I’ve never been an introverted person so I don’t need tips or pointers on how to get out there and meet people, and I’m not the biggest traveler so those lessons really don’t apply to my life. What I do enjoy about these blogs is reading the sense of accomplishment that these people achieve when they meet their goals. As someone who has met (and continues to meet) certain goals in my life, I understand how great that sense of accomplishment feels.

It’s awesome.

However, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in many of these blogs. All of these amateur writers are missing commentary that speaks to a growing number of individuals in our country. Let me be more direct: not one of these bloggers, these self-professed self-help gurus, these accomplished weight loss success stories, these people who have overcome seemingly insurmountable odds, etc. have accomplished their major goals and retired a tremendous amount of debt.

While these bloggers build their own ego and create their own hype because they lost [insert large number here] pounds or because they traveled to [insert large number here] countries, you can’t find someone who has managed accomplish a major goal while saddled with a tremendous non-mortgage debt burden. And it’s like this all over the blogosphere. For example, I read a lot of guy blogs (those blogs focused on items of interest to guys in my age group). These blogs range in variety and type from guys who spend a lot of their time working out and talking about the best techniques for working out to guys who claim to have a lot of social success to guys who manage to weave the fundamentals of their faith throughout their daily lives.

All of the writers that I read on guy blogs eventually wind up writing an entry about how their readers can become better at [insert whatever here]. Well, the impetus for writing this entry was a piece of “advice” that I’ve seen pop up over and over again on these guy blogs. And that same piece of advice pops up on all of the blogs that I read – not just guy blogs. That piece of advice is that if you want to be the absolute best at [insert whatever here], then you absolutely cannot have any debt.

That’s right. I’ve read bloggers saying that if you want to lose weight, you can’t have any debt because you need the freedom to be able to spend as much time as possible working out instead of being stuck working one, two, or more jobs. I’ve read bloggers saying that if you want to increase the size of your social circle, you can’t have any debt because if you don’t have excess funds to do new and exciting things, how can you expand the number and type of people that you’ll interact with? I’ve even read bloggers who say that if you want to meet the type of girl that you think you’re most compatible with, then you can’t have debt because that debt weighs on you mentally and restricts your ability to see yourself with a successful girlfriend, fiancée, or wife.

But here’s the question that prompted me to write this entry…

Who doesn’t have some type of debt? I don’t mean that as a matter-of-fact type of question with the expectation that your response would be, “I guess everyone has some type of debt.” That’s not what I’m going for here. Think of the real answer to that question – who doesn’t have some type of debt? Well, you have independently wealthy people or those who come from tremendous wealth and don’t need to pay their own way through life. Okay. You also have those people who have worked their butts off and earned enough money such that they don’t have to carry any debt. Okay. And you know what? You might even find that people who are the exact opposite of these wealthy people also don’t have any debt. That is to say that those people who never took on college debt yet still didn’t graduate with a degree or those people who just graduated from high school (or not) and wound up living in their parents’ basement; the habitual underachievers out there.

Is there any other type of person who doesn’t have some type of debt? I really can’t think of any, but I would suggest that there should be a fourth category – those people who choose to write a blog focusing in depth about their success at achieving a goal other than retiring debt! After spending a few years reading some of these blogs I’ve come to the conclusion that people out there who accomplish what they believe are great things are not saddled with a tremendous amount of non-mortgage debt. They don’t have a significant amount of consumer debt and they don’t have a significant amount of student loan debt. They have that freedom that I referenced above – the freedom to not be tied down to one, two, or more jobs. And with that freedom comes the ability and flexibility to spend more of their time losing weight or working out or hanging out at local clubs or spending their time learning new hobbies or traveling around the world, etc.

They don’t know what it’s like to work an 8am to 6pm job with an hour commute wrapped on either side of that workday plus spending an hour each morning before you leave for the office working on freelance projects and several hours at night when you get home at night working a second or third job. And I specifically wrote that last sentence to begin with “they don’t know what it’s like” because that’s the problem that I’ve been having with a lot of the blogs that I read: the writers just don’t understand how self-righteous and, frankly, alienating they sound when they write their entries.

And here’s the prime example that I know so many of you out there have probably seen before… How many of you have ever read a weight loss blog or a weight training blog that condemns those who say they don’t have the free time to work out? Usually, the writer says that this is just an excuse and that you can make time to lose weight or work out if you really want to…

If you really want to? Really?

Are you fucking kidding me?

The only person who would write such an ignorant comment is someone who don’t wake up at 5am (exhausted) and then fall into bed at midnight after working the entire day to earn money in an effort to retire debt. Who would tell someone who keeps this schedule 5, 6, or 7 days each week that they are lazy or that they are the cause of their own lament because they don’t make time for working out? I know who would tell someone that – a blogger who has never had to try to tackle both [insert a personal goal here] and retire a significant amount of debt at the same time.

The reason why I wrote this entry is because I know I have a lot of random readers on this blog and I can track where some of you come from out there on the internet. Some of you are coming from some of these self-help, conquer the world type of blogs and that’s great. Believe me, I want to conquer the world and improve my health, wealth, and well-being just as much as those other writers. However, I live my life in the real reality – a reality much closer to where you probably exist, too. I understand that it’s hard to train to climb Mount Everest when you have a six-figure student loan debt crushing you and dictating nearly every move you make. I understand that it’s really hard and really difficult to lose weight when you’re working 16 – 18 hour days (or longer). I understand that it’s difficult to put the proper amount of time and effort into increasing your social circle or even finding someone worthwhile to date when you’re so focused and, unfortunately, controlled by crushing levels of consumer or student debt. I understand where you’re coming from – I get it.

And I don’t think that you’re lazy. I don’t think that you’re anti-social. I don’t think that you’re making excuses. Not at all.

What I do think is that you’re stuck in the same rut that the majority of population is stuck in – you’re forced to do things to retire debt (or generally improve your financial position) that prevent you from fully engaging in the other activities that you want to engage in. You’re not going to find this understanding on those self-help blogs or the guys’ blogs or in many other places out there because the truth is that those writers simply don’t understand. In about 6 years I’ve paid off nearly $100,000 in student loan debt and I have another $21,000+ left to repay. I repaid that amount while losing a tremendous amount of weight, gaining most of it back, losing much of it again, and gaining some of it back again. Professionally, I work around the clock; not just a 9-to-5 type of job. Believe me, I understand the burden of debt and how it really does dictate what you can and cannot do with your life.

And, like many of you, I’ve sat there and listened to people in my personal and professional life ask me why I don’t [insert whatever here] while I’m young? These people also have no idea what it’s like to be suffocating under crushing consumer or student loan debt. Folks constantly ask me why I don’t go away on vacation (my last real vacation was back in 6th grade). Well, I don’t go away on vacation because I can’t imagine spending a thousand or two bucks on vacating reality while I still owe money on my student loan. That would be financially foolish. People ask me why I don’t go out and find a “nice” girl to date (usually, their definition of “nice” is different than mine, but that’s another entry). They don’t understand that when you work around the clock, you don’t have much time for socialization outside of your standard circle. And, to mix a little bit of a guys’ blog mindset here, they don’t understand that the girls you meet while you are burdened with immense debt, while you are out of shape, or while you are working around the clock are typically not the girls that you want to marry! I assume it’s the same for the ladies out there looking for a man.

To sum it up, I just warn you all to read these self-help, self-improvement blogs for purposes other than examples to follow. Chances are very strong that the writer you’re reading doesn’t have the same life experiences as you do. And chances are even stronger that they never had to tackle an immense amount of undischargeable consumer or student debt before, during, or after they accomplished whatever it is that made them an amateur expert.

Be rational, believe in yourself, and tackle your debt first. Once you remove that crushing yoke, then focus on your health (losing weight, gaining muscle, etc.), and after that you can focus on your social life. There’s no way around doing what makes sense and this is the path that I really believe makes the most sense for the most people out there.

Now… back to the grind!

As you’ll see, the feed contains just random thoughts, complaints, and observations. I’m not solving world hunger here, folks – I’m just living my life!

On the topic of what is going on with this blog there’s nothing major to update everyone on, but here is the general rundown:

First, for some reason we’ve been receiving a large number of spammy comments. Now, I write “spammy” comments because these comments aren’t your typical “click here for drugs” robotic spam comments, but rather vitriolic hate speech that is actually written by a human being. It’s really some pretty vicious stuff that has no place on a personal blog. And I don’t know how many times I have to write this in the comments section, but this always has been and always will be a personal blog. In other words, what I say goes so if you write a comment that attacks another commenter or blatantly distorts the issues presented in the various updates, you can stick your comment up your ass. Now granted, in the last year we’ve only gotten about 6 or 7 really vitriolic, arrogant, hateful comments and all of those were moderated before they made it on to the site. However, if you plan on writing bullshit and hate in the comments section you might as well save yourself the time because it’s not getting posted, period. My personal blog, my dictatorial rules – very simple to understand.

Second, I have a lot of content written and ready to be posted to the blog, but I’m waiting for the right time. For example, I have my next student loan update written and ready to go for whenever my total amount outstanding drops again (which should be in about a month – more on that in a minute). Also, I’ve been working on some other projects that are taking up some time so I’ve only been writing for the blog in my spare time.

Third, I’ve been working really hard to cull and delete a ton of the tags on this blog. If you don’t know what a “tag” is, it’s the keywords that bloggers use to help their individual pages categorize themselves and rise up in the search engines. A few years ago I utilized a system that provided a whole host of tags for specific keywords and that has bogged down and crapped up the database for the blog. As an example, if I wrote something about my old Chevy Blazer, I would get the following tags added to the database: Chevy, Chevy Blazer, Blazer, Chevrolet, Chevrolet Blazer, Blazer SUV, SUV, Chevy SUV, etc. That’s totally unnecessary. My culling process is reducing all of that gunk to two tags: Chevrolet and Blazer. That’s it – nothing more is needed. Obviously, this is a long process since there are some 6 or 7 thousand of tags in the database that need to be reviewed and deleted. I’m going through them about 250 at a time and I hope to have the project completed by the end of the year.

And the final part of this part of the update is that I’m looking for ways to freshen up the design of the blog. If you’ve been eagle-eyed, then over the last few weeks you might have noticed random updates here and there in certain design features (the addition of the Twitter feed, the lengthening of the Facebook feed, the layout change for news from the other sites that I own, change in some of the external button links, etc). However, I’ve been thinking that it might be time for wholesale change – I just don’t know how far I want to take it. If you have any ideas on how to change the design, please feel free to add them to the comments section of this post (but don’t post hate or it won’t get to see the light of day!).

That’s it for the JerseySmarts.com Update. And before I end the web-based updates I thought I might add that one of the sites that I own through Usable Web Solutions, LLC has really exploded in the last month and a half. Hits to that website have tripled and it is growing into a very respected site. I’m proud of the team that works there and plan to continue providing them with as much support as possible to let the growth continue. As for the rest of my life…

Things have been very busy. Towards the end of January my company moved its offices from Trenton to New Brunswick. That’s about ten miles less of a drive each morning for me, but the same amount of time thanks to the Route 18 traffic (which sucks). However, I tried to bypass most of the heavy traffic by changing my work schedule from 9am-ish to 5pm-ish to 7:45am-ish to 4:00pm-ish. I’m getting up earlier and leaving my house about an hour and a half earlier, but I’m also getting home right at or slightly before 5:00pm, so that’s an hour and a half earlier than the Trenton commute. The change hasn’t been too bad, but when you shift your schedule to work (and live life) an hour and a half earlier, you experience a personal seismic shift.

On my end, I’m finding that I have less time to spend on the computer in the evening (not playing around on the computer, but working on computer-based, paid projects). Also, I find that I’m totally exhausted by about 3:00pm. I think this is happening because my body isn’t used to going to bed at 10:00pm so I wind up tossing and turning for about a half an hour (though I’m totally beat right now and expect to sleep like a log tonight). It’s a change and I’ll get used to it.

Also, we’re getting towards the end of the college basketball season and I’ve been busy attending the Monmouth University men’s basketball team home games. The Hawks have struggled a little bit this season, but they’re starting to show signs of strength heading into their last four games of the season. Oh, and unlike the last few years I don’t really have a ton of pictures to post from these home games. I’ve actually been sitting back and enjoying the games instead of waiting for the perfect camera shot. However, I have taken a small handful of pictures at the games (mostly of the scoreboard after the games are over) and I plan to post them in the next few weeks.

I’ve also been hit with a variety of big expenses in the last few weeks. First, I spent a good deal of money traveling to Washington, DC for a business trip last week (granted, these expenses will be reimbursed, but I have to wait for the reimbursement to arrive). Then, I had my car crap out on me and it cost over eleven hundred bucks to get the thing fixed. And on the same day that I paid to get the car fixed, I co-hosted a fundraiser/donor recognition event at one of the Monmouth home games (which wasn’t a huge expense, but still an irregular expense in my routine budget). While all of these expenses are manageable, they are all irregular costs in my planned budget and they all hit within the same three day period. So… I’m glad that tomorrow is pay day!

Between the big shift in my personal schedule and the time I’ve been spending at the Monmouth games, my health is more or less in a stalemate. I haven’t been to the gym in about three weeks because I can’t figure out this new schedule yet, but my weight hasn’t moved too much and my blood sugar is very stable. I’m glad about the blood sugar being stable because a shift in routine combined with a reduction in the amount of medication that I’m taking could have formed the perfect storm to throw my blood sugar out of whack. On the topic of health, I purchased the Rebel Fitness Guide from Nerd Fitness a few weeks ago and I just finished reading it. Any guy who writes fitness articles and quotes the Lord of the Rings, uses Legos as a graphic tool, and frequently references the video games that I grew up playing and other nerdy topics is alright with me! I expect to begin the Level 1 Rookie workout around the beginning of March so be on the lookout for updates on how I’m progressing with that workout program.

Other than what’s posted above I don’t have many more big updates to provide right now. One of the last originally-written posts that I wrote for the blog was about finding a new church to attend that is close to where I live. Well, I’m still going to church there on a weekly basis and I find it amazing that I used to think that I didn’t have the time to go to church. Absolutely amazing. The services last about 45 – 50 minutes and when you factor in driving there and driving home, I’m only out of the house for about an hour and five minutes each Sunday morning. Who can’t give an hour and five minutes to go to church each week?! In fact, I continue to find that I enjoy going to church to listen to the homilies and the readings and so on. It’s nice – makes you feel good after you leave and gives you guidance for the week.

I’ve also been reading a lot on the NOOK, in The Word Among Us daily meditations, and random articles – so I have a lot to update on the site when I get a moment to do so! Stay tuned and in the mean time, follow me on Twitter @JVince81!

I took my blog off of a bunch of the networks for a bunch of reasons and I happened to keep a log of those reasons for those of you who are involved with blogs or who might have similar decisions to make.

BlogExplosion – Gone. The interface was not user friendly and I couldn’t figure out what benefit I was getting for being listed.

TopBlogArea – Updated the code. Since I updated the code, however, I rarely get ranked in the Top 100 sites in my category. I think they moved my site to somewhere new in their system. If I can’t fix this, I’ll probably just get rid of this link, too.

BlogCatalog – Updated the code.

BlogTopSites – Updated the code.

BlogHub – Gone. The user interface for this site was too simple and didn’t provide enough information about how I could integrate my blog with their services.

SpamPoison – Updated the code. I love this little button because it takes the spam bots and hurls them into a cycle where they, essentially, spam themselves. Serves them right!

Blogged – Updated the code. By far the best user interface, but extremely slow. These guys are linked up with Facebook, so that’s a benefit, too.

LoadedWeb – Updated the code. This is the easiest network to join and manage. I recommend it.

Truth Laid Bear – Gone. The user interface is excruciatingly slow. I initially updated the code, but ultimately removed it because of the slowness of the site.

BlogAnnounce – Gone. They wanted to try to get payments from the blog publishers or something like that…ha! Yeah right.

Anyway, I hope that some of the webmasters that float by JerseySmarts.com find this information useful.

Some of you might be interested to know that I’ve been working on a lot of the behind the scenes elements of this website since our one year anniversary of merging back in November. Most of the stuff that I’ve been doing is boring, but some of it might be interesting to at least a few of my readers. So here is a short list of what I’ve been up to lately.

• Random HTML Updates: As always, I am obsessive about the cleanliness of the code that is used to create JerseySmarts.com. The WordPress people are great at releasing frequent updates to the blog’s core structure, but I make a great deal of changes and modifications to that structure that I am always going back to tinker with and clean up. I told you this was boring, right?
• Automatic “Strong” Links: This one is really a personal preference, but I like to have the ability to control the appearance of the links in my entries. WordPress is very flexible when it comes to this, but sometimes it is not very clear on how you manipulate the code for these options on the back end. I’ve had some success with a quick, easy workaround on some of the other WordPress-based websites that I own so I decided to institute them here and it has been working very well. Which brings me to the next point…
• Amending Older Posts & Comments: When I merged both sites last year, I brought everything from both sites over to the new system. As those of you who work with me on websites know, I’m a stickler for maintaining content – I hate deleting ANYTHING from a website! However, I do understand the need for content to be correct. To this end, I spent some time the other day amending all of my old comments on this blog to reflect the new URL of JerseySmarts.com instead of the old URL for Joe’s Journal which was based off of the now defunct thebalrogslair.com website. That took some time… And while I was at it, I also amended my buddy Eddie’s comments to reflect his new blog URL as well as my other friend Martin’s comments to reflect his new blog URL. Having the proper URL out there is cyberspace is important to generating hits and interest in your website – you can’t let that stuff fall by the wayside.

There have been a few other things that I’ve done in the last few weeks that really begin to dig into the minutiae of operating a website so I won’t bore you with them. Just know that on those days when there is not a new entry for you to read, chances are I am working on something else behind the scenes that is, in the long run, just as important as new content!

Joe's Journal - As it used to exist

If you read that link, you now know that I merged my old blog – Joe’s Journal – with the one that you’re reading – JerseySmarts.com. One year ago today, that merger was complete. I think the results have been great, but you could probably be the judge of that better than I can…

One of my favorite parts of the old Joe’s Journal was that crazy header that I put together by blending all of the different things that crossed my mind at the moment. You might be able to tell from that screenshot, but there are a whole bunch of different things on there including the Monmouth University hawk, Stewie from an early episode of Family Guy, the Arrested Development television show’s logo, a Cross, the American flag, my fraternity’s flag, a Lord of the Rings logo, a Smallville logo, a silhouette of New Jersey, a Rutgers University logo, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus, the main color of the site was yellow.

In general, I never hate on any of my old sites and Joe’s Journal is no different. I really enjoyed that blog since it was my personal blog where I let off steam and commented on a variety of issues (the entries have all been merged into this site, so go back a few years and look at some of the older posts – lots of bitching in there!). However, as I began to enterprise my web design skills and I began creating newer websites with stronger capabilities and better marketing opportunities, I realized that I had to begin eliminating duplication in those areas of my life where it was unsustainable and, really, unnecessary.

On that point, a few years ago I opened up JerseySmarts.com as a place where I could capture some of the writing skills of my friends from college and other people that I’ve met along the way. It never really panned out the way I wanted it to, but that’s okay. Since JerseySmarts.com became a viable source of revenue, I wound up keeping the domain and just uploading my Joe’s Journal entries onto both blogs. It was easy, but pretty laborious in the grand scheme of things. I never wanted to engage in larger marketing campaigns or new ways to present content because I didn’t want to have to duplicate everything. Plus, I felt like the impact of my entries was being thinned since they were available in two locations.

The logical answer was to merge the two blogs and condense my efforts to create a single website with greater impact. I think that I’ve been pretty successful in that effort considering that JerseySmarts.com is both profitable and has a wide readership. Since the merger, I’ve admittedly held back on publicizing the blog to the extent that I originally intended and part of that was because I wanted to ensure that I had the commitment to keep the thing updated. With that, I’m glad to announce that today marks one full year of this blog being updated every single day. In 365 days JerseySmarts.com has had more than 365 entries. I think that’s a pretty significant accomplishment for a one-man show. One of the ways that I accomplished this was taking advantage of the ability to “schedule” a post in WordPress. For example, I wrote all of the entries for November 1st through November 16th (that’s today) on Halloween. Hey, I had the free time while sitting around waiting for trick or treaters, so I wanted to use it productively! I can’t guarantee that I’ll be updating the blog on a daily basis for the coming year, so I might miss a day here and a day there, but I made it work in the last year so I might be able to keep the momentum going in the coming year!

If I had my way, I’d get more people to sign-up for the monthly newsletter in the next year and I’d utilize that newsletter for more than just a recap of previous entries. I think that goal is attainable, but not when the newsletter stands at 26 subscribers. Last month I started a new Google Group which replaced the old newsletter system that I’ve been using for the last year. Let’s hope that it has some staying power, huh?

Anyway, we’re one year into this merger and I think it’s going great. Let me know what you think!

In no way do I suggest that JerseySmarts.com is engaging in such reporting. In fact, I would agree that I provide my personal point of view in all, if not most, of the entries on this blog. In providing that point of view, though, I do try to counter any biases that I find in the topic, should such a counter be relevant.

Anyway, the purpose of this entry is to announce a Citizen Journalism Conference at Monmouth University one week from today, November 18, 2009. Complete details are below.

CITIZEN JOURNALISM – COUNTERING THE CULTURE OF CORRUPTION

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

The Citizens’ Campaign and Monmouth University are co-hosting a conference on November 18 to discuss the current state of local reporting in our new media environment, including how hyperlocal websites provide a means for stepped up local coverage and opportunities for citizen journalists to report from the frontlines.

The “Citizen Journalism: Countering the Culture of Corruption” morning panel will discuss the cuts in local news room staff and its impact on the quality of local government coverage, and how new online tools make it possible for journalists and citizen activists to report what is happening in city hall and throughout the community.

Speaking on the first panel will be Michael Delli Carpini, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania; Richard Benfield, former editorial writer of the Bergen Record and New York Times; Ted Mann, Founder of InJersey.com and Digital Development Director for Gannett New Jersey; and Michael Shapiro, CEO and Editor of www.TheAlternativePress.com.

The day will also feature a “Citizen Journalism” certification course for beginning bloggers & citizen activists who want to submit their own local news stories to online publications; and an afternoon “Meet & Greet” panel for journalism students and activists to talk and network with online news site editors.

The Conference will be held at Wilson Hall at Monmouth University from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Light refreshments will be served. This event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited, so please reserve your seat today by emailing heather@jointhecampaign.com.

The Citizens’ Campaign is a non-profit organization that is dedicated to promoting and encouraging civic engagement. To learn more about the Citizens’ Campaign, log onto www.JoinTheCampaign.com.

November 18, 2009
11 am – 2pm

Monmouth University
Wilson Hall 400 Cedar Ave.
West Long Branch, NJ

11 am – 11:30: Registration & Refreshments

11:30 am: Opening Remarks by Harry Pozycki & Round Table Discussion:
The New Media Climate: How the internet is transforming modern day journalism and its impact on local government & politics

12:30 pm: Becoming a Citizen Journalist

1:00 – 2:00 pm: Meet the New Media Innovators.

Registration
This event is free and open to the public. To register, email Heather@JoinTheCampaign.com

This should be a great event and I hope that my fellow bloggers in the New Jersey area will plan to attend the conference. I’m hoping to get over there myself, schedule permitting. If you DO attend the conference, please consider sending a report on what was talked about and some of your thoughts.

For the longest time, JerseySmarts.com was set a Google PageRank of 4. That’s pretty damn good. One gets a higher PageRank through link exchanges, frequent content updates, and getting a high level of hits – all of which we have here at JerseySmarts.com. However, Google doesn’t like it if you put up paid advertisements on your site that are not within the Google system. For example, I have the “Additional Information” links to the right of this entry. Those are paid through a company called “Text Link Ads, Inc.” which Google doesn’t like. Also, you may remember when I used to put up random entries about moving companies or hotels in Italy – those were all paid entries, too.

Well, I think someone at Google took notice because my PageRank fell from a 4 to a 3. Frankly, this is completely counter-intuitive to reality since my hits have gone up a great deal since a few months ago, when my PageRank fell. But more hits aside, there is a real effect to having a lower PageRank. For one, I’m not being offered those random paid blog entries any more, which means I lose certain revenues each month. Also, you’ll notice that the “Additional Information” links have been greatly reduced. That’s lost revenue, too.

And to think, the cause of this lost revenue (which is now over $100 per month that I’m losing) is all because Google isn’t happy with paid links on a blog. I’m still trying to build something with this blog and I’m pleased that my hits keep going up. However, it does appear that I’m going to have to rely on new ways to earn some money from this site since relying on systems that use Google’s PageRank don’t seem to be the way to achieve long-term success on the internet. What a shame.

Should be a busy day followed by a busy night. I am, however, looking forward to a relaxing weekend – I need to rest a bit!