Ah, yesterday was a good day: Shannon and Brian (“the boy”) got married. Weddings are fun. This one was perfect: the ceremony was short and the party was long :).

I actually got carded when getting a beer. Me! I’ve got gray in my beard and everything. I had to smile. “I just need to make sure you’re over the mark,” said the woman. “I’m well over the mark,” I replied.

Nahh, it’s all good. Congrats to the newly hitched.

Barely has the smoke cleared from my last blogging for money post and there’s already another new blog network launching: Instablogs (tagline: “A News Organization based on Blogging”). Apparently this one is based in India, and their aim is to launch 50(!) blogs on October 5th. Seems like a lofty goal. Of the first seven blog teasers they list, the astronomy blog sounds the most interesting.

Well, the “Blogging for Money” meme is rearing its head again. Wired just ran this story which is kind of an overview:

Whether you are Calacanis, Denton or Hauslaib, to create a profitable blog requires much more than a keyboard, an internet connection and too much caffeine. You need a talented writer entertaining enough to hold an audience, a consistent publishing schedule, content worth linking to by other bloggers and worthy of press coverage, marketing savvy to sell advertising or enlist third-party networks and, as a culmination of all of this, plenty of traffic.

Says Hauslaib: “If a blog debuted with virtually zero startup costs, then it takes little to earn a profit. One ad will do it. But at the bare minimum, a lone blogger will likely need to attract high four- to five-figure daily visitor figures to even attempt a blog-based livable wage.”

And, there’s a new blog network that just launched: b5 media, with 13 or so blogs in the network. Their blogs range from the predictable, well-worn ground of Microsoft, movies and sports, to some more promising, interesting ones, like Literally Blogging (about literature), Unplugged Living (how to live off the grid, which seems ironic to blog about), and She Knows Best (terrible name, IMHO, but “lifestyle tips for guys” which could work).

So, when am I launching my own blog network? Riiiight. :)

With summer nearly gone and school started, it seemed appropriate to have one of those “what I did” posts, but I’m not ambitious enough to talk about much beyond the weekend. :)

And even then, Saturday was the only day really worth writing about, Sunday was a lazy day. So let’s see, on Saturday we had kindergarten soccer—made all the more exciting by the fact that most of the kindergarteners have no real idea of competition. But they have a lot of fun, so that’s good. The weather this weekend was much better than the weekend before, but with fall nearly here, who knows how long that will last.

Saturday night I went to a bachelor party for Shannon‘s soon-to-be husband. Nothing unusual to report, it was a night of drinking at Stars and I kept my alcohol intake down and left earlier than the rest of the guys (all four of them). A later night than I’m normally used to.

No hangover or anything, either. I doubt I could say the same about the groom, though.

And that about wraps it up.

This looks interesting: The Bend, Oregon Celebrity Weblog.

Today’s hint that blogging is gradually getting mainstream comes from an article in this month’s Realtor Magazine titled, “Blogging for profit“. It was pointed out to me here at work (since I work for a builder, with real estate agents coming and going). There’s nothing new here, it’s just another introductory article, though there’s an interesting statistic in the print version of the article that doesn’t show up online: only 26% of Americans are familiar with blogs. Which means that 74% of Americans haven’t heard of blogs (or are unfamiliar with them; I guess this depends on what your definition of “familiar” is). I’d guess that sounds about right.

A year ago tomorrow, I had a photo shoot with the Bulletin (along with Jake and Chris) for a big article on local blogging that ran a week later. Amazing, that was a whole year ago.