It has been two years since I wrote on this site. Just reading through the last posts I can tell how I’ve personally grown and best of all I now have gone through my first acquisition (which means I’m now a successful “Webpreneur”). Over the coming weeks and months I hope to share some of the lessons I’ve learned from building a digital media company including those that I’m continuing to learn as I become integrated into the new company and continue scaling the business.

While I won’t be covering news anymore on this site, as you can get all the news you want on Social Times and AllFacebook, I will be attempting to post on at least a weekly basis if nothing else. As I gain more time (which is hard to find), I’ll be sure to update this site. One thing that I’d like to include is an update to a post that I wrote in June of 2007. At the time I wrote a post titled, “Can You Make a Living Blogging?” At the time there were still people wondering whether it was possible.

The reality is that the space has become increasingly accepted by advertisers, however the business model of blogging does not come through a single revenue stream. If you want to know one of the most important lessons I’ve learned through the process of building Social Times Inc., it’s this: build multiple income streams as fast as you can.

Is it possible to live off of advertising? Possibly. Is it likely that you will? Not at all. That’s why I launched a conference (Social Ad Summit), started an online school (New Media School), and have published two ebooks through AllFacebook. For the first six months of building the company I also didn’t really sleep. So the lesson is this: making a living off of “blogging” isn’t easy and if you are depending on a single income stream you are shooting yourself in the foot.

While I could go on and on about the most important lessons, I’ll leave this post having only articulated a single lesson: whether you want to build a digital media company, or make money from a single blog, you need to generate as many income streams as quickly as possible. If you happen to be fortunate and have a lot of cash in the bank, congratulations, but for the rest of us, building multiple income streams quickly is critical to making the complete transition over to living off your blog(s).

I’ll go into more details about strategies behind building a “digital media company” in later posts, however this is a great way to kick things off! If you find anything isn’t working on this site, please let me know as I’ve upgraded from a wordpress that was 3 years old. I’ll be upgrading this site in due time!

As I sit here waiting for a video interview to upload I began wondering about whether or not everybody and anybody is fit to be an entrepreneur. Most people would react harshly saying that it would be foolish to suggest that anybody can be an entrepreneur. Let’s be honest though and explore this question a little more. As far as I am concerned, the number one difference between an entrepreneur and an employed individual is the entrepreneur’s choice to no longer work for someone else. Granted, there are prerequisites to successfully entering entrepreneurship.

One of the primary prerequisites for becoming an entrepreneur is sufficient demand and a cash cushion that you can tap to support yourself for a period of time. Additionally, if you have childred and/or are married it will be much more difficult to pull it off but it is still possible. Many of the people that I surround myself with are entrepreneurial individuals. Some of them are more successful than others but ultimately one person after another that I know has decided to start working for themself. This has forced me to question whether or not anybody can do it. I don’t think that everybody wants to be an entrepreneur as most people are risk-adverse.

Given the right circumstance though, I think the majority of individuals would quit their job to go work for themself full-time. Entrepreneurship is ultimately a human desire that most people share. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a need that fits within Maslow’s hierarchy, I do believe that we are born with the entrepreneurial gene inside of us. At some point in our lives we either dismiss of embrace our entrepreneurial desires. Most people dismiss it but a little piece of their entrepreneurial desires will always remain and can be tapped at any point during their life.

I know this haven’t embraced scientific methodology to support my hypothesis but hey, I don’t need science to express something that I feel. Do you think we are all naturally entrepreneurial? Is it something that some of us are born with or is it something that we try to supress as we get older and acquire new responsibilities?

I’m preparing to go out for my new year’s evening and I decided that now would be a great time to write a post. It’s especially a great time since I haven’t been writing on this blog for a while now. I am not gone, just focusing on my many other sites. I have to say that, as I wrote in my previous posts, it became pretty overwhelming. It still is pretty overwhelming now that I brought on my first employee and now have responsibilities that are not only to myself. I hope to be able to look back on this year and say that all the effort that I end up putting into The Social Times was a smart move but even still I am a little skeptical.

I guess you are always skeptical of the future as an entrepreneur but you believe with all your soul in what you are working toward. The past year has been incredible for me with the launch of AllFacebook.com and the success that it has brought. I have now spoken at conferences on panels with people that I learned about only a year ago and aspired to become. I’ve received some press coverage and I’ve built a business that has sustained a decent lifestyle for at least a few months. I thank all of my readers for helping me out in some way or another. Whether or not you know it, you have helped me to become who I am today.

Next year will be incredible. I will either continue to build something incredible or fail completely for the first time in my life. I have never gone for broke with a business and this is the first time that I have had the confidence to do so. I promise to my readers that next year I will be documenting much more of this process on this blog. I have neglected it over the past couple months as things became overwhelming but suddenly I have found some relief in my new hire. Hopefully we can generate sustainable revenue for the early life of the business. I don’t think I have ever been so afraid yet so hopeful at the same time.

It is truly a complicated emotion. Whatever the case, I will be more transparent and communicate what is taking place with my business on this blog over the next year. That is one of my new years resolutions. I wish all of you success and great health over the coming year. I have a feeling that 2008 will be incredible.

Not long ago I stopped pirating music as iTunes provided me with a great interface and a quick and easy way to get the music that I like. Additionally, I finally had some excess cash to spend on music! Since yesterday morning I’ve been trying to buy music from iTunes and I haven’t been able to. I’m not the only one. I have spoken with a number of people who are experiencing the same issue. iTunes sells millions of dollars of music through their store daily so they have to be losing some serious cash on this one.

Is it time to short Apple’s stock? Not yet. Apple’s primary revenue source is currently their hardware offerings (iPhone, iPod and their computers). This is annoying though and I might be forced to start pirating the music that I want. In this age of instant gratification,¬†temporary service outages can mean the loss of purchases and the loss of customers. Outages for days and you have serious problems. I have no idea what the cause of this issue is but I’m sure Apple is working hard to resolve the issue.

I posted the issue in the Apple forums and the only response I’ve been receiving is confirmation from other users that are having the same issue. Are you experiencing the same thing?

Today I have really come close to hitting my breaking point. Over the past few months, I have been working harder then I ever have in my entire life. There have been no vacations. Just work with the occasional party with friends but honestly it has pretty much been just work. I frequently stay up until 2 am and then start again the next day at 8. I stupidly accepted a large development contract with a client (although not completely dumb since some extra money is always nice) and now have to do development in addition to maintaining my daily blogs.

While I know that I could probably take a couple vacation days from the blog, there has been this burning feeling inside of me that really make me feel like I’m getting close to my goals with this new company. The funny thing is that I just started. I am about to begin travelling around the country to host events and all this came out of a simple vision. I know it is feasible but I’ve begun to second guess a lot of my decisions. One of those being the decision to wait for investment.

My inbox is a streaming flow of data that is almost as challenging as my RSS feed reader. Ultimately, I should take a lesson from the 4-hour work week and turn off my blackberry and try to limit email to certain hours of the day. Regardless of all the problems, I have to tell you what just happened to me. As I’m feeling like I’m ready to break, I log in to this blog to write to the world what’s going on in my life. The first thing that pops-up to me is a link that says “Just Be Strong” It was like the message was talking to me. It was a backlink to my blog by an individual who’s trademark lawyer will now be attending my Social Times launch event. Here is one excerpt from the post that Mike Bonifer, author of the book “Game Changers” wrote:

Social networking creates endless opportunities for strong choices, for letting others in your network know where you stand. Whether you’re putting a new app on Facebook or launching a shop in Second Life, strong choices stand out. So take it upon yourself to be like Nick O’Neill, whose self-funded, soon-to-launch new venture, Social Times, I just happened to link to today — and now my trademark lawyer will be attending his launch party in D.C. and the network will extend, and new wealth will surely ensue. It happens just like that when you make strong choices. They have a magnetic effect on your audience, including those who will become your customers.

Included was a copy of my Facebook picture. I have never had something like this occur but let me tell you that Mike Bonifer just made my day. Just when I thought that I am the crazy one for working so hard, Mike helped me out. While I still may come to that breaking point and while I know that I will start needing to make quicker decisions, I at least know that I’m learning. I only wish the same for each of you because learning is the most important thing around. Also remember, never settle for good because you can do much more than that. Eventually, it will all work out as long as you believe it will happen.¬† Burnout may eventually happen but given that passion is the fuel for the fire, I’ve got a long way to go.¬† Thanks Mike!

Over the past few months I have been hyping up a new project. Each of those projects have slowly morphed into another eventually resulting in the current one: The Social Times. The Social Times is my attempt at covering the social web while hosting events that help active participants in the social web connect offline. The first event that I’m hosting is the Social Times launch event. We currently have the following sponsors and demos attending the event:

• Wine Library TV
• Freewebs
• Hungry Machine LLC
• Qloud
• Razoo
• Clearspring
• Why Go Solo

I will be announcing more demos and sponsors over the next few days. The event is going to be December 13th in downtown D.C. If you would like to attend, go register for the Social Times launch event. This is probably the most ambitious project I have ever taken on. I am looking to turn this into a national entity in the next 6 to 12 months. I will be sure to document the lessons learned on this blog so you can hear about the trials and tribulations.

I have chosen to go without seed funding from investors and am instead funding it myself. This will be an amazing experience and a massive challenge. I’m excited! I hope that each of you can be part of the journey. See you at the finish line

I just returned from an amazing dinner with some insanely inspirational people. I had the opportunity to sit, eat and chat with Om Malik, Frank Gruber, Ryan Carson and his wife, Brian Williams, Gary and AJ Vaynerchuk and Gary’s wife, Tim Ferriss, the organizers of the New New Internet Conference, James Surowiecki, Rohit Bhargava and a number of other highly inspirational people.

I have never had the opportunity to sit down and chat with such a world class set of people. The best part about it was chatting about the future of the web and the amazing opportunity that is still available to all of the people that choose to be part of the industry. I am extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to sit and chat with these individuals. I wanted to share with all of you some of the lessons that I learned in the brief discussions that I had with this dynamic set of individuals:

• 99 percent of people aren’t going to try as hard as you will. If you truly have that burning desire, anything you want is within reach if you are willing to work for it.
• Link to the people that you aspire to be and eventually they will begin to pay attention to you. If they don’t, do whatever it takes to make sure that they do.
• Your blog titles may be the most important thing when writing an article.
• No matter how successful you become, always be willing to help others. It will come back to you a million fold.
• Try try again. On the web, there is so much opportunity that not a single one of us can pursue all of the things we want to try. If the first thing you launch doesn’t work, launch something new; eventually something is bound to work.
• When you finally figure out something that works, start monetizing it immediately. Many people fail because they don’t successfully monetize something that is already working.
• As Napoleon Hill says, you need to work yourself into a white heat of desire. Be extremely passionate about what you are doing.
• Finally, pick one thing and conquer it. Spreading yourself thin will only result in disaster.

I cannot express enough thanks to Frank Gruber who informed me of the pre-event happy hour. Thank you so much! I’m looking forward to the conference tomorrow. I hope to be posting about it either on this blog or on AllFacebook tomorrow.

Robert Scoble seems to have the impression that P.R. people provide Mike Arrington with breaking news on a regular basis. When it comes to product reviews he may be right. The only reason for this? Mike doesn’t have aggressive competition. That’s the difference between new media and old media and under Scoble’s description TechCrunch is becoming old media.

Prior to new media, newspapers were simply handed “breaking stories” by P.R. representatives. That’s no longer the case. For example, say that you are friends with the CEO of a large company and you run your own media company. If you talk to that person on a regular basis, chances are they are going to give you the story before anybody else. Breaking news now comes from (and may have always come from) building strong relationships with your sources. Additionally, investigative reporting helps to provide breaking news as well.

If you want to win in the new media landscape you better be aggressive. Rather than fighting for access to the P.R. representatives, you should be fighting for access to other employees within the organization. It sounds like some of these new media people have become spoiled with “access” to higher quality press releases. They are still press releases though. The real juicy scoops don’t come from building relationships with the communications department, it comes from knowing other people in the company. The bottom line here is that building relationships with people is going to beat out any form of informal public relations. It’s as simple as that. A combination of intelligence and aggresion will put you on top.

Robert Scoble has posted about the number of Google subscribers each of the Techmeme leaderboard blogs have. For some reason though my subscription count in Google reader is showing up as only 196. According to feedburner though, I have thousands of RSS subscribers of which over 52% are using Google reader. That would result in 1000+ subscribers to my AllFacebook.com feed. I have a feeling these numbers are a bit off.

This is definitely a good linkbait article though. Techcrunch has posted about this as well. I’m going to take these numbers with a grain of salt. Instead, I’m going to focus on the number of the Techmeme leaderboard as well as within technorati. Also, daily traffic should be a pretty good measure as well.

I have been working feverishly over the past couple weeks. I am preparing to launch a new company. I previously wrote about working on Facebook development. I have decided instead to spend most of my time blogging instead. I will be launching something new in the coming weeks. I’ll post about it on here and on AllFacebook.

I haven’t been writing as frequently on here since I have been busy with AllFacebook. That trend is probably going to continue as I am planning on launching something new. I’m extremely excited about it though and I will continue to write about my experience with the launch on this blog. I also will ocassionally cover some random web related issues as well. Thanks for understanding!

According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the D.C. metro area has the second highest concentration of I.T. professionals in the U.S. next to Silicon Valley. For all those that are trying to help put the D.C. tech community together, it appears as though this is a pretty good goal given the density. Conversely, it should be noted that just because we have the second highest density of I.T. professional doesn’t mean that we have the second highest volume of startups.

There are a number of large companies whose focus is strictly on I.T. services for the government. I would guess that those companies make up the majority of I.T. professionals in the area, but I don’t have the numbers to back it up. Also, the average salary for someone in the I.T. industry living in the D.C. metro area is approximately $122,950. Not bad! Congrats D.C.!

Dave Winer has published the Techmeme top 100 blogs. If you hadn’t heard already, Techmeme is releasing a new tech blog leaderboard tomorrow. My other blog AllFacebook.com has come in 62 on the list. Not bad for starting the blog a few months ago!

People that rank lower on the scale include Financial Times, USA Today, Mashable!, O’Reilly Radar and Valleywag. It’s pretty awesome to see hard work paying off. Rather than embellishing on it (p.s. I am officially a dork), I’d like to post an overview of how to launch a top blog. I’ll be posting some follow-up posts over the coming days to give a thorough overview.