This topic came up again in Sunday night's #blogchat session on Twitter. In particular, this thread:

I take no credit for the idea - I was just the first to go put it into action:

This Space Intentionally Left Blank for Your Comments

Fascinating experiment. Comments welcome.

I've been hinting on Twitter for the past couple of weeks about my "big new venture". Well, this is it! I'm the new Director of Online Marketing for American Guitar Academy. Cool story, in brief. I met the founder, Andy Harrison, at an event where I got introduced to him by my friend Ann Collins (who I met on Twitter). Andy and I talked for a couple of hours that night, one thing led to another, and here we are! (See.this stuff really does work!). This venture brings together my love of music and my experience with social media, working with people with whom I'm philosophically/spiritually aligned - doesn't get much better than that.

And as my first official order of business, I get to give away 50 free guitar lessons!

Have you always wanted to learn guitar? Or did you start and then drop it because you weren't learning fast enough? Or maybe you already play and want to take your playing to the next level? No matter what level you're at, this offer is for you.

American Guitar Academy has trained thousands of guitarists and bassists in the Portland, Oregon, area over the past few years using their patent-pending learning system, which has been shown to be as much as 8x faster than other methods at helping you achieve your learning goals.

AGA now wants to take this method to the world. How?

Skype!

That's right - live one-on-one lessons in the comfort of your own home. Personal attention from a patient, compassionate guitar coach who will help you achieve your goals faster than you ever thought possible.

Here's what one AGA customer had to say about her experience:

"I had tried several teachers before working with AGA but was frustrated with the results. I love the one-on-one attention vs. the classroom setting, and my AGA guitar coach seems to understand how I feel as a beginner - he's very encouraging and supportive. AGA's online lessons are very affordable compared to the local teachers. The convenience is great, too. I used to drive 45-60 minutes each way for guitar class. Even the closest option is 15 minutes each way - I was spending more time driving than learning. I'm still a beginner, but for the first time I'm really happy with the progress I'm making."

- Jonalynn, Hawaii

Now I could go on and on about how great the AGA learning system is, but why? The best thing to do is just let you experience it for yourself.

So here's the first offer.

The first 50 bloggers to call (503) 430-1484 get a free 30-minute lesson to try it for yourself. Now there are some eligibility requirements:

1. You must have a guitar available to you (duh!). Actually AGA provides guitars for the free lessons in their Portland office, but that wouldn't be very practical in this case.
2. You must have a working webcam and Skype. These lessons are interactive. YouTube videos can't give you feedback.
3. You must have an active blog, i.e., 4 or more posts within the past month. Honestly, I'm probably not going to check it. Honor system.
4. You must speak English fluently (but you can be anywhere in the world). We may hire guitar coaches for other languages in the future, but for now it's just English. Also, if you're not in North/Central America, we'll do our best to find a mutually agreeable time, but we can't promise at this point.
5. All levels and ages (well, let's say 10 and up - we're not sure yet how well young kids will work with the webcam) welcome! AGA's system starts with the very basics and goes through highly advanced techniques on both acoustic and electric.

That's it - no strings attached!

Try it out. Of course, we'd greatly appreciate it if you blogged about your experience - good, bad or neutral. This is a new program and we want the feedback as much as the buzz.

If you love it and want to learn more, here's offer #2.

If you decide you want to continue your learning, you'll be eligible for a 50% discount off the regular price. When we launch this program in full, the standard price will be $99 a month, with discounts for longer commitments. If you participate in this pre-launch event, you'll be eligible to be locked in at 1/2 price - $49 a month (1/2-hour weekly lessons) for as long as you want to keep working toward your learning goals. Only one catch: to be eligible for this offer, you'll need to:

1. Post a link to your blog post about your first lesson in the comments here, AND.
2. Tweet a link to your blog post about your first lesson to @AmerGuitarAcad.

One more offer (that's #3).

OK, I'm not going to call it a contest, and I won't insult your intelligence by calling it "free guitar lessons for a year", because there is an exchange. So let's call it an audition. Simply put, we're going to pick one (or two or three) people to keep blogging about their experience in exchange for lessons. No length requirements - just blog about your lesson every week. No money out of your pocket, just a few extra minutes of your time.

If you're interested in blogging for guitar lessons, same requirements as offer #2 above - post a link to your blog post here and tweet a link to @AmerGuitarAcad.

So are you ready to start learning guitar faster than you ever thought possible?

All you have to do to get started is call (503) 430-1484 to schedule your free lesson.

And please. feel free to tweet this, blog this, etc., if you think it would be of interest to your friends/readers/followers.

Top image: Jesse Therrien @ stock.xchng
Bottom image: Txt2Pic.com

Sometimes when I write, it’s like I’m reaching out to an old friend without a name or a face. I think of it as some new form of non-physical intimacy.

I’m trying to find my consciousness and merge it with yours, and as weird as it sounds I feel that connection with every myspace message and email I get.

We’re both alone and interfaced with a monitor in silence, and as I craft my sentences and express my ideas my intention is always for you to get an unfiltered view into my thoughts. I want you to take them with you.

I’m opening my head to merge my thoughts with you, and the only way that really works is if I’m 100% honest.

Well said. We don't have to see people in person to connect at a deeper level. We just have to open ourselves to the possibility and, as Joe said, be completely honest with each other. Even the smallest little deceptions cause us to be more cautious and create barriers to building deep, meaningful relationships.

Joe's blog and humor are pretty crude. Fear Factor is tame in comparison. If you're easily offended, skip it. If not, then start reading his blog, look him up on YouTube, and enjoy.

Prompted by a conversation on MyLinkedInPowerForum about the relative value of LinkedIn vs. MLPF -- not to the owners, but to individual participants -- I was Googling Becker and discovered The Becker-Posner Blog, a collaboration between Becker and legal/economics expert Richard Posner.

Besides the simply brilliant thinking and writing of these two individuals, the blog is intriguing because it's also frequently a conversation between the two authors on the same topic, and they're not afraid to take on some pretty controversial topics, or to take an unpopular stance on them. For example:

• Becker on The Erosion of Individual Responsibility and Posner's comment
• Posner's Post-Mortem Critique of William Buckley and Becker's comment

These guys are also doing an amazing job of sparking conversation. 514 posts have generated 11,840 comments -- that's a 23:1 ratio! Not many blogs have that.

I encourage you to check it out, as well as the Freakonomics blog and David Friedman's blog.

I’m happy to be participating at a Software and Information Industry Association lunch /webcast on October 31 in midtown New York, on "The Promises and Risks of Social Networking in the Information Industry".

The event is on “how your enterprise can profit from social networking: in promotion and marketing, in the development of new products and content creation, and even by making communities one of the services your business offers as an ancillary to content products.”

The other panelists are:

Leslie Forde, VP of Strategic Alliances, Communispace;

Kim Kobza, President and CEO, Neighborhood America;

Scott Parry, General Manager, Reuters Advicepoint

Karen Christensen, CEO, Berkshire Publishing Group will moderate.

Some of the questions that will be addressed include:

• How can we make our communities persistent and sustainable?

• What increases the value of a community to its participants?

• What social media are appropriate for my business?

• Does it really make sense to use existing free social networking communities like Facebook and Second Life?

• Can we develop our own unique social networking systems with open source technologies?

The event costs $50 for non-SIIA members. Alternatively, the event will be available via webcast. Register here.

b5media founder Jeremy Wright offers his ensight, er, insight on it, explaining that the economics of turning bloggers into traditional employees simply wouldn't work. My fellow b5media blogger Mark W. is a little more vehement about it, calling the idea freaking insane. I think Shane of Zoomstart, commenting on Ryan Caldwell's post, said it most succinctly:

Blogging is an entrepreneurial endeavor and a creative endeavor.

Here's my take on it. The way I see it, bloggers fall into five categories:

1. Rock stars - the handful of people who can make a living at it in the free market purely on their own merits.

2. Corporate bloggers - people who blog as a small part of their corporate (or small business) job.
3. Professional writers - people who write for companies that can't blog for themselves.
4. Experts - people who use blogging as a way to build their personal brand, demonstrate their expertise, grow their business and advance their career.
5. Hobbyists - people who are passionate about their topic and blog as a way to express themselves and share their passion with others.

Group 1 doesn't need a union - they're already doing fine financially.

Group 2 doesn't need a union - they're already on salary and benefits.

Group 3 is maybe the only group that could use a union, but even so, in the vast majority of these cases, they're being paid just fine.

Group 4 doesn't need a union - the blog is a marketing vehicle for them. The fact that they're getting paid to market themselves, rather than paying to market themselves is more than compensation enough. Those of us in this category make our money from selling products and services, speaking engagements, etc.

Group 5 doesn't need a union - these people would already be blogging anyway. The fact that they're getting paid for it is icing on the cake. And basically all they have to do is commit to posting volume.

So you either do it because you love it, or you excel at it and make some decent money from it. What I certainly don't want to do is be supporting a bunch of half-assed hacks on basically some kind of blogger welfare.

Those who blogging doesn't work for economically should go find another job. It's not like anybody is sticking bloggers in a sweatshop and forcing them to write for pennies for blogging networks.

Now, that might not be all that interesting to you, except that I've spent some time analyzing my results and I've explained on my blog exactly how I made the A-list, and without working at it nearly as hard as Technorati and others suggests you might have to (Posting twice a day??? Who has that kind of time???).

Anyway... I want to help YOU do this too, so I've set up a thread on my forum there to help you make the A-list. You can post your current authority ranking, ask any questions, share any tips, and...most of all...share your progress! We may not be able to get everyone on the A-list, but we should at least be able to move everybody up a notch or two.

Comments / feedback welcome here, but if you want to participate in the project and boost your blog authority, you need to go post on there -- I can only fragment the conversation so much.

By the way, you might want to also take a look back at How to Become an A-List Blogger - 3.5 years old and still timely.

One of the tips that came up in the comments on his Day 1 post was the matter of using a signature in your post when you leave comments on other people's blogs. Typically, if you leave your name and URL in the comment posting form, it ends up linking your name to your site, e.g., Scott Allen points to TheVirtualHandshake.com (or LinkedIntelligence.com or Entrepreneurs.About.com, depending on the context). However, that's a) usually at the top of your comment - people don't scroll back up once they've read your comment, and b) it's non-obvious that it actually links to your blog.

Jason explains, as well as sharing his hesitation about using comment signatures:

ALso along these lines, I have since started to leave a new signature:

Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com
.. self-serve job security ..

I’ve been trying it out, and with different tag lines. Putting a URL in the comments makes it really easy for readers to just click over to my website, and the tagline makes people curious.

Sometimes I’ve hesitated before putting the signature on the comment, especially when no one else is, but I figure it’s better to risk than pass up the chance, and if someone says they don’t like that then I’ll make note of it and leave the signature off for later comments.

But Pete Johnson reassured him, sharing the success he had after learning the tip from The Virtual Handshake:

As I learned from Scott Allen (and am writing about later in the week), the post signature is huge. On one techie site in particular, I got 10x more traffic when I went from this:

—Pete
http://nerdguru.net

to this:

Pete Johnson
HP.com Chief Architect
Personal Blog: http://nerdguru.net

The second one even got me an unsolicited email from the editor wanting to know if I wanted to write a case study based on HP’s web architecture, an opportunity I wouldn’t have dreamed of otherwise.

This is a great example of co-opting a brand. "Nerdguru" isn't a household name, but HP.com sure is. Pete is able to leverage his position to build his personal brand.

But what if you don't have a big-name brand to co-opt? Even a simple signature can serve you well. Which is more likely to get your attention and make you click?

Scott Allen
LinkedIntelligence.com

or

Scott Allen
Linked Intelligence - Home of 80+ Smart Ways to Use LinkedIn

Or how about:

Scott Allen
TheVirtualHandshake.com

or

Scott Allen
Coauthor, The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online

*Sigh*

I need to remember to follow my own advice!

Finally, I realized that it made a whole lot more sense as a group effort. And so, I came up with Smart Ways to Use LinkedIn – A Group Blogging Project.

If you have a LinkedIn success story to tell, or tips on how to accomplish a particular task with LinkedIn, this is a great opportunity to share it. I have over $4,000 in prizes to give away to participants. And you may want to hurry… there are a couple of special bonuses for the first participants.

If this works like I hope it will, the LinkedIn user community will have a great resource for explaining LinkedIn to friends and for answering the nay-sayers.

Happy blogging!