Saturday, May 30, 2009

Big Thanks to fellow bloggers!

Over the last few weeks as I've been resurecting MyFordDreams I've recieved advice and assistance from several of my fellow Automotive Bloggers, The Auto Prophet, Brian of RaecDriven.com and Gary of TheGarage and while I've sent individual thanks to them via e-mail, I'd like to take the time to publicly thank them and advise you to check their great blogs linked on the sidebar.

When I started in 2005 there was an explosion of Automotive bloggers, some who've fallen along the way. Today some of those guys are professionals at AutBlog, Cars.com and other mainstream sites. But even the mainstream writers would take a moment and help out the non-professional guys. Dave Thomas of Kicking Tires @ Cars.com started the Blog for Auto Bloggers and there were notables from Jalopnik and AutoBlog there as well. There was a real sense of community. And there was a thing called the Carnival of Cars, a weekly roundup of the Auto Blogging highlights. If I'm not mistaken this had been handled by various guys over the years, including Gary of The Garage, The Auto Prophet and Mark Tapscott.

There have been low points to blogging, like when "Splogs" would scrape content and repost it on sites designed to generate income with no original content. But there have been high points as well, such as when Bill Daschele, a graduate student did a survey and wrote about the auto blogging scene. And we've even been mentioned in a book on corporate blogging by John Case, which I mentioned a few days ago.

Some guys get paid to do this, many of us do this out of passion for the subject. I've recently started to attempt to monetize my blog, by accepting advertisements. I've even tested the waters of partnering with a professional site. There will be improvements to MyFordDreams and some minor changes ( maybe even some major changes) but it will still always be My Dreams and there will always be some level of personal passion about it.

Again I'd like to thank The Auto Prophet, Brian V and Gary G for their assistance and encourage you to check their pages as often as possible. And in a shameless plug for myself, tell all your friends about MyFordDreams.

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