The first major post went up yesterday, How to Become a Better Blogger By Not Reading Blogs.

There is now a college scholarship available for blogging. With all the negativity sometimes heaped on "bloggers," why would anyone give them a scholarship?

We believe passion is important. As the world gets more competitive, those who are passionate about what they do, and work close to their passions, will be able to become and stay successful even as technology and automation eat away at many business models. Those who are willing to share their experiences with the world help make the world a better place, even if most bloggers only consider blogging a hobby.

I think the best blogs are those written out of passion. Click the link above if you want to apply for the scholarship. It's worth $10,000 total.

Charlie O'Donnell has a cool idea – raise money for charity with one of those Superbowl wagering games.

For a donation of $10 (plus PayPal transaction fees), you get to stake claim over a box on a 10 x 10 table whose row and column numbers will represent the last digit of the scores of the Colts and Bears at various points in this Sunday's Superbowl.

The key is that you are playing for a charity… and all of the proceeds, net of PayPal fees, will be going to charity. When you win, your charity will get money.

I'm playing for the American Cancer Society, which has been my charity of choice since my grandmother died of cancer in 2001. The wiki is here. I took box #31. One thing to note – if you play, make sure you LOG OUT of the wiki once you are done. Otherwise, the rest of us can't log in without "stealing" the lock from you.

Businesspundit launched on March 12, 2003. Some would say that the business blogosphere was born. Others would say I wasn't reallyt the first. It depends. Actually, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that the business blogosphere has been a disappointment. Here's a first hand account of what happened, along with some meaningless speculation about why. This post was in part inspired by Joseph Rago's Blog Mob editorial today in the Wall Street Journal. Joseph has nailed the blogosphere when he says:

Part of it, I think, is that everyone likes shows and entertainments. Mobs are exciting. People also like validation of what they already believe; the Internet, like all free markets, has a way of gratifying the mediocrity of the masses.

In 2002, I began reading Instapundit. How cool it was. Here was a guy – a non-journalist, broadcasting his thoughts on the web. I loved it. I soon found others, like Scrappleface and the now defunct Rachel Lucas. It was all very refreshing.

There were several people that blogged about business, but most of them blogged about lots of other things too. My guess is that Seth Godin was really the first business blogger. Economics bloggers were plentiful. Some other bloggers, like David Foster were around and were writing about business and many other things, but I think I may have been the first average joe writing only about business. I did it because Instapundit wouldn't blog most of my articles. I would send him stuff – interesting things about business – and they wouldn't get published. I decided I might as well publish them myself. I was just a digital design engineer at the time, but I was a voracious reader of business press, so I launched Businesspundit as a blog that would point you to interesting business stories around the web. It was a lot of fun.

I don't know how the initial readers came. But Jay and Jonathan were readers from the beginning. There was a political science professor and blogger named John Lemon, who eventually gave up blogging. And there was a frequent commentor named Brother Hezekiah, who seems to have vanished around early 2005. Todd Sattersten, who now blogs here, and Jeremy Wright were very early on the scene too. By "scene" I mean average people writing about business. We had this crazy idea – the idea that you didn't have to be Jack Welch to contribute something to the discussion. Real people have good experiences. That's what I thought.

By the summer of '03 there were a handful of business bloggers. A Professor of Entrepreneurship, Jeff Cornwall had joined the discussion, along with a few other bloggers and Fast Company magazine decide to start blogging, which we all felt gave credibility to the medium. It was a fun time and we all felt like we were doing something cool and unique. I traded lots of emails with the aforementioned bloggers, and people like Steve Bainbridge, Jennifer Rice, and Jon Strande. It was easy to keep up wtih what everyone was writing, and we carried on lots of conversations between our blogs, linking each other's posts and commenting on issues. It is what the blogosphere was meant for, but it only lasted a few months.

The business blogsphere grew quickly, and soon I couldn't keep up. That's really what inspired the Carnival of the Capitliasts. It was an attempt by Jay and I to make sure we didn't miss anything good. But already things were changing.

It became obvious to me that the blogosphere was segmented. I followed links to links to links and ended up on some business blog I never heard of, but that had been around since 2001.

Brain Based Business, which is pretty self explanatory

and

Punctuative, a blog written by my friend Matt who is an analyst at a VC firm. Matt doesn't post that much, but I nag him from time to time, so maybe he will pick up the pace.