I'm blogging on Smart Data Collective - Stephen Baker

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I'm blogging on Smart Data Collective posted on January 5, 2010

General

Starting this month, I'll be blogging for Smart Data Collective, a site run by Social Media Today. It's sponsored by Teradata. I'll be paid for this work, which means that I'll be disclosing this relationship whenever I write about Teradata or companies that compete with it.

The arrangement involves this: Smart Data editors pull relevant posts from this site and cross-post them. I do one Webinar a month with someone from the data world, and I do at least one blog post a month exclusively for that site. I do what I can to promote their events, and I participate on the site (and steer other data-centric bloggers in the same direction).

I'm happy about this, because it pushes me to continue following data, and places me in a larger data community. I need such contacts now that I'm away from BusinessWeek. Fewer press people are calling me these days, saying, "My CEO is coming through New York, OK if we stop by?" Since I plan to be writing and speaking about these issues, this arrangement looks promising.

Of course, in my ideal world, I would continue to do my writing and reporting, never disclose anything, and money would just appear in my bank account. (In that world, my taxes, insurance, bills and investments would all be handled automatically too.) But as I mentioned in yesterday's post, we journalists and writers ("content creators, in the new jargon) increasingly must fend for ourselves. This means cutting our own deals and figuring out how to do the reporting, get paid, and deal responsibly with ethical issues. When I encounter such issues, I'll blog about it. Makes for interesting discussions, and in this new world we all have to learn from one another.