On Thursday night, an interesting dilemma fell into my lap. I discovered from my youngest sister, who just graduated high school last year, that my high school was literally falling into shambles. After my high school principal passed away in 2001, the leadership of the high school fell into numerous incapable hands. Turnover was high. At the same time, the vision of the school started to change. See, I attended a religious high school, but the school, for whatever reason, started becoming less religious. In the most recent news, the most influential teacher in my entire academic career (which includes college) was fired with a handful of other teachers.

I was brought to the attention of a Facebook group that was formed by current high school students to save the teachers who were canned. The group’s wall has an incredible outpouring of support by the high school students. I graduated high school a long time ago, but I still have a connection to the school — more so, I feel an obligation towards the teachers whose careers I feel were unjustly terminated.

John Chow caught my eye a few months ago when he started announcing his monthly earnings off of his blog. His February 2007 blogging income exceeded $7,000, with revenue coming from such sites as ReviewMe, Adsense, and Text-Link-Ads. His success has brought him a great deal of subscribers, myself included. I began watching how his blog, which is really more a personal musings site, gained him credibility and a real following (his February earnings post has 258 comments).

The interesting thing is that John Chow is not just a “blogger.” He’s a clever Internet Marketer, and he’s using that to his fullest advantage while his subscriber numbers are large and continuously growing.

Take, for example, his “Review My Blog” series. He introduced the series in December of 2006, encouraging bloggers to write and offering reciprocal links to reviews (as an added incentive, the best review writer gets a MiniTV USB). So far, there are 37 batches of reviews, each with 10 reviews (will this post make batch 38? I’m not quite writing for the review!)

What has that done for John? When he started the “Review My Blog” series, he was ranked 1,529 on Technorati. Now? Well, Technorati seems to have removed the rankings, but he broke 1,000 shortly after his series announcement.

I’m sure a few people have been watching me blog (with extreme gusto lately) and have wondered where the old me has gone. In case you’re not reading the other blogs, I’m moving on from a place that has been very close to my heart, and I’ll soon be doing some serious sidekicking. As I’m transitioning into a new role, from that of a systems administrator to that of a blogger (and then some), I’ve seen the need to be a little more open, and I’m having a lot more fun with this blog. It is a little more diverse than I initially intended it to be, which I’m actually really excited about.

Jason Calacanis, entrepreneur and tech dude, who incites Internet riots, started a trend a little over a month ago called “fatblogging.” This was at a time when I was in the middle of a diet but didn’t want to call attention to it, since most of my diets have never been quite successful. Now, with some newfound success that I will share in this blog post, I’ll announce that I have joined the fatbloggies. I won’t be fatblogging in the true sense of the word, because Calacanis actually wants us to post our weights (every day!), and well, that’s a secret, my friends.

Regardless, the fatblogging trend has been extremely powerful and has seriously been a big hit in the blogosphere. People are writing about it, and it’s catching on. I’m going to jump on the bandwagon for a brief period to announce that since I started my “diet” on January 8th, a diet that was inspired by Jeremy Zawodny (I keep that spreadsheet open on my desktop all the time), I’ve lost about 20 pounds. This was an incredible thing for me. After all, about a year ago, I had a pretty major surgery and never got active thereafter to lose that dead weight that I accumulated, nor did I have any intention to (though I did set a goal to exercise, but I simply never did). The Hacker Diet variation by Jeremy was a real simple thing for me, and the results have made me quite happy.

I saw a very strange thing today. In response to Chris’s post about MySpace’s Digg clone, SearchAnyway replied using video. But if you listen to the whole one minute and forty seconds of the video, there’s nothing in it except for a guy talking, trying to explain to News Corp that removing the “Digg” button would be a bad move and would ostracize a user community.

After watching the video in its entirety, I couldn’t help but wonder if video was necessary for the points that the other Chris wanted to get across. It would make for a great written blog, but video? After all, it was just a monologue of a guy making an argument, which would have done much better in the written word with the necessary emphasis.

While online video is a “technological breakthrough,” I don’t think there’s much effectiveness when video is being used this way to tell a story without any engaging aspects. As I wrote in December, we are already heavily overloaded with multimedia, and not everybody is ready to embrace it. Further, it’s hard for individuals to take the time out of the day to immerse themselves in content that is not easily multitaskable (my new word for the day; I told you I could have used Quizlet). Blog video defies the nature of blogging (and RSS). Once I start watching this speech, I have to watch it in its entirety. Some folks might be inclined to go so far as to say “I want that 1 minute 40 seconds of my life back.”