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I started this blog one year ago to give attention to the plight of Perez Hilton and his banned YouTube channel.

Since then I’ve written close to 100 posts about new media and how to make a living in this new universe.

Writing about this stuff has been a fun and humbling journey.  It’s a scary new world, with a lot of unwritten rules.  The exciting thing is that we as a community are all collectively blazing the trails that others will follow.  That is why it’s good to reflect and analyze what’s happening and what’s working.  And it’s important to keep offering a hand back to those just starting out.

This is a space that completely reinvents itself every few months.  It’s hard to have long term vision when there is this much churn.  Like being caught in a riptide, this is a time for calm and steady action, not wild and flailing panic.  We can see the shore from where we are now, but we can’t swim directly there.  We need to swim laterally and get out of the confusion and then to the safety of shore.

In New Media, that means do good work, expect no money, expect no fame, but prepare for them.  Continue to get better with each piece of work.  And above all survive.  Survive either by raising friends and family capital, or by keeping your day job, or by having the TV or movie version of your show ready to sell.  Most likely you’ll need to do a little of all of the above.

There is no straightline from anonymity to being set for life.  Even extremely popular and consistent producers like Fred, aren’t making enough money to that their equivalents in TV and film are making.  I would guess that Fred is grossing 1/10th of what a comparative writer/creator/star makes on even the most basic sitcom.

And he needs to keep producing for him to keep making money.  There’s no residuals or a big efficient market (yet) for syndicated short form content.  So Fred and everyone else making it online needs to diversify and make a TV show, write a book, sell merchandise, which will inevitably pull him away from creating new media content.

These issues will be worked out over the coming years.  But they still are very much unresolved now.

And that’s not to say that it’s not worthwhile to produce shows without it being financially viable — that puts you solidly into the realm of artist.  But, as with most human endeavors, it’s difficult to justify the investment of time and money without some sort of return.

My dad is a woodcarver.  He specializes in making primitive wood caricatures and figures.  They have a rough hewn charm the belies the hours of work and care he puts into them.  He sells the finished product occasionally for well under $1o0.  With each carving taking at least 40 hours to produce it’s not a moneymaking affair.  But he is a professional carver because he teaches it at a community college.  So he has dozens of students currently and he has made an impact on thousands of people over the years from his efforts at the school and the crafts fairs he’s attended.

He’s on the low end of people that make a living from his art (in terms of time spent versus monetary compensation), but that still puts him ahead of most people that carve wood.  And his reward is much more than money.  He gets out of bed every morning and preps for his class and carves for himself because he loves it (and his spouse tolerates it, if you ever meet my mom ask her about all of the wood in the garage).

He carves because it gives back to him more than he puts into it.  He loves sharing his most recent work, he loves showing the process to new people, his enthusiasm is infectious and at times overwhelming.  When we were growing up, he got our entire boy scout troop their woodcarving merit badge.  We all carved dolphins and learned how to sharpen our knives.

And that’s why you should be creating videos too.  Because you have to.  Because they express things that you can only accomplish using a taped medium.  Not because you think the YouTube partner program is a good deal.  You should need to make films and want to share them with people, because if you didn’t you’d die a little inside.

I love to make people laugh.  I love to communicate ideas.  I love figuring out how to piece together disparate concepts and weave them into something new that creates a reaction.  Technology has made this increasingly easier to do, but still it always, always comes down to writing and execution.  RSS and Youtube are nothing without you to put the soul into them.

That our job.  We are the soulgivers, the storytellers of this new generation.  The money situation will work itself out.

So here’s to another year of blogging about New Media.  May your 2009 be better than your 2008.