A month or two ago we started a blog to watch the the developments in the Vatican around the Pope who was suffering from terrible illness. With his continuing decline it has been amazing to be involved in a blog that tracks a life like his. I feel like I’ve learned a lot not only about blogging through it but about the topic at hand.
The latest news is that he’s just been read his last rites and is very close to death – you can imagine the type of attention that this story is getting and will continue to get over the coming weeks.
Update – in following developments of the Pope’s health for the past 5 or so hours and updating news as it happens on the blog I’m again amazed at the speed and usefulness of blogs in comparison to the main stream media. The past three or four posts that I’ve put on the blog have beaten main stream online news reports by half an hour or more every time. Our sources are the same (Vatican Radio) but blogs are just so fluid that I have type up a post as I hear it and have it live on the blog within seconds.
In fact the mainstream media reports of the story are sometimes so out of date by the time they are published. As I watch Google New on the topic I’m still seeing reports appearing just now that the Pope’s health is worsening when Vatican Radio reported he’s stabilised over an hour ago. Again it highlights the usefulness of blogging in reporting the news.
its not traffic that is going to make you money, but IF anyone is paying for ads for pope, etc with adsense or affiliates selling pope-mobiles….neither of which i doubt anyone is doing……
You’re right dean – I didn’t actually set it up with money as my major motivation. There are a few ads which pay a little towards hosting the site – but thats not the point of it all.
I know this will sound cynical, but if you refer to the Pope as the head of the Catholic Church, or use the word catholic a couple of times in the post, you’ll find that the adwords will probably change, whether they’ll bring high returns I wouldn’t know, but atleast they would be topical. I posted recently on a mormon blogger and all of a sudden the post was surrounded in mormon ads, as they say, Google Adsense works in mysterious ways.